Will you TCP My Valentine?

To celebrate Valentine’s Day, we bring you a smattering of poetry, puzzles, and song for sweethearts!

One of my favorites is a poem printed on a wreath of heart-shaped knots, from Recreation for ingenious head-peeces, or, A pleasant grove for their wits to walk in of epigrams 700, epitaphs 200, fancies a number, fantasticks abundance : with their addition, multiplication, and division: 

The poem reads:

TRUE love is a pretious pleasure,

Rich delight unvalu’d treasure,

Two firme Heartes in one ♡ meeting,

Grasping hand in hand ne’r fleeting,

Wreathlike like a maze entwineing

Two faire mindes in one combineing;

Foe to faithless vowes perfidious

True love is a knott religious,

Dead to the sinnes yt flameing rise

Through beauties soule seduceing eyes,

Deafe to gold enchaunting witches,

Love for vertue not for riches;

Such is true loves boundles measure.

True love is a pretious pleasure.

From the same book, a selection of “Posies for Rings,” or short epigrams that might be engraved inside a ring given as a token of love:

This ballad illustrates the custom that the first person you see on February 14 is your Valentine:

In the month of February,

the green leaves begin to spring;

Pretty Lambs trip like a Fairy,

Birds do couple, bill, and sing;

All things on earth,

That draweth breath,

In love together then do joyn,

Why should not I.

My fortune try,

And seek me out a Valentine.

Thanks kind fate I have my wishes,

for I have now met my dear,

Whom I greet with honey kisses,

her sweet sight my heart doth chear,

My dearest love,

And Turtle-Dove,

O let my arms about thee twine,

For thou art she,

I first did see,

In this case, the coy maid resists his advances,

Surely Sir you are mistaken,

for you met some other Maid,

Young-men they are given to scoffing,

and as much to her you said;

Then do not stay

Me on the way,

with your swéet words that you do coyn

Let me alone,

I must be gone,

Nevertheless, he persists, and the song ends with a wedding: