Your ideal woman doesn't exist

>your ideal woman doesn't exist
Post poetry for this feeling. Preferably from the English Romantic poets

The pic is only slightly related, but anything like this is also welcome.

"Preferably English Romantic Poets"
>posts Elizabethan Poet

>preferably

You don't know what English romanticism is, do you?

I meant metaphysical poets, sorry

is it only slightly related because it's a justification for not having the ideal woman? Because that's not what Shakespeare had in mind--just don't fuck your ideal woman

While we're on the topic of "ideal woman" let me just say whatever you have in mind for this "ideal" is probably wrong. Read As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra, hell, even Troilus and Romeo and Juliet. Fuck, or even the sonnet "My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun..."

Now thou has loved me one whole day,
Tomorrow when you leav’st, what wilt thou say?
Wilt thou then antedate some new-made vow?
Or say that now
We are not just those persons which we were?
Or, that oaths made in reverential fear
Of Love, and his wrath, any may forswear?
Or, as true deaths true marriages untie,
So lovers’ contracts, images of those,
Bind but till sleep, death’s image, them unloose?
Or, your own end to justify,
For having purposed change and falsehood, you
Can have no way but falsehood to be true?
Vain lunatic, against these ‘scapes I could
Dispute and conquer, if I would,
Which I abstain to do,
For by tomorrow, I may think so too.

It's related because it's about the pursuit of false love. Sonnet 130 does something similar, but it ends in a positive note with the his mistress seems to exceed the conceits used by poets. Whether my "ideal" woman exists or not is not the issue, I'm looking for poetry about pursuing an ideal, whether that be an embodied woman or just the idea of love, but it not being successful or possible according to the speaker of the poem.

Pretty much all of Yeats.

Epipsychidion by Shelley has some great moments

>implying

Okay, on that note, what do you think about this:

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.

Written by Yeats whose love Maud Gonne continued to deny him and said she was doing the world a favor by creating better poetry. When they finally DID get together, it was "eh." Should we trust Yeats's advice here? Or is it meant to be untrustworthy??

Where's the spark in finding a perfectly ideal woman though? I'd rather find someone that's able to surprise me.

I like it a lot. I don't take any poetry as advice tho

Then the perfect woman would be one with the capacity to surprise you

A necessary attribute of my ideal girlfriend is that she must exist therefore my ideal gf does exist

>I don't take any poetry as advice tho
>tho
You didn't have to pleb signal twice

I see poetry as a way to capture experience in a more pure form. I can relate to it, but I don't see how you can get any sort of advice from it.

Sterne's blank page had it summed up perfectly.

What does it matter how it turned out? The whole point is that it's idealistic fantasy on another sphere.

user, you trust too much in the powers of your own imagination... there's much more outside your head than what the inside can imagine, and this is true of women, too

my ideal woman did exist but she doesn't anymore

the point is that Yeats is giving this advice on how to maintain a woman's love and yet it seems he didn't know how to at all. Compare Ovid's advice in Art of Love.