Milton Acorn

I Shout Love

I Shout Love - meaning Summary

Love Answering Pain

The poem depicts a speaker who repeatedly shouts love into scenes of physical and emotional suffering. Stark, visceral images—blizzard cold, cracked skies, blue fingers, and a harsh sun—link human tenderness to bodily and societal pain. Love is presented not as remedy but as a force that coexists with, responds to, and witnesses trauma. The closing line underlines a bleak modern intimacy: love and pain as inseparable companions.

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I shout love in a blizzard's scarf of curling cold, for my heart's a furred sharp-toothed thing that rushes out whimpering when pain cries the sign writ on it. I shout love into your pain when skies crack and fall like slivers of mirrors, and rounded fingers, blued as a great rake, pluck the balled yarn of your brain. I shout love at petals peeled open by stern nurse fusion-bomb sun, terribly like an adhesive bandage, for love and pain, love and pain are companions in this age.

June, 1958.
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