Certainly a large proportion of Grave’s poetry is about love; and the range of experience is wide. At one end are humorous or disgusted encounters with sex, and at the other triumphant claims that the miracle he allows for has come about, in the love between himself and embodiments of his Muse or Goddess.
Somewhere in the realistic or even disillusioned area is the popular anthology selection 'The Thieves'. It is short enough to be quoted in its entirety:
Lovers in the act dispense
With such meum-tuum sense
As might warningly reveal
What they must not pick or steal,
And their nostrum is to say:
' I and you are both away.'
After, when they disentwine
You from me and yours from mine,
Neither can be certain who
Was that I whose mine was you.
To the act again they go
More completely not to know.
Theft is theft and raid is raid
Though reciprocally made.
Lovers, the conclusion is
Doubled sighs and jealousies
In a single heart that grieves
For lost honour among thieves.