I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
— from Pablo Neruda’s “One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII”
Oil on canvas.
Verónica Claudio Villasante, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Thanks to the heart by which we live,
Thanks to the tenderness,
its joys, its fears:
To me, the meanest flower that blows can give
thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
— from William Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, 1807
Woodcut illustration for George Meredith’s “The Crown of Love,” by John Everett Millais, Joseph Swain, 1859
Universal Pictures.
Charlton.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 