Quotations and poems

Sharing quotations and poems on love which have inspired me

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Rilke and Rumi are always huge sources of inspiration to me on love, and 
Hafiz…

here is a poem translated by Daniel Ladinsky -

I Have Learned So Much

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That gave me the chills!

Here's my favorite poem in a book by Tanith Lee

A rose by any other name
Would get the blame
For being what it is -
The colour of a kiss,
The shadow of a flame.
A rose may earn another name,
So call it love;
So call it love I will,
And love is like the sea,
Which changes constantly,
And yet is still
The same.

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that's an awesome poem, and very new to me, thank you! it's a joy to 'discover' a poet…

another poet i adore is yeats…

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
from “The Wind Among the Reeds”

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

–W.B. Yeats, 1888

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Love is the cure

Love is the cure,
for your pain will keep giving birth to more pain
until your eyes constantly exhale love
as effortlessly as your body yields its scent.

- Rumi

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Be like a lamp unto others
radiate out your love to the universe
that love will come back to you and comfort you
rewarding you with exquisite beauty
love bequeath love

Your love will trigger the release
of that mysterious quality in others
and when you meet up with again
it will be something so soothingly familiar

When 2 lovers meet
the universe dissolves back into itself
like water pouring into water

- Gien

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Pathways

Understand, I'll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.

I'll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:
You come too.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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Sharing that for me love includes, yet extends beyond our human concerns to creation, all that Is

Love Falls All Around Us.

Nature calls to man, from rosy clouds
that scud accross a twilight sky,
rains life upon us with her honeyed

breath. She draws him to the paleness
of a gibbous moon, bathes him in platinum
light. Earth gives man rest on her broad

breast, turns each to warmth from the sun.
From trees her arms reach out to touch,
write tomes of love to fill the empty sky.

Nature flirts with man, her perfume rises
from each flower, in colours that caress
the eye she spills her peace in woodland bower.

In great oceans nature weilds her power;
sucks up water for her springs and conserves
raindrops from each gentle shower,

Man turns a deaf ear - spins more garments
to cover earth's pristine naked beauty.

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Purity

Life of my life, I shall ever try to keep my body pure, knowing

that thy living touch is upon all my limbs.

I shall ever try to keep all untruths out from my thoughts, knowing

that thou art that truth which has kindled the light of reason in my mind.

I shall ever try to drive all evils away from my heart and keep my

love in flower, knowing that thou hast thy seat in the inmost shrine of my heart.

And it shall be my endeavour to reveal thee in my actions, knowing it

is thy power gives me strength to act.


part of Gitanjali “Song Offerings” by Rabindranath Tagore

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Lovely inspiring poem Tai, and so true, when our eyes are open to the love in all, how can we fail to try to love that way?

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And because love battles
not only in its burning agricultures
but also in the mouth of men and women,
I will finish off by taking the path away
to those who between my chest and your fragrance
want to interpose their obscure plant.

About me, nothing worse
they will tell you, my love,
than what I told you.

I lived in the prairies
before I got to know you
and I did not wait love but I was
laying in wait for and I jumped on the rose.

What more can they tell you?
I am neither good nor bad but a man,
and they will then associate the danger
of my life, which you know
and which with your passion you shared.

And good, this danger
is danger of love, of complete love
for all life,
for all lives,
and if this love brings us
the death and the prisons,
I am sure that your big eyes,
as when I kiss them,
will then close with pride,
into double pride, love,
with your pride and my pride.

But to my ears they will come before
to wear down the tour
of the sweet and hard love which binds us,
and they will say: “The one
you love,
is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
you could find one more beautiful,
more serious, more deep,
more other, you understand me, look how she’s light,
and what a head she has,
and look at how she dresses,
and etcetera and etcetera”.

And I in these lines say:
Like this I want you, love,
love, Like this I love you,
as you dress
and how your hair lifts up
and how your mouth smiles,
light as the water
of the spring upon the pure stones,
Like this I love you, beloved.

To bread I do not ask to teach me
but only not to lack during every day of life.
I don’t know anything about light, from where
it comes nor where it goes,
I only want the light to light up,
I do not ask to the night
explanations,
I wait for it and it envelops me,
And so you, bread and light
And shadow are.

You came to my life
with what you were bringing,
made
of light and bread and shadow I expected you,
and Like this I need you,
Like this I love you,
and to those who want to hear tomorrow
that which I will not tell them, let them read it here,
and let them back off today because it is early
for these arguments.

Tomorrow we will only give them
a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf
which will fall on the earth
like if it had been made by our lips
like a kiss which falls
from our invincible heights
to show the fire and the tenderness
of a true love. 

Pablo Neruda 

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earth opens heaven's door
multiple patterns of checkered light
appearing as if smudged by softened rain
merging now into one water-washed world of love

love spread like oil on water
glazing the top then sinking deep, deeper
slowly melting through skin's elastic barrier
dripping majestically, forming pools of spectacular colours

ocean floor covered in spots of mixing opalescent rainbow tones
surface top, deepest forever base, rich in life giving nutrient
softly layered in colour
will the colours merge
into the space inbetween?

releasing and falling
rising and merging
heaven and earth join
into oneness and truth

lots a'love
Tai
July 09

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Looking For Your Face

From the beginning of my life
I have been looking for your face
but today I have seen it.

Today I have seen
the charm, the beauty,
the unfathomable grace
of the face
that I was looking for.

Today I have found you
and those that laughed
and scorned me yesterday
are sorry that they were not looking
as I did.

I am bewildered by the magnificence
of your beauty
and wish to see you with a hundred eyes.

My heart has burned with passion
and has searched forever
for this wondrous beauty
that I now behold.

I am ashamed
to call this love human
and afraid of God
to call it divine.

Your fragrant breath
like the morning breeze
has come to the stillness of the garden
You have breathed new life into me
I have become your sunshine
and also your shadow.

My soul is screaming in ecstasy
Every fiber of my being
is in love with you

Your effulgence
has lit a fire in my heart
and you have made radiant
for me
the earth and sky.

My arrow of love
has arrived at the target
I am in the house of mercy
and my heart
is a place of prayer.

Rumi

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It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough…
It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always go on doing that), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way. For their nature tells them that the questions of love, even more than everything else that is important, cannot be resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case require a new, special, wholly personal answer. But how can they, who have already flung themselves together and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their own, how can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?…
 Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand, on without opening, there is no general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much….
 This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Seven

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Give all to love; obey thy heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Love Song


by Rainer Maria Rilke

How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul?
How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote lost objects,
in some dark and silent place that doesn't resonate 
when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you, 
takes us together like a violin's bow, 
which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

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Love, like a river, will cut a new path
whenever it meets an obstacle.

- Crystal Middlemas -

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Salvation

There is no salvation for the soul 
But to fall in Love.
It has to creep and crawl 
Among the Lovers first.

Only Lovers can escape 
From these two worlds. 
This was written in creation.

Only from the Heart 
Can you reach the sky. 
The rose of Glory 
Can only be raised in the Heart.

Rumi

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somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to preceive in this world equals
the power of you intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
E.E. Cummings

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“Two souls with but a single thought
Two hearts that beat as one”

John Keats

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We are all beads
Strung on the same thread
Each one is different
Yet all are the same
Love is the thread
That joins us together
Love is the essence of
God in us all
Give your smile to someone lonely
See it light their face
In the heart of deepest sorrow
God will shine His grace
Hold the hand of someone crying
Shy not from your fear
Share the burdens of their heart
Let them know you hear…
Truth can have no country
Love has no caste or creed
May the world unite as One
(By) serving those in need…

Amma