Oh, Bittersweet Love

A collection of poetry that delves into the deepest layers of love, leaving no emotion concealed. Blending despair and passion, poetry is the true language of love, speaking directly to the depths of our hearts.

Scene from Amélie (2001)." Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, written by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant, produced by Claudie Ossard, released by Miramax Films. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.

Poetry and love are like the most beautifully orchestrated duet, forever intertwined, as if one couldn’t exist without the other. The heart yearns for poetic lines, just as words crave emotion. Poetry is one of the rare tools capable of expressing love in all its complexity—the joy, the despair, and everything in between. The yearnings of the heart are as intricate as the poems that capture them, revealing the full spectrum of bittersweet feelings. Like a window into love, poetry helps us understand it more deeply. To understand it, truly. For poets, however, love is uniquely interpreted. Whether it’s the dreamy, idealistic kind, loving oneself and one’s family, or the intense, melancholic connection—poetry allows no emotions to stay hidden.

Let’s start with love in its dreamy, romantic form. Few poets capture this as well as John Keats. Keats often writes about love in its dreamy state, yet he doesn’t hold back from the truth, acknowledging the tensions that arise in relationships. In Bright Star, Keats explores romantic, idealized love—a longing for steadfastness and a peaceful, eternal union. This poem speaks to the hearts of those who desire constant, unchanging affection. But there’s no love without tension. In To Fanny, Keats delves into the real complexities of love. His deep affection for Fanny Brawne is clear, but so are the struggles and pain that come with their relationship—poor health and financial troubles are some of the endless external forces that can strain something as fragile as love. But at the end of the day, the greatest love of our lives is life itself. In When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be, Keats explores the fear of death and the fear of losing—never fully experiencing life, never fully experiencing love before time runs out. In the dance of life and love, this poem reminds us that the greatest love of all is the one we have for life itself.

Bright Star by John Keats

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.

To Fanny by John Keats

I cry your mercy—pity—love! Aye, love!
Merciful love that tantalizes not,
One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love,
Unmasked, and being seen—without a blot!
O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!
That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest
Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine,
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,—
Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all,
Withhold no atom's atom or I die,
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,
Forget, in the mist of idle misery,
Life’s purposes,—the palate of my mind
Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!

When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be by John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piléd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy power
Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

While love can be peaceful and light, it can also be a thunderstorm, bringing both destruction and harm. Sylvia Plath captures the nuances of love without clinging to the dreamy, idealized version. Instead, Plath fully understands the complexities of love with all its raw force and pain. Plath’s Mirror explores self-love and identity, highlighting the struggle with self-image and acceptance. Loving others is deeply connected to loving oneself, but self-love is often the toughest kind of love we face. In Morning Song, Plath reflects on motherhood—often seen as the purest and most blissful kind of love. But for Plath, motherhood isn’t all sunshine and roses. The poem portrays both the love and anxiety that is brought about with a new life. Ultimately, love is destructive. In Elm, Plath captures this destructive power of love, portraying it in its darkest forms, where hope and despair coexist. Rather than forcing an illusion, through her unique lens, Plath uncovers aspects of love that are often hidden or ignored.

Mirror by Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful—
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Morning Song by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Elm by Sylvia Plath

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanders: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? -

Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kills, that kill.

Then we come to the poets who know how truly understands how to blend lyricism and passion like no one else - Pablo Neruda. Truth be told, few can express passion quite like Neruda. His love poems are more than just passionate - they’re intense, shifting between deep connection and the melancholy of detachment. Within passion is whirlwind of emotions that follows no straight path. In Sonnet XVII, perhaps his most famous work, Neruda demonstrates this ability to write with such intensity that it instantly hooks the reader. Always remember that love is no fair game, and in If You Forget Me, Neruda tackles one of love’s harshest truths: it’s dependent on mutual affection. Love is fragile, and without mutual affection effort or signs of neglect, it will fade. To round it all off, in Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines, Neruda confronts the end of love. It expresses the true bittersweet sorrow that follows its loss - the aftereffects of a great storm.

Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were a salt rose, or topaz
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
So I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

If You Forget Me by Pablo Neruda

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all the fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Tonight I Can Write (the Saddest Lines) by Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest line.

Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

Love is a complex emotion. Within all its colors, other emotions of anger, hope, fear, and passion are hidden. Poetry, the language of love, captures all these layers, showing us that love is never one-dimensional. It’s a constant dance with other feelings, shifting seamlessly between joy and hardship, pain and affection. At the end, we’re often left with a bittersweet feeling. Yet, nothing aids our quest for enlightenment quite like poetry. And, in some cases, it even reveals emotions we didn’t know we were struggling with. So, how did these poems deepen your understanding of love's complexity? And more importantly, how did they make you feel?