How To Write A Love Poem

When we set about to write a poem about
love or the ones we love, the temptation is
to write with sentimentality which has a tendency
to make the poem sound soppy and insincere.
One way to avoid this and to make use of the
romantic is for the writer to use distance.
Distancing creates romance and also forces
objectivity onto the writer.

To write about how special someone usually
sounds sentimental, but if the writer compares the
person to something else they prevent the risk of
soppyness (is that a word?).
One of Shakespeares more famous
sonnets starts with this very idea:
..' shall I compare thee to a summers day.'

Below is a feeble attempt of mine to show how
this effect might be used in a love poem for a lover
who likes gardening.

You are
The buds of springs flowers
Without you Im
A lonely blade
Growing between rocks
Prickly as a
Cactus, growing in
The desert
You are the perfect
Passiflora
Around you I bloom
Lets worship Spring Glory
Hiding together under
Cover of Squirreltail Grass
Growing our fruits
Of passion
(I did warn you it would be a feeble attempt!)

Ok. Your turn to write a poem now.
Choose someone or something you are fond of.
Choose a subject you know something about
and mix them together in the above fashion.

As a young boy I can remember my father
and two brother walking and riding our
bikes about an hour away from our home
to fish the richly populated waters of a large lake.

If I was to construct a poem about how
much I loved my now dead father. It would
say much more about our relationship if I
wrote about 'the summer days we fished the
lake together' or if I was to write about my love
for my mother I could write about the 'wonderful
aromas and tastes of her roasted dinners' instead
of 'I love you mother'.

T.S. Elliot called this 'objective correlative'
To quote Elliot:
'The only way of expressing emotion in the form of
art is by finding and 'objective correlative': in other
words a set of objects...which shall be the formula
for that particular emotion'...
These objects, the bike ride, the fishing, lake, the roast
dinners stand for the emotions the poem is about.

Ok . Your turn again .. construct a poem around
a memory of someone you love or are fond of.
Dont write about your feelings like 'I love you Dad'
instead let the facts be a metaphor for the feelings.