Love Poem With Toast

Many of the lines in “Love Poem with Toast” touch on the inevitability of aging and death. This major theme is at the heart of the poem, despite a seemingly upbeat title that conjures images of spending time with loved ones, everyday breakfast occurrences, the power of love, and love poetry. The Inevitability of Aging also appears in both form and in function throughout the text: The speaker talks about aging and the slide forward toward death in all of us, while the text itself literally moves forward toward the theme of aging and death encapsulated in the poem’s ending. The poem also culminates in what can be described as an apotheosis—love that transcends the personal and outlives worry. Yet each read and reread of the poem underscores aging and death’s insistence and questions humanity’s attempt to break free from one of our greatest certainties: the inevitability of death and aging.

Williams disarms readers early on with the title of the poem: “Love Poem with Toast.” The title suggests that the poem might follow suit with traditional/stereotypical examples of love poetry. Readers might even think that the current exercise of reading William’s so-called love poem will inevitably include flowery, lovey-dovey language, especially since Williams characteristically employs simple language and everyday objects to aid in his poetics. The poem, however, shatters this inevitability by focusing on wants, desires, and the human body as agents in a wider plot that involves death and inevitability. Instead of flowers, which can symbolize love despite inevitably aging and dying, the poem offers something seemingly more hearty: “this meat and bone” (Line 21). Yet this meat and bone, like flowers, will wither away and die as well. Because of this, the speaker says that humankind wants “to love beyond meat and bone” (Line 21), though the poem in its entirety underscores that even this desire is ultimately out of our control. Our fate as animals who will one day wither is inevitable.

There are other symbols of aging and death throughout the poem, such as “the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting” (Line 7). Like meat and bone, skin and the hoe eventually break down and decompose. In a sense, humans are tools for biological purposes just as much as a hoe is a tool that serves a purpose and wears down over time. Despite humans wanting to be tough and “pretend” that things will be all right, skin breaks down, aging happens, and we die. Williams highlights this passage of time, the time it takes for a human body to live and then die, with other lines that emphasize want and desire: “wanting not to have cancer” (Line 15), “to be home by dark” (Line 16), and “wanting not to run out of gas” (Line 17). Gas is a natural resource and, even when looking at it as something which propels cars, can run out. Light, though it returns, has an expiration date when darkness arrives. The interplay here between light and dark also suggests the circle of life and the inevitability of death.

The final stanza of the poem culminates with the desire to have a loved one by our side at “the end” (Lines 18-19) and wanting “to love beyond this meat and bone” (Line 21). The entire poem up until this point has steered readers to this ending through literary devices and philosophic pondering, underscoring how the poem’s form functions as a movement toward death as well (see Literary Devices). Though aging and death are inevitable, the last stanza suggests that, because of love, humankind is willing to “pretend” that things will not only turn out all right but that we have a say in how things end. Despite the inevitability, “we gaze across breakfast and pretend” (Line 22). One explanation for the ending of the poem is that the speaker and their lover do not communicate what they feel and think. The thought of death and aging is perhaps too great to consider. Another interpretation is that the speaker and the lover both know that aging and death are inevitable and so decide to live in the moment. In this sense, the “pretending” taking place is an admission of helplessness in the face of fate, yet it’s also a nod to the triumphant human spirit. Despite the end, the speaker enjoys breakfast and feels an intense love for both the lover and for living in general. This is the love that can outshine or transcend meat and bone. This love doesn’t seek to eradicate death but to define and experience love, life, and death on its own terms.