The Romantic Way

Poetry, especially romantic poems, help us to pause, ponder and peer more closely into our experiences. For example, how can you really appreciate a flower growing only a few inches from the ground unless you get on all fours and really have a look? Once you do, you're astounded at the complexity of such a delicate wispy thing. Poetry takes a similar look at our lives, loves, losses and fears. It gets down on all fours, and using all the senses of the mind and heart peers inside to find our secret places. Poetry gets very personal with our private souls. It says it like it is.

Romantic poems can look at one thing in our world and help us to understand another. They cast our untouchable desires and dreams in a metaphoric way so we can touch, feel and examine them. Romantic poems assure us that our take on a confusing world is really not so confusing.

Read The Romantic Poems of These Poets

John Greenleaf Whittier

Romancing The Blues

E. E. Cummings

Song of Songs -- Song of Solomon

John Keats

Lord Byron

Oscar Wilde

Percy Bysshe Shelley

You'll recognize this verse by Sergeant Joyce Kilmer--a simple but artistic use of metaphor expressing the simpleness of a man and his ideas in the context of creation. Kilmer perished in action on the battlefield in 1918.

Trees

Joyce Kilmer
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
and lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

There is some sort of order—some sort of sense to it all. It's all happened before and we'll survive it now as well. Even though life is tragic, poetry, by its metaphor, gives us perspective and makes us feel safe.

Romantic poems help us with perspective. They look at our beloved from all sides and show us things which we would have never noticed any other way. Romantic poetry is an inventory of love, love lost, love found and loves forgotten.

The nineteenth century poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, turns her love over and over, her gaze resting on each facet in her classic love poem How do I love thee?

How Do I Love Thee?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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 everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Romantics like us are targets of critics who say we aren't serious and that we sort of drift through life without our feet on the ground. The opposite is true. For the romantic, poetry is a glass which draws life into focus so he finds himself facing the truth be it horrible or lovely. Through romantic poems, the romantic embraces reality's form. He feels it and holds it intimately.

Alan Seeger, another early 20th century poet, is just one such romantic who, in spite of life's harshness, pushes head-on through this poem in order to cope with reality during World War I. It's hardly a love poem, but definitely a romantic poem.

I Have a Rendezvous with Death

Alan Seeger
I have a rendezvous with Death
   At some disputed barricade
   When Spring comes round with rustling shade
And apple blossoms fill the air.
   I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
   And close my eyes and quench my breath;
It may be I shall pass him still.
   I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
   When Spring comes round again this year
   And the first meadow flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
   Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
   Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear...
   But I've a rendezvous with Death
      At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
   And I to my pledged word am true,
      I shall not fail that rendezvous.

For the romantic, poems are a channel of perspective from life to the soul and from the soul, a conduit of understanding to a reader. When you notice that some years of your life have washed past unnoticed and you realize you've taken life much too seriously, capture a moment; read romantic poems. Better yet, write one.

Yours along TheRomanticWay!


Rod & Holly