• Ars Amoris
• Speak to her heart!   
• That manic force   
• When wits depart   
• Forbids remorse.

• Dream with her dreaming   
• Until her lus t
• Seems to her seeming   
• An act of trust!

• Do without doing!   
• Love’s wilful potion   
• Veils the ensuing,
• And brief, commotion.

• Choice
• Allegiance is assigned
• Forever when the mind
• Chooses and stamps the will.
• Thus, I must love you still
• Through good and ill.

• But though we cannot part
• We may retract the heart
• And build such privacies
• As self-regard agrees
• Conduce to ease.

• So manners will repair
• The ravage of despair
• Which generous love invites,
• Preferring quiet nights
• To vain delights.

• Montana Pastoral
• I am no shepherd of a child’s surmises.
• I have seen fear where the coiled serpent rises,

• Thirst where the grasses burn in early May
• And thistle, mustard, and the wild oat stay.

• There is dust in this air. I saw in the heat
• Grasshoppers busy in the threshing wheat.

• So to this hour. Through the warm dusk I drove
• To blizzards sifting on the hissing stove,

• And found no images of pastoral will,
• But fear, thirst, hunger, and this huddled chill.

J.V. Cunningham

J.V. Cunningham (1911-1985) was an American poet whose precision in meter, form and image places him squarely in the neo-classicist camp of poets. His style was fashioned after the Latin poets – such as Catullus and Horace – and he was especially adept at the epigram – a brief and direct poem which addressed a wide range of subjects drawn from personal experience. According to critic and fellow poet Hayden Carruth, Cunningham’s epigrams largely rehabilitated this all-but-lost poetic form in the 20th century.