I don't know how to pick one, there are so many classics. I love many by Byron. I love the Romantic poets best. But I will put this one here because it was one of the first ones I loved and dreamt myself into as a teen-ager when I used to dream about a man. I didn't even understand a lot of the lines in the middle back then, but I do now. For me, it has stood the test of time and all of the changes I have gone through, inwardly and outwardly--then and yet now, eternal love... :
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
--John Keats
It speaks of a side of men that I can't even believe exists anymore--the side that needs feminine love and softness and some kind of shelter from harshness in the world, and it implies the man's protectiveness of her as well (another lovely gender-related aspect that has been significantly scorned and "beaten down" by "feminism"). This all in the context of his own love and fidelity to the one woman--"for ever."
I need to mention just one Byron poem, since I always use one of its stanzas as a signature or favorite quote in different places.
The Tear.
"My" stanza:
Mild Charity's glow to us mortals below
Shows the soul from barbarity clear,
Compassion will melt where this virtue is felt,
And its dew is diffused in a Tear.
P.S. Of course I also love She Walks in Beauty
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
--John Keats
It speaks of a side of men that I can't even believe exists anymore--the side that needs feminine love and softness and some kind of shelter from harshness in the world, and it implies the man's protectiveness of her as well (another lovely gender-related aspect that has been significantly scorned and "beaten down" by "feminism"). This all in the context of his own love and fidelity to the one woman--"for ever."
I need to mention just one Byron poem, since I always use one of its stanzas as a signature or favorite quote in different places.
The Tear.
"My" stanza:
Mild Charity's glow to us mortals below
Shows the soul from barbarity clear,
Compassion will melt where this virtue is felt,
And its dew is diffused in a Tear.
P.S. Of course I also love She Walks in Beauty