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A curated collection of eight classic love poems — from Shakespeare and the Song of Songs to Karin Boye, Rumi and Pablo Neruda. Perfect for weddings, vows, love letters and reading aloud by candlelight.
William Shakespeare · 1609
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.
The classic wedding sonnet — read at countless ceremonies worldwide for its promise of love's constancy.
Pablo Neruda · 1959
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers.
From One Hundred Love Sonnets — one of the most popular texts in the world for weddings and vows.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 1850
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
Browning's Sonnet 43 is one of the most quoted love poems in the English language — perfect for wedding ceremonies.
Rumi · 13th century
This is what love does:
it hangs its lamp in the window of the heart
and forces the dawn to wait.
When you are gone, there is no music.
When you enter the room,
silence itself becomes a melody.
The Persian mystic's love poems move between the earthly and the divine — and so they become universal.
Karin Boye · 1935
Of course it hurts when buds are breaking.
Why else would the springtime falter?
Why would all our ardent longing
bind itself in frozen, bitter pallor?
Often read as a poem about change, Boye's verse is at heart a love poem to life and to growth itself.
Edith Södergran · 1916
The day cools toward evening…
Drink the warmth from my hand,
my hand has the same blood as spring.
Take my hand, take my white arm,
take the longing of my slender shoulders…
It would be strange to feel,
a single night, a night like this,
your heavy head against my breast.
Södergran's early love poem brought a physicality entirely new to Swedish poetry in 1916.
Unknown (Old Testament) · ca. 900 BCE
Set me as a seal upon thine heart,
as a seal upon thine arm:
for love is strong as death;
jealousy is cruel as the grave:
the coals thereof are coals of fire,
which hath a most vehement flame.
One of the world's oldest love poems — often read at weddings for its timeless intensity.
Hjalmar Gullberg · 1933
To love you is to be two.
To lose you is to be no one.
Between these two extremes
I live my life.
Gullberg's compressed lines carry the whole breadth of loving and losing.