Writing Love Poems

Staring at a blank page this week with Valentine’s Day fast approaching, I find myself drafting a love poem. This is hard work for me; I actually tend to avoid it. I can’t recall the last love poem I wrote that had not left me embarrassed by how quickly my words curdled into cliché metaphors. Although I felt compelled to put down the pen and although the poem is addressed to no one in particular (but maybe that one party crush), I feel motivated—as a newly minted college student—to think more seriously about love.

I adore poetry, frankly, because of love poetry. It was the first genre that taught me how deeply words could penetrate, how language could reel me in and alter the way I move through the world. This leaves me now with a persistent question: how can I write a good love poem too?

I have primarily written like a “lovesick teenager fumbling with scansion and sentiment,” a description bemoaned by The Poetry Foundation when reflecting on the difficulty of this genre. In truth, being in love has often been detrimental to my poetry—a fish in water does not know much about water, let alone how to describe it. Whether I was writing about infatuation or heartbreak, the results were lackluster at best, ruinous at worst. My chosen metaphors felt too canonized, everything too pithy. I convinced myself that it was simply embarrassing to share my innermost thoughts, much less record them in indelible ink.

History suggests that this problem is not new. Love poetry, after all, has never been marginal to literary history. The oldest known love poem, the “Love Song of Shu-Sin,” composed in ancient Mesopotamia, celebrates a marriage using an incantatory refrain: “Bridegroom, dear to my heart / Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet. Lion, dear to my heart, Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet.”

Across centuries, the genre endures defiantly. We see it in the fragments of Sappho, which collapse the boundary between the personal and the universal (“soft as she is / [Aphrodite] has almost / killed me with / love for that boy”) and in the medieval troubadours, describing a love that “pricks [Lanval] and … blazes in the dark.” From the mischievous conceits of John Donne (“The Flea”) and the “Roses are red” poem from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, to the poems of modern-day, the form has evolved. 

Amid dynasty changes and world wars, in peace and in war, love remains our most persistent subject. Perhaps a good romance poem is but a structure capable of holding a feeling without dissolving into it, holding it while the world and time rush by.

My mother always told me that poetry was supposed to be beautiful—love poetry undeniably so. Chinese poetry is scattered with motifs of natural landscapes in harmony, from streams and valleys to wild geese and plum blossoms. When I was in elementary school, she enrolled in an online course on Chinese literature and attended lectures while cooking dinner—I was inevitably a student too. As I sounded out phonemes at the kitchen island, her professors expounded on regulated verse and tonal restraint.

In that classical tradition, desire is rarely a declaration; it is a displacement. Emotion is cast onto the landscape until the scenery itself begins to ache. Love drifts through the weather; intimacy is found only in the negative space of images. I think of Su Shi’s “Song of River City,” mourning an unreachable bond; Qin Guan’s “Meeting Across the Milky Way,” which imagines spiritual union against cosmic distance; and the “Guan Ju” from the Shijing, where young desire is infused into ospreys and river reeds.

For a long time, my own writing felt like a repudiation of that inheritance. My language tended toward the blunt and the profane—abrasive, always prosaic, and deliberately unromantic. When I was an eighth-grader in quarantine, my first poems dealt with racism, specifically anti-Asian hate, and loneliness. In a world that felt insistently brutal, tenderness seemed beside the point. I avoided love poems and wrote instead about violence, body horror, and politics, perhaps because it felt safer to be angry than to be wanting.

It was not until high school that I encountered poets who opened me to this romantic genre.

I started studying in workshops with various poets, encountering works that were unabashed in their full-throated cry for love. I was struck by the humor and vulnerability in Jordan Hamel’s poem “DJ Got Us Fallin in Love by Usher plays in the club as the world burns” and the empowering boldness in Danielle DeTiberis’s “In a Black Tank Top.” I read about queer longing in Chen Chen’s “i love you to the moon &”; I learned from Margaret Atwood’s “Variation on the Word Sleep” that desire could be both haunting and precise.

My favorite poems are romance poems—lines written by Rumi, Shakespeare, and Li-Young Lee. These poems about love and intimacy are my heartstones, trinkets I return to for warmth, sympathy, and connection. They speak to a tipsy, throbbing, persistent feeling, so unique to us yet so universal among our species. 

These poems did not apologize for their emotions. They operated on the trust that vulnerability, however awkward or unpolished, was a risk worth taking. They suggest that writing love requires a certain frustrating patience—a distance great enough to see, with a clarity both relieving and terrifying, precisely what is at stake.

On Valentine’s Day, when poetry briefly enters our public sphere—cards, text messages, confessions—people risk saying something earnest, knowing it will likely sound foolish. But that risk is the point. Perhaps a good love poem does not avoid embarrassment, but one that leans so deeply into it that it becomes beside the point. 

Maybe this year, I will even give the “roses are red” poem a pass. I have come to realize that although not all poems are romantic, nearly all are about love. They are desperate acts of paying attention to a world that will eventually leave us.

Love poetry, then, is not so much a genre as a poetic state of mind—the way language behaves when something matters enough to risk being ruined by it.

Cloris Shi ’29 (clorisshi@college.harvard.edu) hopes to receive a love poem this year.