The Feast of Valentinus will soon be upon us.
Some look forward to the pageantry of the day: the bouquets, the chocolates, the frilly avowals of eternal devotion. Others find the yearly onslaught of gewgaws produced in the name of wuv, twu wuv, downright nauseating.
If you fall into the latter camp and are currently seeking refuge from mawkish sentimentality, you'll probably want to avoid this post for now. The list of sci-fi/fantasy poetry I've thrown together below is chock-full of heart-eyed declarations of tender affection and happily-ever-afters of various romantickal shades. For the most part, the speakers herein--whether human, immortal, organic, or mechanic--clearly love being in love.
This could easily have been a dark post. There seems to be no end to SFF poems of love gone wrong, after all. Page through a genre verse anthology, old or new, and it likely won’t be long before you come up against tales of terrible enchantments (e.g. Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”), devouring obsessions (Raab’s “Attack of the Crab Monsters”), ghoulish pacts (Liddell’s “The Vampire Bride”), unrequited passions (Tennyson's “The Lady of Shalott”), or hair-raising hauntings (Clarke’s “Porphyria’s Other Lover”).
But, on occasion, bypassing the grim, the tragic, and the gritty for the sweet, the lighthearted, and/or the celebratory makes for a pleasant change. And there are plenty of specpo takes on love of a more joyous flavor around, if you keep an eye out.
So, in honor of this coming February the 14th, here are fourteen SFF poems about first crushes, romantic epiphanies, conjugal bliss—love gone wonderfully right—that you can read or listen to online. Pieces selected are drawn from classic fantasy, recent sci-fi, and everything in between, but all tend more toward the touching, the humorous, or the aww-inspiring than the grisly.
(There is perhaps a teensy dash of darkness to be found lurking in the pieces below, most notably in the form of a pair of betentacled Lovecraftian abominations--abominations that are, however, to all appearances quite happy in love. Also, Ragnarok happens, and one highly unfortunate decapitation. But there’s no real cause for alarm. Promise.)
Time to break out the candy hearts and get reading.
14 Speculative Love Poems
“Sailors Take Warning” by Robin M. Mayhall “… you and I laugh As we lie together …”
“Green Thumbs” by Toby MacNutt “He blooms only rarely.”
“Love Song of Beren and Luthien” by J. R. R. Tolkien, in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring “He called her by her elvish name ...”
“Sumerian Love Song” by Mary Alexander Agner “I offer you richness, herbs from the fields …”
“The One” by Brandon O’Brien “She is briefly the only thing that makes sense.”
“The Day the Saucers Came” by Neil Gaiman (read by the author in this video; or you can view the text alongside an ASL translation here) “… the day the saucers came, by some coincidence, Was the day that the graves gave up their dead …”
"Lyric Fragment" by Sonya Taaffe “... I unbraid your hair dark as violets in the sea-shifting light ...”
“Duet on Mars” by John Updike “There’s life, by all the stars above, On Mars—it’s you and I!”
“The Sea King’s Second Bride” by C.S.E. Cooney “The Sea King looks astonished, quite bewildered and bedazzled Like he's never seen my likeness …”
“Kissing the Invisible Man” by Todd Dillard “… I seek the light bending through him …”
“The Jackdaw, Married” by Mathew Joiner "He gifts his wife with tinfoil-twists ..."
“Across the Grimpen Sedge” by Paul Christian Stevens “… come, retract your eyes and Float, locked with me, towards the soft horizon.”
“Companionship” by Mary Soon Lee, from The Sign of the Dragon “Unasked-for, unnegotiated, this friendship.”
“The Headless Horseman of Cuba” by Margarita Engle “The fireflies flashed and blinked, like stars.”
Thanks for checking in!
<3