Success To Him Was To Relish The Failure Of All The Inefficacious Attempts That Altered Forms (in The

Valentine's Month Poetry Recommendations 💌

1. Classical (rhymed & metered poetry)

Bright Star by John Keats

To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns

Love's Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley

How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Browning

Amoretti LXXV by Edmund Spenser

When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats

I Loved You First by Christina Rossetti

I Am Not Yours by Sara Teasdale

To My Dear Husband by Anne Bradstreet

I Love You by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Air and Angels by John Donne

Love and Death by Lord Byron

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal by Tennyson

2. Modernist/Contemporary (free & blank verses)

Love Sonnet XI by Pablo Naruda

Unending Love by Rabindranath Tagore

[i carry your heart with me] by e.e. cummings

Bird-Understander by Craig Arnold

Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath

For Keeps by Joy Harjo

Always For the First Time by Andre Breton

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

Any Lit by Harryette Mullen

To Be In Love by Gwendolyn Brooks

Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy

Desire by Alice Walker

Romantics by Lisel Mueller

Come, And Be My Baby by Maya Angelou

3. Written by Me (personal selection)

Amore Immortale by Shayan Das

Flawed Perfection by Shayan Das

I Love Thee Not by Shayan Das

A Song of Love by Shayan Das

If Only by Shayan Das

End of Eternity by Shayan Das

For My Valentine by Shayan Das

Would you rather loose your ability to write or your ability to see?

And here comes one, an ineluctably lethal 'would you rather' question. Tbh, at one moment I thought of leaving this question to corrode in one corner of the mailbox but anyways here we go. Well, frankly speaking, it depends. But for time being, if there are no other options available I'd go for losing the ability to write (well, I guess it doesn't mean losing the ability to read as well) 'cause losing the ability to see 'fore turning even 20 would seemingly arrest the continuity and occurrence of some major things. For one moment I can stop appreciating beauty through my art but never in life through my senses.

Appears like asking someone if they would rather die or be dead. I dunno. Thanks for asking though!

If Only (Poem) by Shayan Das

[Artworks/Images: In Bed: The Kiss, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1892) | Renoir (2012) | Romantic Lovers, Willem Haenraets]

"Whose death are you more afraid of, my or yours?" the girl enquired and the boy replied, "Yours" whilst whispering somewhere deep within himself, "For darling, I'm the last person to die on Earth. After me none shall die".

Shayan Das

What’s the worst color that was ever invented?

And why do we need to deem something as inferior to make another one look superior? Well, you may argue that's how this world works, right? We reap contentment costing someone else their own joys, see someone garnering milk and honey making someone else poor, and so on and so forth. Back to the track, I consider no colour to be the worst, assuming each one possesses its own intrinsic value and radiates its own distinctive nuance to the palettes of nature. I remember my mother once said to me that there are two kinds of people based on how they perceive beauty. A profusely large number who search for everything in beauty in hopes of finding a home and a far smaller number who search for beauty in everything and find the home naturally. And little did I know, the latter will bring out the poet in me.

Thank you so much for asking. Wish you a great day/evening/night ahead <3

Don't fall for someone who won't pull you up.

Shayan Das

Life's too long with anguish and too short with contentment.

Shayan Das

What made me fall for fall is that it revealed the only ways to romanticize letting go. 🍁

Shayan Das

Acrostic: The first letters of each line read vertically downwards spell out my mother's name.

Neither she nor I could ever figure out whether poetry was an excuse to think more of her or she was an excuse to think more of poetry.

Shayan Das