#1 Love Poems
Great Love Letters
When Love Ends, How Will You Cope?
Zelda Sayre to F. Scott Fitzgerald when the Alps and ocean divide us,--bu
Spring 1919
Sweetheart, Please, please don't be so depressed--We'll be married soon, and then these lonesome nights will be over forever--and until we are, I am loving, loving every tiny minute of the day and night--
Maybe you won't understand this, but sometimes when I miss you most, it's hardest to write--and you always know when I make myself--Just the ache of it all--and I can't tell you.
If we were together, you'd feel how strong it is--you're so sweet when you're melancholy. I love your sad tenderness--when I've hurt you--That's one of the reasons I could never be sorry for our quarrels--and they bothered you so-- Those dear, dear little fusses, when I always tried so hard to make you kiss and forget--
Scott--there's nothing in all the world I want but you--and your precious love--All the materials things are nothing.
I'd just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence-because you'd soon love me less--and less--and I'd do anything--anything--to keep your heart for my own--I don't want to live--I want to love first, and live incidentally...
Don't--don't ever think of the things you can't give me--You've trusted me with the dearest heart of all--and it's so damn much more than anybody else in all the world has ever had--
How can you think deliberately of life without me--If you should die--O Darling--darling Scott--It'd be like going blind...I'd have no purpose in life--just a pretty--decoration.
Don't you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered--and I was delivered to you--to be worn--I want you to wear me, like a watch--charm or a button hole bouquet--to the world.
And then, when we're alone, I want to help--to know that you can't do anything without me...
All my heart--
I love youthey ner will, unless you wish it. ~
George Gordon, Lord Byron to Teresa Guiccioli
Bologna, 25 August, 1819
My dearest Teresa, I have read this book in your garden;--my love, you were absent, or else I could not have read it.
It is a favourite book of yours, and the writer was a friend of mine. You will not understand these English words, and others will not understand them,--which is the reason I have not scrawled them in Italian.
But you will recognize the handwriting of him who passionately loved you, and you will divine that, over a book which was yours, he could only think of love.
In that word, beautiful in all languages, but most so in yours--Amor mio--is comprised my existence here and hereafter.
I feel I exist here, and I feel I shall exist hereafter,--to what purpose you will decide; my destiny rests with you, and you are a woman, eighteen years of age, and two out of a convent. I wish that you had staid there, with all my heart,--or, at least, that I had never met you in your married state.
But all this is too late. I love you, and you love me,--at least, you say so, and act as if you did so, which last is a great consolation in all events.
But I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you.
Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and ocean divide us,--but they never will, unless you wish it.
~
Franz Kafka to Milená Jesenská
19221
No, Milená, I beg you once again to invent another possibility for my writing to you. You mustn't go to the post office in vain, even your little postman--who is he?--mustn't do it, nor should even the postmistress be asked unnecessarily.
If you can find no other possibility, then one must put up with it, but at least make a little effort to find one.
Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.
Remembering that one extinguished fire with clothing, I took an old coat and beat you with it. But again the transmutations began and it went so far that you were no longer even there, instead it was I who was on fire and it was also I who beat the fire with the coat.
But the beating didn't help and it only confirmed my old fear that such things can't extinguish a fire.
In the meantime, however, the fire brigade arrived and somehow you were saved.
But you were different from before, spectral, as though drawn with chalk against the dark, and you fell, lifeless or perhaps having fainted from joy at having been saved, into my arms.
But here too the uncertainty of transmutability entered, perhaps it was I who fell into someone's arms.~
George Gordon, Lord Byron to Teresa Guiccioli
Bologna,
25 August, 1819
My dearest Teresa, I have read this book in your garden;--my love, you were absent, or else I could not have read it.
It is a favourite book of yours, and the writer was a friend of mine. You will not understand these English words, and others will not understand them,--which is the reason I have not scrawled them in Italian.
But you will recognize the handwriting of him who passionately loved you, and you will divine that, over a book which was yours, he could only think of love.
In that word, beautiful in all languages, but most so in yours--Amor mio--is comprised my existence here and hereafter.
I feel I exist here, and I feel I shall exist hereafter,--to what purpose you will decide; my destiny rests with you, and you are a woman, eighteen years of age, and two out of a convent. I wish that you had staid there, with all my heart,--or, at least, that I had never met you in your married state.
But all this is too late. I love you, and you love me,--at least, you say so, and act as if you did so, which last is a great consolation in all events.
But I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you.
Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and ocean divide us,--but they never will, unless you wish it.~
Use sparingly and wisely.
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