For Love

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1962

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Inscrutable Mystery of Love

“For Love” grapples with the idea that the poet, in the end, can conclude only that love endlessly turns away (Creeley repeats the verb construct for emphasis) from even the most determined efforts to understand it. But mystery, the hobgoblin of the sciences, lifts and sustains.

Mystery provides the poem’s complicated gift of awareness offered to lovers everywhere. You cannot expect love to be deciphered into some neat cause-and-effect logic. The world is thinned by definitions; every phenomenon from the sunrise to a heart attack to weather events to chemical reactions is joylessly tamed into explanation and coaxed into formulas that dull life into expectation and flatline each day into routine. Lovers aspire to move, collectively, beyond the certainties, the dreary, uncomplicated understanding of things. Love is supposed to baffle, running as it so often does against the logic of the intellect. It is unpredictable, its development uncertain, its end always premature. Lovers dream of getting to that point where they acknowledge that they have found a love that cannot be explained, a love so sumptuous and so absolute in its impact that understanding it would only trivialize it.

For the poem’s speaker, tapping into love’s mystery is sufficient. Love becomes an eternal energy that defies the particulars of time and space and expands awareness itself into a time and place beyond measure. To feel love, for the poet, is to tap into “the company of love” (Line 63). Bobbie’s beautiful face, he concedes, will ultimately join that vast urgency. His love may someday collapse of the weight of its own expectations, but love itself will remain, an affirmation of its powerful, self-sustaining, and self-generating mystery. Love defies logic: The more mysterious love is, the more real it becomes; the more personal it is, the more cosmic are its implications, an experience at once thrilling and terrifying.

The Limits of Language

At the core of this love poem is an existential dilemma the poet confronts. For lovers, to be in the emotional state that soars beyond language—to get to a relationship in which the emotion is beyond description—is exactly the goal of the heart’s most earnest yearning, the Shangri-La of lovers: the love beyond words. But this is a poet speaking, a wordsmith whose livelihood and (presumably) identity are shaped by his command of words. His frustration mounts as he tests one after another strategy for defining love and finds each insufficient. Definitions of love cannot capture the love of the moment, love in the now. Definitions of love render it a high-stakes game of give and take or a lacerating memory or a hoped-for fantasy. Imagine the disappointment when a painter realizes the most accomplished and elaborate canvass cannot match the intensity and intricacies of an ordinary sunset, or when a playwright realizes all the sculpted and clever lines of dialogue between characters on a stage cannot equal the power and revelation of a couple’s casual ad-libbed conversations over breakfast:

Nothing says anything

but that which it wishes

would come true, fears

what else might happen (Lines 45-48).

Language was invented, according to the poet here, to contain those things we most fear or hope for. How then can language be on the same footing as love? In the end, the poet willingly concedes the vastness of an emotional energy that cannot be contained by words, that alone gives the urgency to love. Domesticate it into language and love is no more enticing than chairs or sandwiches. The poet offers his surrender to the uselessness of his own skills as a poet, as the poem’s cause for celebration. His obsession with language, the vehicle that so animates his poetry, cannot in the end rise to the challenge of love. The title and its preposition “for,” then, can be read not so much as a dedication to love but rather as an affirmation of love, a support of it despite (or perhaps because) of the limits of language.

The Fear of Loneliness

In a poem otherwise defined by a dazzling display of rhetorical flourishes and a command of the tightly sculpted line, there is a moment of careless confession. Not about the poet’s inability to define love—in the end, that inability becomes key to his understanding of the emotion—but rather in the eighth stanza when he drops all the pretense of his rhetorical audacities. There he admits that life without Bobbie would be bleak, an unendurable tedium that edges toward existential despair, a recognition that without love he would be diminished. It is a moment suspended in anxiety. Before Stanza 8, the speaker believes in his own intimidating intelligence, his command and confidence that speaks through the carefully chiseled lines with their tight and subtle rhythms, their clipped metrics that suggest the intensity and concision of Eastern verse, and their elliptical and decidedly cerebral phrasing. The speaker appears self-sustaining and self-justifying even as he sorts through definitions of love—at least until Stanza 8.

There in that central stanza is the dark heart of Creeley’s poem: the fear of the poet collapsing into loneliness, a distinctly postmodern sensibility in which the poet, for all the dazzle of his rhetoric and all the bravura of his poetic lines, fears being left alone, left to amuse only himself with his own cleverness, what he terms

[a] painful

sense of isolation and

whimsical if pompous

self-regard (Lines 30-33).

The poem therefore interrogates, in a distinctly unironic, un-postmodern turn, the fear of loneliness and the justification for celebrating the pull of the heart. In a moment of unexpected candor, the poet reveals that the threat lurking about him is isolation itself. That, not the failure of his creative intellect to define love, is the true threat. It is only his own determination in the closing two stanzas to uphold that love is an urgent and untappable energy as wide as the cosmos that allows the poet his closing affirmation.