Other Valentine's Day!, the date par excellence dedicated to love. And few more beautiful literary compositions to write about love than sonnets. Fourteen verses where the whole essence of a feeling so difficult to explain can be concentrated. All poets have wanted to do it since the beginning of time. Today I remember these 6 love sonnets. Maybe they are the best known of its authors, especially those of Lope, Quevedo and Garcilaso de la Vega, and they are also perhaps the most beautiful. To them I add others of Neruda, Miguel Hernández and Lorca.
Lope de Vega
Faint, dare, be furious,
rough, tender, liberal, elusive,
encouraged, deadly, deceased, alive,
loyal, traitorous, cowardly and spirited;
not find outside the good center and rest,
be happy, sad, humble, haughty,
angry, brave, fugitive,
satisfied, offended, suspicious;
flee the face to the clear disappointment,
drink poison for soft liquor,
forget the profit, love the damage;
believe that a heaven fits into a hell,
give life and soul to disappointment;
This is love, whoever tasted it knows it.
***
Francis of Quevedo
Close my eyes the last
Shadow that the white day will take me,
And can unleash this soul of mine
Hora, to his eager flattery;
But not from here on the shore
It will leave the memory, where it burned:
Swimming knows my flame the cold water,
And lose respect for severe law.
Soul, to whom all a God prison has been,
Veins, what a humor they have given so much fire,
Medules, which have gloriously burned,
Your body will leave, not your care;
They will be ashes, but it will make sense;
They will be dust, more love dust.
***
Garcilaso de la Vega
Your gesture is written in my soul,
and how much I want to write about you;
you wrote it by yourself, I read it
so alone, that even of you I keep myself in this.
In this I am and always will be;
that although it does not fit in me how much I see in you,
of so much good what I don't understand I think,
already taking faith for budget.
I was not born except to love you;
my soul has cut you to its measure;
out of habit of the soul itself I love you.
How much I have I confess I owe you;
I was born for you, for you I have life,
for you I must die, and for you I die.
***
Pablo Neruda
How many times, love, did I love you without seeing you and maybe without a memory,
without recognizing your gaze, without looking at you, centaury,
in contrary regions, in a burning noon:
You were just the aroma of the cereals that I love.
Maybe I saw you, I assumed you as I passed by raising a glass
in Angola, in the light of the June moon,
or were you the waist of that guitar
that I played in the darkness and it sounded like the excessive sea.
I loved you without my knowing it, and I looked for your memory.
I entered empty houses with a flashlight to steal your portrait.
But I already knew what it was. Suddenly
while you were going with me I touched you and my life stopped:
in front of my eyes you were, reigning, and queens.
Like a bonfire in the woods, fire is your kingdom.
***
Miguel Hernández
You die of caste and simple ...
I am convicted, love, I am confessed
that intrepid kidnapper of a kiss,
I released the flower from your cheek.
I released the flower from your cheek,
and from that glory, that event,
your cheek, scrupulous and heavy,
it falls off leafy and yellow.
The ghost of the delinquent kiss
the cheekbone has you haunted,
more and more patent, black and big.
And without sleeping you are, jealously,
watching my mouth with what care!
so that it does not become stale and out of control.
***
Federico Garcia Lorca
This light, this devouring fire.
This grey scenary surrounds me.
This pain for just an idea.
This anguish of heaven, world and time.
This cry of blood that decorates
lyre without a pulse now, lubricious tea.
This weight of the sea that hits me.
This scorpion that dwells on my chest.
They are a garland of love, a bed of the wounded,
where without sleep, I dream of your presence
among the ruins of my sunken chest.
And although I seek the summit of prudence
your heart gives me the valley
with hemlock and passion of bitter science.