It is hard to write a poem about romantic love that is both happy and any good. True love is fascinating from the inside, but frequently the experience looks a tad naive from the outside. When we are crazy about someone, and they are wild about us, we are true believers.

I can think of a few poems that center on that over-thrilled moment of new-love bliss. They solve the problem by being explicitly stuck in time. Sappho’s shivers of longing happen in the instant she is struck by hotness.

I think of the English Romantic poet John Keats as writing more about time than about love, but it came up a lot. His sonnet “Bright Star” is a best-loved love poem.

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendor 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.

It is one sentence long and the volta, the change in argument, comes right in the middle, with a No. In the first half he says he wishes he could be Polaris, the bright star around which the whole sky seems to turn. He wants to timelessly watch Earth roll by. But No. Instead, he wants to stay forever with his head on his love’s breast, feeling it rise and fall with her breath. Presumably she’s asleep. He’s too excited to sleep. He decides that instead of the whole world as it ever changes, forever, he’d like just this breast, just this moment.

As with the other recent posts, all of the above is from the Love chapter in The Wonder Paradox, FSG, 2023, out in paper March 5.