Love After Love

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1976

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Eating the Meal

The meal is one of the central motifs in “Love After Love.” Walcott uses the idea of “breaking bread” in order to stimulate a reunion and “conversation” between the reader and their internal “self.” Throughout the poem, the speaker gives multiple orders to “sit here. Eat” (Line 6). The heart, or middle, of the poem even directly states, “Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart,” (Line 8) making the return to the self a complete meal, with the “heart” as the entrée. In this sense, the ”heart” becomes a metaphor for love itself, and the wine and bread are just precursors to the most important aspect of self-actualization: self-love and understanding. A meal is something that should be enjoyed, and the speaker counsels the reader to forget the romantic love lost and focus instead on thoroughly enjoying themselves.

Gazing in the Mirror

Walcott uses the mirror as a motif; when he introduces the mirror in the poem, it is used as a means of cutting the reader into two separate halves or “selves”: “you will greet yourself arriving / at your own door, in your own mirror / and each will smile at the other's welcome” (Lines 3-5). Only by separating “you” into two halves is Walcott fully able to address the concept of finding and loving yourself. Rather than opening the poem with two separate entities coming together, Walcott uses the mirror, an object that reflects a person’s image back to them, as a means for creating a shadow-image of the reader, the “stranger who was your self” (Line 9).

Notes and Photographs

Representative of artistic artifacts, the notes, letters, and photographs that make up the reader’s life appear only toward the end of the poem. These objects are used as symbols for written and visual art: “Love letters from the bookshelf, / the photographs, the desperate notes” (Line 13) are examples of personal art, or expressions of the self that are created through artistic means, and the act of self-actualization that Walcott describes involves using art to find “yourself.”

Rather than directly stating that the reader must create and ingest art in order to know and love themselves, Walcott creates a symbolic image of the “you” reading old notes and letters and observing photographs. The reader must “feast” upon these expressions of their own life in order to fully understand and love themselves. The “you” is only able to fully “feast” on their life through a re-introduction to artistic self-expression.