20 pages • 40 minutes read
For Love
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Literary Devices
Form
Thematically, Creeley’s poem is at odds with itself. The intention—to define love—is at every turn frustrated. The poet cannot in the end find the way to account for this emotional experience. The poet talks about how words fail and yearns for a simple end: I want to speak of love with some authority, after all (and the poem is addressed to his wife) we are in love. The expectation would be a form that reflects the careful and precise logic of a mind keen to express itself: tidy and neat phrasing to reflect the intellect’s assurance that this experience falls within the scope of its abilities to understand.
The poem, however, is in chaos despite its tidy appearance (16 tidy and structurally patterned quatrains, each unit of four lines separated by regularly recurring white space, thus creating a reassuring sense of order). The more the poet speaks, the more his own words rebel against the presumption that language can actually say anything. The more the poet reflects on love, the more he realizes love eludes his reflections. That sense of urgent panic is captured by the poem’s use of a technique called enjambment, in which lines within and between are seldom pieced off with neat end punctuation. Rather one line rushes and cascades into the next, often across the otherwise neat and clean white spaces between the quatrains. Instead of tidiness, the lines reflect a quiet if urgent rush toward a hopefully satisfying end.
As mentioned earlier, the enjambment creates momentum that is not end-stopped, thus creating a sense of the poet’s desperate movement from one angle on love to another, revealing how the poet hopes in each tested definition to find some kind of satisfying closure. The form, however, refuses such reassurance to the point that form becomes like love itself, a conflicting emotion that the poet, in the end, embraces. Only in the closing stanza does the poem find its way to the calming reassurance of end-punctuation. It does so as the poet calms himself and assures himself that love reflects a greater, wider, broader love that so grandly renders definitions at worst inadequate and at best irrelevant.
Meter
The poem does not read (or scan) like conventional poetry. The poem, which involves a man thinking to himself, is more conversational, plainspoken—there are no anticipated percussive rhythms or forward-reaching rhyme schemes to create the set metrics of traditional poetry.
The lines are elliptical, often collapsing into fragments and incomplete thoughts that capture the drift and rush of a mind in overdrive puzzling itself into frustration. The lines are tightly cut, each four to six words, but the syllable distribution is carefully varied to create a metric pattern that is and is not a pattern, more an assertion of ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, and hints. The poem offers thus a quiet kind of non-assertive/assertive metrics, both there and not there, inviting the recitation to decide an appropriate pace, delivery, and emphasis. The reader brings to the poem’s meter their own experience with love, their own confusions, their own emotions. In this, the meter reflects Creeley’s fascination with be-bop jazz and its sense of tempo, always slyly shifting, always urgent, always ragged. Like a Charlie Parker riff or an Ella Fitzgerald scat or a Thelonious Monk solo, each reading of the poem becomes both tightly scripted and yet radically new, entirely pre-set and yet completely unpredictable. The careful sculpting of the lines creates the sonic experience of off-the-cuff ad-libbing. Nothing is more difficult to create in meter than careless precision, the kinetics of the mind thinking its way into idea.
Voice
Minus the poem’s dedication (“For Bobbie”) and the voice heard in “For Love,” the poem gets complicated. If the poem is, indeed, for Bobbie, then the poem becomes a dialogue, a kind of give-and-take (although clearly the poet dominates, gives far more than he takes) as the poet shares with his lover, Bobbie, his own futile search for the right way to define their love. Such heroic efforts ascend to the sweetly romantic if Bobbie, the poem’s auditor, is there to patiently give sympathetic understanding and emotional support as the poet sorts through the options of what exactly their love is.
If “for Bobbie,” however, means that Bobbie is not the object of the quest but rather its purpose, then the poet speaks within a constricting echo chamber, his every misdirected attempt to define love creating about him an increasingly insulated sense of apartness. Then the poem is a monologue, a clever one, certainly, but one with only itself for comfort. The questions become rhetorical in this scenario, the fragments self-justifying (no one is there to question what has been broken off), and all the frustrations over how elusive love is, how each time the poet approaches it, it endlessly turns away, becomes not so much a sweet game of hide and seek as the epitome of an existential crisis, the confusion fueling itself quietly, the anxiety mounting subtly.
Thus, the poem sustains two radically opposite voices, the poet at once a lover animated by his heart and an isolate entombed within his own intellect.
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