How to Write Love Poetry

Try To Be Romantic Today ... :)

Step 1
Master the art of rhyme. Save the blank verse for Bohemian coffeehouses and Yale poetry raves; a love poem has to rhyme, and the more often, the better. Try to stick with easy-to-rhyme words like “moon” (June, swoon, buffoon) and “heart” (start, tart, Wal-Mart). Avoid difficult-to-rhyme words like “interregnum,” “ameliorate,” and “venereal.”

Step 2
Learn your similes. What do love poets do more than ordinary schmos (besides rhyme, that is?) That’s right: they compare things to other things. Shakespeare was a master at comparing things to other things (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate”) and you can be, too, provided you choose the right things to compare with each other. For example, it may not be a good idea to compare your beloved’s lips to potato chips, even if it does rhyme quite nicely.

Step 3
Choose the right meter. You don’t need to hear an exegesis on iambic pentameter vs. trochaic hexameter; that’s kindergarten stuff. Just remember that choosing the wrong meter will bulldoze all your carefully worked-out rhymes and similes, curl your beloved’s potato-chip lips in disgust, and cause her to dump you for the sweetly versifying pizza-delivery boy who just delivered her triple pepperoni. (For example, which of the following do you think is more romantic? “She walks in beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies…” or “There once was a girl from Peru…”)

Step 4
Indulge yourself. Did you ever read “Paradise Lost” in high school? That’s the kind of length you’re aiming for here, only longer. A short poem (“Roses are red/Violets are blue/Gosh, you’re cute!/Like a llama from Peru”) will only persuade the love of your life that you don’t have the attention span to truly attend to her needs. She needs to be convinced that you spent weeks cloistered on a barren mountaintop, using your blood for ink, howling at the moon to summon divine inspiration.

Step 5
Consider your presentation. Your love poem may be endless, rhyming, pleasingly metric and chock-a-block with similes, but all that counts for nothing if you toss it off on the pickup line at the local Fotomat. Plan something a bit more creative, like inscribing your masterpiece on rare Arabian parchment and burying it in a homemade souffle. (Note for beginners: Remember to do this *after* you’ve removed the souffle from the oven.)

By Bob Strauss, eHow Member