For Love

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.