St. Valentine’s Day is coming up, and thoughts of love are in the air. Now, he may not be the first figure to spring to mind when thinking of romance, but here he is anyway: G.K. Chesterton. He was an incurable romantic, and spent years of his life wooing his wife, Frances—long after he was married to her, in fact. Here is a collection of poetry snippets and anecdotes, drawn from Joseph Pearce’s biography, Wisdom and Innocence.

“Here ends my previous existence. Take it: it led me to you.”
—G.K. Chesterton, writing to his fiancée Frances

God made you very carefully,
He set a star apart for it,
He stained it green and gold with fields
And aureoled it with sunshine;
He peopled it with kings, peoples, republics,
And so made you, very carefully.
All nature is God’s book, filled with His rough sketches for you.

—Poem written for Frances Blogg by G.K. Chesterton

“Speaking of his wife, Gilbert wrote candidly that he had fallen in love with her at first sight. She had looked straight at him during the course of a conversation and he said to himself: ‘If I had anything to do with this girl I should go on my knees to her: if I spoke with her she would never deceive me: if I loved her she would never play with me: if I trusted her she would never go back on me: if I remembered her she would never forget me.’”
—from Wisdom and Innocence by Joseph Pearce

Never again with cloudy talk
Shall life be tricked or faith undone,
The world is many and is mad,
But we are sane and we are one.

—part of “Creation Day”, a poem written during the Chestertons’ honeymoon

“For Chesterton the idea of sublime femininity had become incarnate in Frances. He told a friend, Freda Riviere, that he particularly liked an unusually placed window at their home: ‘I like that window. When the light catches her hair, it gives Frances a halo and makes her look something like what she really is.’”
—from Wisdom and Innocence by Joseph Pearce

I need not say I love you yet
You know how doth my heart oppress
The intolerable tenderness
That broke my body when we met.
I need not say I love you yet.

But let me say I fear you yet
You the long years not vulgarise,
You open your immortal eyes
And we for the first time have met.
Cover your face; I fear you yet.

—G.K. Chesterton, writing Frances to commemorate their silver anniversary