How To Write A Love Poem
Writing a love poem is both the easiest and also the most difficult thing to do in poetry. It is easy to write a love poem because writing about something that feels so good simply comes easily. Certainly easier than writing a poem about something painful or even grievous. However, writing a love poem is also difficult, especially if you aspire to write something interesting. Trite love poems are ubiquitous. A quick search online will immediately pull a wealth of poorly written love poems praising the charms of the beloved using phrases and metaphors which are not unique let alone interesting. The primary goal of someone writing a love poem should be to write a poem that rises above the banal.
So ,although writing a love poem can be easy because you know what you are feeling, trying to write a poem that expresses your love in a new and exciting way may not come as easily. Even the most masterful poets struggle with writing love poems. I confess to not only writing but publicly sharing some admittedly horrid love poems. I say this to encourage you not to get so caught up in the suggestions which follow that you never write a love poem. I hope that you will, however, at least try to write something that will reflect the most essential experience of your emotion for your beloved. And to this end, I offer the following exercises.
The first exercise I would recommend is to write a love letter instead of a poem. In the letter, write directly to the person describing how you feel about them and why. Or you can write a letter to someone else, telling them how you feel and why. It is not enough to say what you feel because the truth is that we all experience the feeling of love in similar ways–the excitement of seeing the one you love, the "butterflies in the stomach," the breathlessness. By saying "why" you feel what you feel, you are taking your emotions to something more personal. Is it the way the person dances? Not everyone dances. Does the person you love make you breakfast in bed? These are the details which make your relationship and what you feel and experience different from everyone else’s.
Another way to approach a love poem is to make a list of things you love about the person. Many love poems and songs are simply a list of things the the lover/writer loves about the other person. Elizabeth Barrett Browning counted the ways she loved her husband Robert Browning in a sonnet. You can do the same. I would even challenge you to try to make the list as long and as detailed as possible. The longer you can make your list, or letter, the more details from which you will be able to draw when it comes down to writing your poem.
As you are writing the letter and/or the list, do not discard anything as being too trivial or unimportant. Remember that your goal is to celebrate your relationship and the qualities of your love which make it different from anyone and everyone else’s. For this reason, you want to include the things about your relationship and the person you love that define what the two of you share. Do not be afraid to celebrate the trivial aspects of your love because these, ironically, will elevate your poem above the trivial and typical love poem.
After you have written the letter and/or the list, you should have plenty of information from which to draw and write a poem that is emotionally relevant to you and your beloved. Poetry is an ideal means of communicating familiar emotions because the abbreviated lines and careful choice of words allows the poet to take the mundane and make it profound. As you read through your writing, look for those things which jump out to you as interesting. The things that jump out may be physical or personality traits, things the two of you share in common, and experiences that the two of you have had together. The goal here is not to highlight everything but to choose the highlights of your emotions and experience. These are the elements you will want to weave into your poem.
How you choose to write the poem, whether you choose to write a form poem (ie. a sonnet, vilanelle, et al) or free verse is completely up to you. You might want to write more than one poem, using more than one form. While I realize that this sounds like an awful lot of writing, look at it as an opportunity to celebrate your relationship, to explore the things about it which make you happiest, to not only relive the best but also immerse yourself in the experience of being in love with this other person. (You may even want to save what you don’t use this time and share it at some future time.)
I assure you, if you take the time to do these things you will be able to present your beloved and the world with a wonderful gift–a synthesis of your love in your words that only you can offer. I hope you will share them with me if this article has helped. I would love to celebrate your love with you and know that this article helped you do the same.
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Posted in Education, Literacy - Reading and Writing
