What Makes the Best Love Poems – with examples from our Poetry Magazine
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Wherever you find poetry, you can usually find love poetry. From Rumi to Maya Angelou to Mahmoud Darwish, poets have dedicated their work to the theme of love. Not just romantic love, either. It just so happens that writers simply want to write about what they love.
If you’re looking to get inspired and perhaps even write a love poem yourself, you’re in the right place. Check out the love poetry we’ve published below, and read to the end for some tips on writing your own love poetry.
Love poem examples from the archives
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, we’ve been feeling the love here at Free the Verse. To celebrate the occasion, we’ve dug into our archives and uncovered love poems that have stolen the hearts of our editors and readers over the months. Whether you’re a poetry enthusiast or someone who loves love, these poems are sure to strike a chord.
Palms — Terrell Worrell
This delicate poem is about the relationship between love and forgiveness. In only a few lines, Worrell uses the imagery of peace – white flags, open palms, the bed – to portray the mending of the relationship after an implied falling apart.
We reached an uneasy truce come sunset
she knocked on the door white flag in her fist
stepping softly towards the bed where she slipped in beside me
her head on my shoulder, my hand on hers
later i held the wind in my palms
like i talk about
hand out the car
Head filled with white noise and flags
that sort of nonsense
Almost — Beth Weg
Beth Weg’s achingly beautiful poem ‘Almost’ is an account of the feelings surrounding a miscarriage. In her own words: “There is so much unnecessary stigma around miscarriage that the timing felt right to share my experiences with it. Hopefully these words offer comfort and understanding to someone else.” Check out our interview to learn more about this poem and her approach to writing poetry.
Intimate stranger
Preserved in phantom space
Alive as cruel mist
I resurrect you as flesh
Eyes like his
Hair like mine
We never met
We never will
Our fierce love is enough.
Aunty Nor — Farrah Lucia Jamaluddin
Love Poetry Competition Winner
Farrah’s poem explores a pure and simple form of love. ‘Aunty Nor’ – both the poem and the person – reminds us that love exists in the acknowledgement of imperfections rather than in spite of them.
“If you are not a little bad from time to time
how can you learn to be a little good?”
my aunt would tell me as I soaked her
robe with my tears. I can’t remember what
I had done, but the guilt was heartbreaking.
Her teeth were stained with chocolate and tea,
her hair a mess of gold and black. She kept company
with weak men and strong birds, righting wrongs, wronging rights.
My mother tolerated her with a patience
only the power of filial ties could provide,
my aunty was a force worthy of thunderstorms.
She liked the warmth of her familiar sun,
But she greeted wind and rain all the same.
Earthenware Glaze — Lee Eustace
This is how Lee described his poem in our interview: Earthenware Glaze is a work that is centered on a singular theme: love. I was moved to write this poem in response to my own experience of falling in love – that feeling which is bordering-on-ineffable. The poem seeks to express the balance I sought between following the sensation of love to its very depths and retaining a solid foothold that allows reprieve and lasting pleasure in that space.
I saw you and stopped.
Time was elastic and irrepressible,
trees were truncated and
words were forthcoming.
Gushing in ebbs that strained
against the everlasting swash
of newfound promise. A reason
to look beyond the pale:
past rows of uncharted trees
and unwieldly grass. The type
in which your step may suddenly
disappear and be engulfed by what lies beneath.
Detached roots and earthenware glaze:
shining to the brim and beyond.
Beyond that savage eye of promise
with which I saw you
and I stopped still for fear of disturbance.
A Labour of Love — Bailey Schaan
Schaan’s poem uses a scene in nature – the magpie breaking the soil – as a metaphor for all the ways in which love can show up in daily life.
I watch magpie beak
break fresh thawed soil.
It is a tender knocking wake up call,
mom tapping at your door saying
“honey, you will miss the bus.”
It is the gentle plucking,
pulling up hope like worms
through soft tufts of prairie grass.
It is the back breaking labour of
patience perfected by months of
stillness and scarcity
So what makes the best love poems?
The best love poems veer away from generic platitudes and instead focus on specifics: whether it is specific details about a relationship, a person, or the space they occupy. The best poetry always feels as though it couldn’t have been written by anyone else – it brings a unique lens to a situation even when many others have written about similar situations in the past.
Remember – romantic love is only one kind of love. As you saw in our examples, familial love, the love that is a precursor to grief, and many other kinds of love make for interesting and moving representations of love in poetry. Whether or not you are writing about romantic love, try to tell your story through scenes: show us the moments in which love appears. What does it look like? How does it sound? What does it feel like?
The poems above are all written about love – but they’re also very different from each other. What makes them different is the imagery. Each poem opens a door into a different place, where you can experience love in a way that you’ve never experienced it before.
How to write a good love poem
If you already know who – or what – you’re writing about, great. If you don’t, list some of the people, things or experiences that bring you love. Make it a long list, and then pick something near the bottom. This way, you’ll choose something that may not have been obvious to you. This may just make the poem more interesting to your readers.
Now picture a scene. When do you feel this love? What makes you feel it? What are you doing? Where are you? What are the colours and sounds? Who is there? Is there conversation, or is it silent? Write down some phrases and words that describe this scene.
Dive deeper into that feeling of love. Are there other feelings mixed in with it? Grief, joy, loneliness, regret, gratitude? What is the association between love and this feeling? Does this change how you would describe the scene above? Write it down.
Keep writing through the feelings until you have enough words on the page to work with. Maybe it already looks like a poem. Maybe it doesn’t. Now, you can either shape it into a poem or step away from the piece for a while. Your brain will keep working on the poem in the background while you are doing something else. When you come back to the poem, you might find the words flow more easily.
Finally, edit your poem. This is the perfect opportunity to catch any lingering cliches. Does something sound familiar to you? Could someone else have written it? If you’re confronted with a cliche, re-assess what you were trying to say and then make it more specific. Add some details. You could make it into a metaphor or simile – or you can just describe it plainly, this time in a way it hasn’t been said before.
There you go! Now you can share your love poem or keep it close to your chest. And don’t forget – we’re always open for poetry submissions.
Enter our new poetry contest for the chance to win $100!
We accept entries from all around the world. And, unlike our issue submissions, our competition doesn’t have a theme.
Questions? Let us know in the comments below.