Love Poems

How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
by 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 every day'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 the 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.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare

(1564 - 1616)

Ernest R. Ball--1919
Let the Rest of the World Go By

With someone like you, a pal good and true
I'd like to leave it all behind, and go and find
A place that's known to God alone
Just a spot to call our own
We'll find perfect peace, where joys never cease
Out there beneath the kindly sky
We'll build a sweet little nest, somewhere out in the West
And let the rest of the world go by

(You ask me where I'm goin'
So early in the morn
I'm just a traveler roamin'
Just a romin on
I've searched this whole world over
Many times I've searched in vain
For a spot that seems like heaven to me
and I long to see again.
I'm going to hide away out beside that Utah trail
Out where old friends are gay and all nature is unveiled
I'm gonna settle down in peace where all is well
in a little house just built for two out along that Utah trail.)

Heard this music in the movie Out of Africa tonight It reminded me of my Grandpa VanBuren, who had a beautiful voice and loved to sing this song.

The last verse is the one my Grandpa sang, don't know where it came from, but that's my memory of it.