Never give all the Heart

Never give all the heart, for love

Will hardly seem worth thinking of

To passionate women if it seem

Certain, and they never dream

That it fades out from kiss to kiss;

For everything that’s lovely is

But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

O never give the heart outright,

For they, for all smooth lips can say,

Have given their hearts up to the play.

And who could play it well enough

If deaf and dumb and blind with love?

He that made this knows all the cost,

For he gave all his heart and lost.

Karen Stärke,

as William Butler Yeats, fictional poet.

Comments

Woman in the Mirror

I wrote this poem as a child, after a certain incident, and, like many of my poems attributed to other poets, this one has been commonly attributed to Cecília Meireles, maybe because she had a book on poems for children published. This isn't a nursery rhyme, though. I finally translated everything into English (I grew up bilingual). Of course, this is not an exact translation, but rather an unprecedented adaption, as happens with poetry. You can read both versions bellow. Mullher ao Espellho Read it in English Hoje, que seja esta ou aquela Pouco me importa Quero apenas parecer bela Pois seja qual for, estou morta. Já fui loura, já fui morena Já fui Margarida e Beatriz Já fui Maria e Madalena Só não pude ser como quis. Que mal faz esta cor fingida Do meu cabelo, do meu rosto Se tudo é tinta; o mundo, a vida O contentamento, o desgosto. Karen Stärke Woman in the Mirror Today, being a zero or someone I no longer care As long as I'm the pretty o...

A poem right for your personality type and Myers-Briggs true story

While I was writing new episodes for a famous and yet uncredited TV comedy series , I came up with the plot in which one of the characters, an actor, is having trouble with getting into a character's skin and his best friend, originally a writer, that recently started seeing a psychoanalist, suggests he tries a psychology type test called Myers-Briggs - whose name, and its own creators' were invented - for composing the character. I took inspiration from an already existing personality type test, that classifies the types into fleumatic, choleric, etc. As I had tried it before and had trouble fitting within one of the types, I though that, in such cases, a better system would be a more comples one, with combinations of two or more determining personality traits. I set up for four, concluding that any such classification system is an abstration, and the more types, more precise it is. As I digged into it, relying on my rud...

You Are Tired (I think), And So Am I

As it happened with many of my poems, short stories , novels , songs, screenplays , etc , this one has also been widespread on the internet credited to someone already dead when I was born. I've been creating poems (and other stuff) since childhood, when I thought they were made to be declaimed, not written. But I wrote this one in my adult life, and, due to the ambiguity of the sound of 'Jacynth Song' in Portuguese language, though not enough to give up on this dreamly mysterious verse, which wasn't the first mention to this intriguing term, I signed it under the sugestive name of E. E. Cummings , soon creating another good poem under the same name. Like in 'Eternal Shine of a Spotless Mind' , I kept referring my own work even when I forgot about it, thus later I've created an illustration based on this very same poem. You Are Tired (I think), And So Am I You are tired, (I think) And so am I ...

Karen Stärke

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