This Is The Greatest Love Poem Of All Time

For anyone who loves to read, poetry is the sweet gift of perfect phrase and feeling.

To mark World Poetry Day, poetry specialists at London’s Southbank Centre compiled a list of the 50 greatest love poems from the past 50 years.

If you’re getting over heartache, or in the early buds of a new romance, the number one poem of all time might just pull at your heart strings.

While he might be known for his tumultuous relationship with American writer Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes’ ‘Lovesong’ topped the list.

We’ll let the words speak for themselves…

Lovesong
Ted Hughes

He loved her and she loved him
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment’s brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin’s attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
Her glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-trick were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap.

H/T i100