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Guenevere
Sarah Teasdale

I was a queen, and I have lost my crown;
A wife, and I have broken all my vows;
A lover, and I ruined him I loved: --
There is no other havoc left to do.
A little month ago I was a queen,
And mothers held their babies up to see
When I came riding out of Camelot.
The women smiled, and all the world smiled too.
And now, what woman's eyes would smile on me?
I still am beautiful, and yet what child
Would think of me as some high, heaven-sent thing,
An angel, clad in gold and miniver?
The world would run from me, and yet am I
No different from the queen they used to love.
If water, flowing silver over stones,
Is forded, and beneath the horses' feet
Grows turbid suddenly, it clears again,
And men will drink it with no thought of harm.
Yet I am branded for a single fault.
I was the flower amid a toiling world,
Where people smiled to see one happy thing,
And they were proud and glad to raise me high;
They only asked that I should be right fair,
A little kind, and gowned wondrously,
And surely it were little praise to me
If I had pleased them well throughout my life.
I was a queen, the daughter of a king.
The crown was never heavy on my head,
It was my right, and was a part of me.
The women thought me proud, the men were kind,
And bowed right gallantly to kiss my hand,
And watched me as I passed them calmly by,
Along the halls I shall not tread again.
What if, to-night, I should revisit them?
The warders at the gates, the kitchen-maids,
The very beggars would stand off from me,
And I, their queen, would climb the stairs alone,
Pass through the banquet-hall, a loathed thing,
And seek my chambers for a hiding-place,
And I should find them but a sepulchre,
The very rushes rotted on the floors,
The fire in ashes on the freezing hearth.
I was a queen, and he who loved me best
Made me a woman for a night and day,
And now I go unqueened forevermore.
A queen should never dream on summer eves,
When hovering spells are heavy in the dusk: --
I think no night was ever quite so still,
So smoothly lit with red along the west,
So deeply hushed with quiet through and through.
And strangely clear, and deeply dyed with light,
The trees stood straight against a paling sky,
With Venus burning lamp-like in the west.
I walked alone amid a thousand flowers,
That drooped their heads and drowsed beneath the dew,
And all my thoughts were quieted to sleep.
Behind me, on the walk, I heard a step --
I did not know my heart could tell his tread,
I did not know I loved him till that hour.
Within my breast I felt a wild, sick pain,
The garden reeled a little, I was weak,
And quick he came behind me, caught my arms,
That ached beneath his touch; and then I swayed,
My head fell backward and I saw his face.
All this grows bitter that was once so sweet,
And many mouths must drain the dregs of it.
But none will pity me, nor pity him
Whom Love so lashed, and with such cruel thongs.

 

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Love Poems 3 The Bungler by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Love Poems 4 Blue and White by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861-1907)

Love Poems 5 Desideria by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Love Poems 6 The Taxi by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Love Poems 7 Daffodils by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Love Poems 8 Song by Sir William Watson (1858-1935)

Love Poems 9 To a Butterfly by William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Love Poems 10 Sonnet From the Portuguese V by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61)

Love Poems 11 She Tells Her Love by Robert Ranke Graves

Love Poems 12 It's all I have to bring to-day by Emily  Dickinson

Love Poems 13 I Never Lost As Much by Emily  Dickinson

Love Poems 14 Heart, We Will Forget Him by Emily  Dickinson

Love Poems 15 O Mistress Mine by William  Shakespeare

Love Poems 16 The Rose in the Deeps of his Heart by William Butler Yeats

Love Poems 17 Love by Robert  Browning

Love Poems 18 My Pretty Rose Tree by William  Blake

Love Poems 19 I Should Not Dare by Emily  Dickinson

Love Poems 20 One Day I Wrote Her Name by Edmund  Spenser

Love Poems 21 Tell me not, Sweet, by Richard  Lovelace

Love Poems 22 The Dream by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love Poems 23 The Dream by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love Poems 24 Hope is a Thing With Feathers by Emily  Dickinson

Love Poems 25 We Are Seven by William  Wordsworth

Love Poems 26 Mag by Carl  Sandburg

Love Poems 27 Ebb by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love Poems 28 I Sing by Emily  Dickinson

Love Poems 29 For Each Ecstatic Instant by Emily  Dickinson

Love Poems 30 Love Not Me by John  Wilbye

Love Poems 31 Mild Is The Parting Year by Walter Savage Landor

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