Books like Poetry

If Poetry stayed with you, these share its feel: love, longing and faith. Each comes with a real page, so you can tell in a minute.

About Poetry · John Donne

1.Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems

Christina Rossetti, 1862

Also longing and love. Poems of goblin fruit, ghostly visitors and stubborn refusals, by a Victorian who made longing sound like a nursery rhyme.

God strengthen me to bear myself;That heaviest weight of all to bear,Inalienable weight of care.All others are outside myself,I lock my door and bar them outThe turmoil, tedium, gad-about.I lock my door upon myself,And bar them out; but who shall wallSelf from myself, most loathed of all?If I could once lay down myself,And start self-purged upon the raceThat all must run! Death runs apace.
2.Gitanjali

Rabindranath Tagore, 1910

Also longing and faith. Short devotional songs that read like love letters to something unnamed. A way to spend an hour with longing, humility and joy, in English prose the poet shaped himself.

Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song—the joy that makes the earth flow over in the riotous excess of the grass, the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world, the joy that sweeps in with the tempest, shaking and waking all life with laughter, the joy that sits still with its tears on the open red lotus of pain, and the joy that throws everything it has upon the dust, and knows not a word.
3.Sonnets from the Portuguese

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1850

Also longing and love. A Victorian poet, ill and isolated, writes her way through the terror of being loved by a man who will not look away.

I lift my heavy heart up solemnly,As once Electra her sepulchral urn,And, looking in thine eyes, I overturnThe ashes at thy feet. Behold and seeWhat a great heap of grief lay hid in me,And how the red wild sparkles dimly burnThrough the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scornCould tread them out to darkness utterly,It might be well perhaps. But if insteadThou wait beside me for the wind to blowThe grey dust up—those laurels on thine head,O my Beloved, will not shield thee so,That none of all the fires shall scorch and shredThe hair beneath. Stand further off then! Go.
4.A Midsummer Night's Dream

William Shakespeare, 1600

Also love and wonder. Four lovers, a fairy king and queen, and a troupe of terrible actors collide in one wood outside Athens, all under the same love potion.

I know a banke where the wilde time blowes,Where Oxslips and the nodding Violet growes,Quite ouer-cannoped with luscious woodbine,With sweet muske roses, and with Eglantine;There sleepes Tytania, sometime of the night,Lul’d in these flowers, with dances and delight:And there the snake throwes her enammel’d skinne,Weed wide enough to rap a Fairy in.
5.Poetry

James Joyce, 1907

Also longing and love. The poems Joyce wrote before Ulysses: love lyrics built like songs, and later, darker pieces from Trieste and Paris, short enough to read standing up.

Wind whines and whines the shingle,The crazy pierstakes groan;A senile sea numbers each singleSlimesilvered stone.From whining wind and colderGrey sea I wrap him warmAnd touch his trembling fineboned shoulderAnd boyish arm.Around us fear, descendingDarkness of fear aboveAnd in my heart how deep unendingAche of love!
6.The Lily of the Valley

Honoré de Balzac, 1836

Also longing and love. A young man remembers the married woman who taught him desire and restraint in a French valley—and the cost of loving someone who refuses to be possessed.

A new soul, a soul with iridescent wings, had burst its chrysalis within me. My favorite star, dropping from the blue waste where I had admired it, had become woman, while preserving its light, its sparkle, and its brilliancy. Suddenly, knowing nothing of love, I had fallen in love. Is not this first irruption of the most intense feeling a man can know a very strange thing? I had met some pretty women in my aunt’s drawing-room; they had not made the slightest impression on me. Is there an hour, a conjunction of the stars, a combination of fitting circumstances, a particular woman above all other women, which seal a passion as exclusive at the age when passion includes the whole female sex?
7.Riders of the Purple Sage

Zane Grey, 1912

Also longing and love. A Utah rancher, a gunman with a hidden grief, and a valley of purple sage: the Western that taught the genre how to feel like a myth.
8.Far from the Madding Crowd

Thomas Hardy, 1874

Also longing and love. A woman inherits a farm and runs it herself — hiring, harvesting, weathering storms — while the men around her mistake her independence for an invitation.
9.Great Expectations

Charles Dickens, 1861

Also love and longing. A blacksmith's orphan is made rich by a stranger, and finds out what money does to love, friendship and memory.
10.Persuasion

Jane Austen, 1817

Also love and longing. A woman of twenty-seven meets again the man she was talked out of marrying, and begins to wonder whether prudence was ever a virtue.
11.Poetry

Henry van Dyke Jr., 1894

Also faith and wonder. A minister who loved birds, ships and the sea writes plain, musical poems about time, strangers and the guest-right of God — quieter and stranger than its era suggests.
12.Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë, 1847

Also love and longing. A storm of a love story told by two unreliable narrators, in which childhood devotion curdles into revenge across two generations on the Yorkshire moors.