Thomas Wyatt
William Shakespeare
John Donne
Andrew Marvell
Richard Lovelace
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
William Blake
Robert Burns
Lord Byron
Christina Rossetti
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
John Keats
Ernest Dowson
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Robert Frost
Charlotte Mew
Elizabeth Jennings
Louis MacNeice
Anne Sexton
Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
Seamus Heaney
Keith Douglas
Tony Harrison
Carol Ann Duffy
Paul Muldoon
Wendy Cope
This poem depicts what is left of the relationship of an elderly couple. They are apart physically and emotionally; isolated in proximity. After many years of marriage their passion has faded and they live with comfortable distance and separateness. How sad this is may be a matter of interpretation...
Lying apart now, each in a separate bed, He with a book, keeping the light on late, She like a girl dreaming of childhood, All men elsewhere it is as if they wait Some new event: the book he holds unread, Her eyes fixed on the shadows overhead. Tossed up like flotsam from a former passion, How cool they lie. They hardly ever touch, Or if they do, it is like a confession Of having little feeling or too much. Chastity faces them, a destination For which their whole lives were a preparation. Strangely apart, yet strangely close together, Silence between them like a thread to hold And not wind in. And time itself's a feather Touching them gently. Do they know they're old, These two who are my father and my mother Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold?
One Flesh was written by Elizabeth Jennings.