Love whether fleeting or of the ages, expressed with a look, a touch, or a thought is wanted by us all.

Across genders and generations love is both the glue and the accelerant of our lives.

Yet once gained we sometimes let it go without recognition of its value or fail to nourish it spiritually. Love needs feeding, needs tending. Love needs love.

In today’s easy, ‘always on’ society we wail, whine and weep and forget that accomplishment will involve work, will involve sacrifice but it brings rewards. Rewards larger than our rational understanding but instinctively safe within our souls. And that can make us better people. To ourselves and each other.

First love can be electric and consuming. But love matures, passions turn to bonds, amour to armour, to soulmates. A parents’ love is infinite and merciful but always streaked with protection. The march of time makes love dependable despite squabbles and bumps of heartache. But love can be unrequited, love can break, can fail. Love comes in all shapes and sizes, and in many combinations, for an instant and forever.

When we speak with our hearts we speak with a rarer truth that the brain can make light of, can reduce to the ephemeral, but love is our greatest ally, our surest need that we are of value to each other and our common humanity.

Sometimes love requires many things of us. To bear loss, to retreat, to compromise, to surrender but in every way, it enriches us. Sometimes not even for now but some future gain.

Our classic poets did not surrender to the logic of the group or seek advice from others quick to blame but slow to embrace. Their legacy remains because it is true, because in that look, that touch, that thought, that display of words the heart remembers us and treasures us.

Here are words and verse of love. For your ears, your loved one’s ears and hearts everywhere.

1 - The Poetry of Love - Speaking from the Heart - An introduction

2 - "How Do I Love Thee" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

3 - "A Red Red Rose" by Robert Burns

4 - "Go Lovely Rose" by Edmund Waller

5 - "Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal" (from "The Princess") by Alfred Lord Tennyson

6 - "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlowe

7 - "I Am Not Yours" by Sara Teasdale

8 - "Sonnet 116" by William Shakespeare

9 - "Spiritual Love" by Alfred Austin

10 - "When You Are Old" by W B Yeats

11 - "Sonnet 18 - Shall I Compare Thee to a Summers Day" by William Shakespeare

12 - "Bright Star" by John Keats

13 - "She Walks in Beauty" by Lord Byron

14 - "I Love You" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

15 - "Love's Philosophy" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

16 - "The Kiss" by Charlotte Dacre

17 - "In the Safety of Your Mouth" by Daniel Sheehan

18 - "To My Dear and Loving Husband" by Anne Bradstreet

19 - "The Good Morrow" by John Donne

20 - "Oh Lovers" by Jalaluddin Rumi

21 - "Give All to Love" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

22 - "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear

23 - "Longing" by Matthew Arnold

24 - "Helas!" by Oscar Wilde

25 - "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe

26 - "Remember" by Christina Rossetti

27 - "If Thou Must Love Me Let It Be for Nought" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

28 - "One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand" by Edmund Spenser

29 - "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" by William Butler Yeats

30 - "Unending Love" by Tagore