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Best Love Poem
Judging poetry is very much a personal matter, and what may be a great poem to one person may have no appeal to another. So, when choosing the best love poem, I am sure millions will disagree. What is more, I have not read every love poem on the planet, so there must be plenty more that could come into the reckoning as being the best.
Thinking back to my own poetry as a teenager, my poems were not usually love poems as such; at least, apart from one sorry attempt at the age of 15. So I cannot even select my own best love poem. However, now I have started this website, and am back in writing mode after a two and a half decades break, maybe I will just write a few love poems as time goes on.
I have to admit I stopped reading poetry in my 20's, as bringing up a family and having a professional life intervened. My favourite poet was Dylan Thomas, and I have no reason to change that now. I discovered Dylan Thomas in my English Literature Advanced Level studies back in England. However, when it comes to choosing the best love poem, it was not Dylan Thomas who came to mind.
For a poem to rank as "best love poem" it needs to be so powerfully written, compressing immense expression and feeling into a very confined space. It was very easy for me to make my choice, because there is one line of a poem that has always stuck in my mind for the past 40 years; a line of a poem that encapsulates true, everlasting love:
"Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds..."
In these days of easy come, easy go "love" and romance, quick divorces and broken families, a Western world based on selfishness and little else, those few words really do express true love with great and memorable power. For that reason, I have chosen Shakespeare's poem as the best love poem.
Here is the poem, William Shakespeare's Sonnet #116.
For audio, please click the play button below.
(Please note, I am not a professional orator!)
Love Is Not Love Which Alters...
by
William Shakespeare
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments, love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come,
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
