Loss of Love
Loss of Love - meaning Summary
Confronting Aging and Loss
This poem addresses aging and the fading of love and youthful energy. Angelou frames decline as an external raid that destroys cultivated years, then names bodily changes and altered ambitions after fifty-five. She shifts from combative refusal to a sober calculus about whether to keep fighting or to accept a new role. The closing lines urge a dignified reception of age, conceding space to the young.
Read Complete AnalysesThe loss of love and youth and fire came raiding, riding, a horde of plunderers on one caparisoned steed, sucking up the sun drops, trampling the green shoots of my carefully planted years. The evidence: thickened waist and leathery thighs, which triumph over my fallen insouciance. After fifty-five the arena has changed. I must enlist new warriors. My resistance, once natural as raised voices, importunes in the dark. Is this battle worth the candle? Is this war worth the wage? May I not greet age without a grouse, allowing the truly young to own the stage?
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