But I've Lived—thrived Half My Afternoons Wondering Whether Mom Would Prepare My Favourite Dinner For

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

Life seems meaningful only after we suffer.

Shayan Das

Hey, I've loved love ever since I knew what love was. I love the thought of being in love or even the thought of someone truly loving something and you seem to feel the same. Romantic love is obviously glorified throughout all kinds of medium and is present every where around us and yep, despite never being in love I'm bound to believe it's worth it.

And sometimes, it just hits me, and there is this tiny tiny ache in me, desperately wanting something I don't even know how it feels and well, I choose to ignore it and move on. Do you ever get that? I'm guessing you do, but what I wish to know is how you deal with it?

Maybe by just bleeding out on pages or modestly moving on, heeding largely to things I've got control over. After all, 'tis not the first time and I've not loved entirely a single entity in life. Speaking specifically from the romantic aspect, certainly, there would always be that missing part of the puzzle so as long we do not get it. Being an only child, a sheer introvert and someone who's got so much to tell but no one to listen to, I feel like sometimes it's love and sometimes it's necessity disguised as love. I don't aspire to get someone who'd love me more than themselves but someone who'd dance with me in the rain even when there's lightning outside. Someone with whom I can contentedly do robbery over the apprehensions of death, someone whom I can love vehemently even 'fore I fall in love with them.

Mother says it's easy to fall in love but hard to love, and that they are two largely different things. She said she never fell in love with me; she just loved me, and I understood exactly why a mother's love persists in all the places where others subside. 

Shayan Das

hi!! i'm assuming here but are you bengali? because I am and i was just curious

i also really like some of your writings! they're really impactful. i saw in one of your posts how much the entire romantic movement affected you and I wanted to say that really shines through your poems and pieces! the entire writing since you were eleven is really relatable because so was i! hope you always keep writing!

Thank you so much for the compliments! Yes, I'm a Bengali, an ardent lover of Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay besides English Romanticism.

My Bengali poems are posted here.

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!

Your vibe is just awesome. I can see your love for art and poetry and your live in your writings. Just wanna say...keep it going, all the best!!! (Also.....just mentioning that you are the type of guy I look for and I love ❤)

Too many compliments to assimilate at once. Thank you so much and wish you a great day/evening/night ahead!! <3

How is it that each time we fall in life we seek someone else in the same condition to console our inner self?

Shayan Das

I was a dream until one day I had my own dreams. My peers thought I'd outshine them; my parents expected my light would embellish them until one day it blemished me. 'Cause to shine is to build expectations and to build expectations is to be vulnerable. You ascend, albeit you know that the higher one goes, the more bones he breaks each time he falls. You trade your ambitions to build someone else's, snivel in silence and make endless excuses to defend each catastrophe until one day you find yourself becoming them, exhausted and devastated, on the verge of hitting mediocrity, and questioning why you couldn't be that anticipated one. All you wonder is if only you could stop that 7-year-old boy from striving those extra hours to top his class, rip apart the diary when he wrote his first story at 11, fasten those lips that whispered in praise of him, burn the books that told a 15-year-old boy that he can be almost anything in this world only if he aspires to. You pray only if you could dissolve into oblivion until one day you get to make a noise and yet remain unexplored.

Shayan Das

At the end of the day, the only thing you'll sigh over after making a poet fall for you is that you could not become his first love.

Shayan Das