What is “true love” and how do writers approach this topic?

1. What is “true love” and how do writers approach this topic? Poetry Selections From The Unit

2. to hate is an easy, lazy thing but to love takes strength everyone has but not all are willing to practice -- Rupi Kaur

3. I have enough of loss, enough of gain I have my Love, what more can I obtain? Mine is the joy of her companionship Whose healing lip is laid upon my lip – This is enough for me! -- excerpt from “No Lover of Hypocrisy” by Hafiz

4. Love does not claim possession,but gives freedom. Tagore

5. Love adorns itself;it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty. Rabindranath Tagore

6. Almsby Edna St. Vincent Millay My heart is what it was before,   A house where people come and go;But it is winter with your love,   The sashes are beset with snow. I light the lamp and lay the cloth,   I blow the coals to blaze again;But it is winter with your love,   The frost is thick upon the pane. I know a winter when it comes:   The leaves are listless on the boughs;I watched your love a little while,   And brought my plants into the house. I water them and turn them south,   I snap the dead brown from the stem;But it is winter with your love,—   I only tend and water them. There was a time I stood and watched   The small, ill-natured sparrows’ fray;I loved the beggar that I fed,   I cared for what he had to say, I stood and watched him out of sight;   Today I reach around the doorAnd set a bowl upon the step;   My heart is what it was before, But it is winter with your love;   I scatter crumbs upon the sill,And close the window,—and the birds   May take or leave them, as they will.

7. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate:Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer’s lease hath all too short a date”. William Shakespeare

8. On Faithby Cecilia Woloch How do people stay true to each other?When I think of my parents all those yearsin the unmade bed of their marriage, not everlonging for anything else—or: no, they musthave longed; there must have been flickerings,stray desires, nights she turned from him,sleepless, and wept, nights he rose silently,smoked in the dark, nights that nest of breathand tangled limbs must have seemednot enough. But it was. Or they justheld on. A gift, perhaps, I've tossed out,having been always too willing to flyto the next love, the next and the next, certainnothing was really mine, certain nothingwould ever last. So faith hits me late, if at all;faith that this latest love won't end, or endsin the shapeless sleep of death. But faith is hard.When he turns his back to me now, I think:disappear. I think: not what I want. I thinkof my mother lying awake in those armsthat could crush her. That could have. Did not.

9. When I Met My Museby William Stafford

10. Don't Go Far Off by Pablo Neruda Don't go far off, not even for a day, because -- because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep. Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then the little drops of anguish will all run together, the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift into me, choking my lost heart. Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach; may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance. Don't leave me for a second, my dearest, because in that moment you'll have gone so far I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking, Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

11. From the book Chasers of the Lightby Tyler Knott Gregson

12. love is a placee.e. cummings love is a place& through this place oflove move(with brightness of peace)all placesyes is a world& in this world ofyes live(skillfully curled)all worlds

14. A Very Short Song by Dorothy Parker Once, when I was young and true, Someone left me sad- Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad. Love is for unlucky folk, Love is but a curse. Once there was a heart I broke; And that, I think, is worse.