Favorite Expressions of Love

[thesummerqueen]

Well, Valentine's Day is almost over (or already over, or getting there) for most of us. But it got me to wondering...what are some of your favorite artistic expressions of love?

I tend to be pretty old fashioned with my tastes.

"A kiss, when all is said, what is it? a rosy dot placed on the ‘i’ in loving; ‘tis a secret told to the mouth Instead of to the ear.” Cyrano De Bergerac


Unending Love

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times...
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it's age old pain,
It's ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers,
Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,
the distressful tears of farewell,
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man's days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours -
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

Tagore

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIF4_Sm-rgQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d22CiKMPpaY

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 skilfully,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 perceive in this world equals
the power of your 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

ee cummings


(Don't judge me - this is my favorite Disney movie of all...and it has roses in it. )


"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Jane Austen (First line of Pride & Prejudice - one of my favorite books and movies ever)

"Reader, I married him." - Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre

Love unrequited in The Lady of Shalott, by Waterhouse


That awful beginning in Whispers of Love by Bougereau



And one of my new guilty pleasures - reading the letters of other lovers - first being John and Abigail Adams. http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/aea/letter/