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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
W. B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865, the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised,...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Difficult Love
A Love Song
by William Carlos Williams
Anna, Thy Charms
by Robert Burns
Be Near Me
by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
He would not stay for me, and who can wonder
by A. E. Housman
I Am Not Yours
by Sara Teasdale
I Do Not Love Thee
by Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton
Love's Secret
by William Blake
The More Loving One
by W. H. Auden
To His Coy Love
by Michael Drayton
To His Coy Mistress
by Andrew Marvell
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why (Sonnet XLIII)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
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Never give all the heart  
by W. B. Yeats

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.

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