Old Love

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2010

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Poetic Form and Structure

“Old Love” is written in free verse, with no regular meter or rhyme pattern. The poem employs simple diction (word choices) and sentence structure which reflect the situation and speech pattern of the individuals it describes. The speaker simply reports an extraordinary moment they have witnessed, without any embellishment or an effort to milk it for pathos. They merely mark their surprise at the uncle’s emotional outburst. The uncle speaks in an emotionally heightened register, without sentimentality or flowery rhetoric. The plainness of their speech contrasts the intensity of their feelings, which contributes to the poem’s emotional impact. The poem presents the uncle and his niece or nephew as two ordinary people, who speak simply but feel deeply.

Direct Speech

Since the poem’s speaker is a niece or nephew who witnesses their uncle’s grief, the poem could have described what they see and hear entirely in their own words. If that were the case, the speaker’s perspective would have completely mediated the uncle’s experience, subsuming it into the speaker’s perception. However, the poet gives the uncle his own voice by having the speaker present the uncle’s words in the form of direct speech, within quotation marks. This strategy gives prominence to the uncle’s peculiar ways of expressing his love and his grief, such as calling his wife who died at the age of 87 “my girl” (Lines 4 and 5). It also emphasizes the fact that one of the poem’s themes is intergenerational communication. The poem is not only about the uncle’s feelings but also about him sharing those feelings with his niece or nephew in a memorable way. If the uncle’s words were reported as indirect speech, summed up by the speaker, that important sense of communication between them would have been diminished. The use of direct speech, on the other hand, adds a layer of meaning to the poem and clarifies that what the poem describes is of great importance to both the uncle and the speaker, on whom the uncle’s words have clearly had a powerful impact.

Similes

A simile is a figure of speech in which two things are directly compared with each other, typically using the words “like” or “as.” It is similar to a metaphor, but a metaphor makes an implicit comparison while a simile makes the comparison explicit. For example, “her smile is as bright as sunshine” is a simile, but “her smile is sunshine” is a metaphor. Thus, these two figures of speech can make the same comparative point, though a simile does it more literally.

There are two key similes in “Old Love,” both describing the uncle in his grief. In the first simile, he is “like a prophet in the Bible” (Line 3), and in the second, he is “like a tree alone at night” (Line 13). The two images complement each other (for detailed analysis of each simile, see Symbols & Motifs), but they are visually quite different and derived from diverse sources. The first simile is both literary and Biblical, referring to a figure one knows from reading the Old Testament. The other simile refers to the natural world and relates to indigenous, pre-Christian beliefs about human connection with all natural objects around us. While today we cannot observe a Biblical prophet with our own eyes, we have all seen trees, including a solitary tree in the middle of a meadow or a garden. Thus, these two carefully chosen similes evoke both an image from a distant, semi-mythical past and one from everyday experience. They engage both the reader’s religious education and their first-hand observation of the natural world. As a result, they balance each other and expand the scope of associations the poem elicits. This is a good example of how varied similes can broaden the world of the poem, incorporating connections and implications that deepen and enrich the poem’s meaning.