Love songs and poems of the great Irish writers for Valentine’s Day

Yeats, Joyce, Boyle O’ Reilly, Heaney, and others on great love and loss

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Wow your Valentine with some romantic Irish verse

Photo by CORBIS

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Seamus Heaney Nobel Laureate

Her scarf a la Bardot,
In suede flats for the walk,
She came with me one evening
For air and friendly talk.
We crossed the quiet river,
Took the embankment walk.

Traffic holding its breath,
Sky a tense diaphragm:
Dusk hung like a backcloth
That shook where a swan swam,
Tremulous as a hawk
Hanging deadly, calm.

A vacuum of need
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously we held
As hawk and prey apart,
Preserved classic decorum,
Deployed our talk with art.

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