Love Knots

5.10 Love Knots

It has no beginning and no end and consists of graceful loops (sometimes forming hearts) in which messages of love are either attached and knotted in (or written on the ribbon or rope) and read by turning the knot around and around. And, if you couldn't make a real love knot, then many Valentines included a design of one.

A young man often hung this love knot on his true love's doorknob, slipping a letter under also. (Some feel this began with the sailors since many were skilled at making fishnets and so doing knots or macrame were their skill. Others say it is a celtic custom and design. While others say it is Scandinavian.)

5.11 Paper Hands

By the 19th Century another symbol of love became the paper hand. It was considered a symbol of courtship because of the custom of a man "asking for a lady's hand" in marriage. And eventually tiny paper gloves became a valentine card symbol as well....evolving into gloves (esp. silk) becoming a popular gift to for a man to give his sweetheart. Eventually, a woman sort of expected a pair of good gloves as a gift (in she was in certain social circles). Eventually (I guess it depended on how well you knew the woman?) a man would also give shoestrings, silk stockings, garters and jewlery to his sweetheart for Valentines.

5.12 Valentine Lace

Expensive Valentines today have real lace, perhaps gold charms, real flowers (or dried) and even made with red velvet and not paper. For thousands of years, certain "pretty things" have often been associated with romance. In the days of olde, knights often rode into battle with his lady love's scarf or ribbon tied somewhere on him. Lace, because of it's delicate nature, has come to represent something lovely to look at and thus represent love (because lace really isn't practical as far as a fabric.) So lace as long as 400 years ago because a popular trimming for clothing...especially clothing associated with love = wedding dresses!

How lace paper got made was purely accidental. Joseph Addenbrooke in 1834 was working for a London paper when by accident a file brushed over a sheet of paper embossed with a raised design. The high points of this embossed design thus got filed off leaving small holes, and giving a lacey look to the paper.

This led into the business of making paper laces and soon others followed --- competitively to the point where some of these paper laces are of museum quality today.

VI. Saint Valentine’s Poems

How Do I Love Thee?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning(1806-1861)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of every day's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seem to lose

With my lost saints, ---I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life! ---and if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

False though She Be to Me and Love

William Congreve (1670-1729)

False though she be to me and love,

I'll ne'er pursue revenge;

For still the charmer I approve,

Though I deplore her change.

In hours of bliss we oft have met;

They could not always last;

And though the present I regret,

I'm grateful for the past.

 

Love's Secret

William Blake (1757-1827)

Never seek to tell thy love,

Love that never told can be;

For the gentle wind doth move

Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,

I told her all my heart,

Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears.

Ah! she did depart!

A Red, Red Rose

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

O, my luve is like a red, red rose,

That's newly sprung in June.

O, my luve is like the melodie,

That's sweetly play'd in tune.

As far art throu, my bonnie lass,

So deep in luve am I,

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi' the sun!

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

While the sands o'life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only luve,

And fare thee weel a while!

And I will come again, my luve,

Tho' it were ten thousand mile!

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

William Woodsworth (1770-1850)

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

--Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!