Why I Love Thee?
Why I love thee?
Ask why the seawind wanders,
Why the shore is aflush with the tide,
Why the moon through heaven meanders;
Like seafaring ships that ride
On a sullen, motionless deep;
Why the seabirds are fluttering the strand
Where the waves sing themselves to sleep
And starshine lives in the curves of the sand!
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 20, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Why I Love Thee?” was self-published in Drifting Flowers of the Sea and Other Poems (1904).
Sadakichi Hartmann
Carl Sadakichi Hartmann, born in the late 1860s in Japan, was a dramatist, fiction writer, and art critic. His poetry collections include Naked Ghosts: Four Poems (Fantasia, 1925), Tanka and Haiku: 14 Japanese Rhythms (G. Bruno, 1915), and My Rubaiyat (Mangan, 1913). He died in November 1944.