Speaking Of Love - Analysis

Love as something we can’t define, only approach

The poem opens by making definition feel like the wrong tool. Love is introduced as speaking of love, then immediately bracketed by doubt: of / which Who knows the / meaning. That capitalized Who turns ignorance into something like a chorus or authority: not just one speaker failing, but anyone. The central claim the poem keeps circling is that love is not a stable meaning you can possess; it’s an experience you can only move toward—through guessing, touching, laughing, and finally letting yourself vanish into it.

The grassblade: a small mind that “thinks beyond” our grasp

Instead of offering a definition, the speaker offers an image: i / guess a grassblade / Thinks beyond or / around. The grassblade becomes a model for love’s intelligence—quiet, unshowy, and not organized like an argument. It Thinks beyond us, or maybe simply around us, sidestepping the human urge to pin things down. That matters because the next phrase admits our human habit: Our picking it. We take; we pluck; we reduce the living thing to what can be held. Love, the poem hints, is what keeps escaping that kind of possession.

Touch and laughter as the poem’s real “definition”

The line this / caress that laugh is where the poem’s attention sharpens. These are not metaphors for love; they are love’s evidence. And they quickly signify—a phrase that makes love both legible and fleeting. The quickness is crucial: the moment of contact or shared laughter can light up a whole life, but it also passes before you can translate it into a lesson. The speaker’s earlier uncertainty—i guess—isn’t just modesty; it’s an ethics of not overclaiming. Love is known by the body and the instant, not by the lecture.

The half and the all: a pressure to live without withholding

Then comes a tight contradiction: life's only half followed by the insistence to feel / all. The poem seems to say that ordinary living is partial—half-lived, half-felt—unless something (love) forces the gates open. The phrase through / deep weather then / or none widens the claim: whether life is stormy or calm, the demand remains. The tone turns from speculative to urgent, from wondering about meaning to pleading for fullness. If love can’t be defined, it can still be obeyed: feel everything, even when conditions don’t look “deep” enough to deserve it.

Mind in mind, flesh in flesh: union that ends in “disappear”

The poem’s final movement binds thought and body together without choosing between them: mind in mind flesh / In flesh. Love here is not a purely spiritual merger or a purely physical appetite; it’s a doubleness where each level meets its match. But the last phrase—succeeding disappear—adds a shadow. Union succeeds by erasing the separateness that wanted to “pick” and keep. Disappearing can be bliss (the self finally unguarded) and also a kind of risk (the self no longer intact). The poem leaves both possibilities alive, as if love’s deepest proof is that it makes us willing to lose something we normally protect.

A sharp question the poem refuses to settle

If a grassblade Thinks beyond us, and our instinct is still Our picking it, what does love ask us to do with our hands: hold, or let be? The poem’s ending suggests that to feel / all may require consenting to disappear—not as destruction, but as the cost of finally not standing outside the thing we claim to love.