English Poems

Richard Le Gallienne's 1892 collection arrives like a dispatch from a more languorous age, when poets still believed beauty was worth dying for. These are verses suffused with the particular Victorian melancholy that knows joy and sorrow are not opposites but lovers locked in eternal embrace. Le Gallienne writes with the lush, aching sensibility of a poet who understands that desire always carries its own shadow. The collection ranges from tender invocations of young love to the dark romance of 'Paolo and Francesca,' his retelling of the legendary lovers condemned in Dante's inferno for the crime of reading romance together. Throughout, there runs a thread of longing so acute it becomes almost physical, a reaching toward something perpetually receding. The natural world trembles with feeling here; spring is never just spring but the unbearable reminder of time's passage. These are poems for readers who want to feel something intensely, to remember what it felt like before irony became armor. Le Gallienne offers no apologies for sentiment; he simply inhabits it completely, and in doing so, makes the reader homesick for emotions they may never have had.