For Love

The poem grapples with a central concern: What is love? That the poet feels the gravitational pull of another is not the issue. He can easily define his feelings for his wife Bobbie, the person to whom he dedicates the poem, as love. At the risk of over-intellectualizing the heart, however, the poet is curious about what these feelings entail. When investigating feelings, the emotions brought about by love, the poet stumbles against the inadequacy of the only thing that essentially matters to him: words.

The question of what constitutes love often comes off as a cliché in the considerable poetry dedicated to the exploration (and glorification) of love. The poet confesses in the opening lines that the nature of love has puzzled him now for an entire day. He longs to speak of love, presumably to Bobbie herself, but has found himself, a poet, at that most awkward point where words fail him. For most of us, the point where words fail marks the ascendancy of emotion; we are happily freed of the efforts to put into words what the heart and soul have gifted to us. But for a poet—that moment provides an existential crisis.