Love Songs in Age
Love Songs in Age - meaning Summary
Memory of Unfulfilled Promise
An elderly widow rediscovers a small collection of love-song sheet music and re-experiences the youthful certainty and joy those tunes once summoned. The songs briefly revive the sense that love could order and complete life, but she recognizes this promise was illusory both then and now. She returns the music to its case, grieving, and accepts that the past’s bright certainties never actually fulfilled their promises.
Read Complete AnalysesShe kept her songs, they kept so little space, The covers pleased her: One bleached from lying in a sunny place, One marked in circles by a vase of water, One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her, And coloured, by her daughter - So they had waited, till, in widowhood She found them, looking for something else, and stood Relearning how each frank submissive chord Had ushered in Word after sprawling hyphenated word, And the unfailing sense of being young Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein That hidden freshness sung, That certainty of time laid up in store As when she played them first. But, even more, The glare of that much-mentionned brilliance, love, Broke out, to show Its bright incipience sailing above, Still promising to solve, and satisfy, And set unchangeably in order. So To pile them back, to cry, Was hard, without lamely admitting how It had not done so then, and could not now.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.