Today, a sampling of X poems (or rather XXX poems–LOL), not written by me.  Love, death, and sonnets?  You could ask for more…but why?  (No, x!)

Amoretti and Epithalamion

Sonnet XXX. My love is like to ice, and I to fire

Edmund Spenser (1552?–1599)

MY love is like to ice, and I to fire; How comes it then that this her cold so great Is not dissolv’d through my so hot desire, But harder grows the more I her entreat? Or how comes it that my exceeding heat         5 Is not delay’d by her heart-frozen cold; But that I burn much more in boiling sweat, And feel my flames augmented manifold! What more miraculous thing may be told, That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice;         10 And ice, which is congeal’d with senseless cold, Should kindle fire by wonderful device!   Such is the power of love in gentle mind,   That it can alter all the course of kind.

Sonnet XXX
by William Shakespeare

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste;
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoanéd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

Sonnet XXX
    Edna St. Vincent Millay