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. He knows he has been moved, but defining that momentum, accounting for that coaxing pull is where he has been stuck. It appears love is not interested in helping—every time he thinks maybe he glimpses what it is, it turns away, “endlessly” (Line 11) teasing him, coaxing him to the point where he concedes that love is exactly a state in which words fail.

The speaker’s temptation is to rely on love cliches such as moon imagery: “If the moon did not” (Line 13), he begins, before he abandons it quickly. He tries to celebrate the prosaic love of everyday relationships, epitomized in meals, the daily ritual of food preparation and sharing, the routine that lifts and then buries relationships. Nothing seems quite applicable to his love. The best he conjures is love as a grand memory (“love yesterday” [Line 19)] and love as a fetching hope, a fantasy. The speaker struggles with expressing his current, immediate feelings. He understands the reciprocal nature of love, how gestures from one to another earn love. It is “a reward” (Line 26), he admits, but the poet then expresses the panic of his unfolding existential crisis with Line 28: What if the love he feels is really just a trick of his mind, more an intellectual construct than an emotional reality.

The thought of love being just a projection of intellect panics the speaker. After all, without love, without Bobbie, his life would be a “tedium” (Line 29). In his panic, he cascades into a grim picture of his life without Bobbie, a tight and cloaking loneliness with only his own “whimsical if pompous” (Line 31) ego to entertain him. To ease his fears, the poet tries speaking directly to Love, but he falters even in this: "what […] I think / to say. I cannot say it" (Lines 37-38). All he can really do is express love through tangible descriptions: love is "companion, good company" (Line 41), conversation, "crossed legs with skirt" (Line 42), and a "soft body" (Line 43) in bed. In this inventory, the poet, desperate to confirm love, is momentarily content with the simplest (and most easily verifiable) physical expressions of love: friendship, companionship, small talk, and sex.

Had the poem ended with the inventory, it would represent a kind of sweet surrender, the poet acknowledging that love itself is beyond words and that, in turn, we must be content with the manifestations of that otherwise mysterious urgency. Much like the Beats, a school of San Francisco-based poets who in the 1950s celebrated the sensual dimensions of love, the poet would seem content to give in to the pleasures of love. But Creeley is too much a philosopher, his mind ironically discontented by such contentment. Thus, he moves into the most difficult question to ask: If love is an intellectual construct, what he has learned is that the mind constructs words as a way to contain fears or to express wishes. The intellectualizing of love therefore threatens the poet with an even greater loneliness than being alone: “A voice in my place, an / echo of that only in yours” (Lines 50-51).

In the closing stanzas, the poem opens up to possibility. The poet rejects the intellectualization of love. If the poem to this point has been a stubborn list of what love is and isn’t, the panic and confusion drop away. The poet moves beyond the world confirmed by the senses. Sex cannot be love’s endgame—neither can conversation or physical attributes. Rather, love is something greater than its parts. It’s an eternal energy that has animated the human condition since time immemorial and no single relationship or attribute ever claims to be the totality of that energy. It is a grand Platonic ideal, “some time beyond place, or / place beyond time” (Lines 58-59). In the closing stanza, the poet concedes this: When (not if) this love with Bobbie fails (Creeley was a self-described bohemian player, and Bobbie would be the second of his three wives), Bobbie’s sweet face, so tantalizing and satisfying in the moment, will return to this eternal energy, this vast “company of love” (Line 63). This admission is the poet’s way of resolving love’s paradox: Relationships crash and burn and yet love itself persists. Love beckons, burns, sustains, collapses, and dies, and yet love always returns.