Steps to Follow

1. Let Your Heart Bloom 🌸

   Begin not with a pen, but with your pulse. Love poetry flourishes from sincerity. Ask yourself: is your heart trembling with first love, aching with loss, or steady with devotion? Let your emotions rise like spring roses—tender, vulnerable, alive. Example: Sappho of Lesbos (c. 630–570 BCE), history’s original queen of heartbreak, once whispered: 'You came and I was crazy for you, and you cooled my mind that burned with longing.' (Source: Mary Barnard translation of Sappho)

2. Write in Petals, Not Facts 🌷

   Engage the senses. What does your lover's voice taste like? Does their absence echo like rain on old stone? Sensory imagery is the fragrance of poetry—linger in it. The Romantics did. Keats, in 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' described love like a haunting fever in the bones.

3. Water with Metaphor and Simile 🌼

   Metaphors are the honeybees of love poetry—they pollinate meaning. Compare your beloved to 'a red, red rose' like Robert Burns (1794), or to 'the tide that lifts all boats' like Neruda in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Quote: 'I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.' (Source: Pablo Neruda, Poem XIV)

4. Pick Your Garden Form 🌻

   Will you write a tidy Shakespearean sonnet (abab cdcd efef gg), or wander wild in free verse like e.e. cummings? Each form carries a rhythm—traditional forms like the ghazal, haiku, or villanelle can surprise you. Fun fact: Shakespeare didn’t invent the sonnet, but he made it immortal. His 154 sonnets remain a gold standard.

5. Root in the Personal 🌺

   Generic lines wither quickly. Don’t say 'I love you' like a Hallmark card—say it like your soul’s fingerprint. Describe the way their laugh disarms you, or how their scent lingers like jasmine at dusk. The best love poems are those that could only be written by you.