Bond and Free
Bond and Free - meaning Summary
Love Versus Thought's Flight
The poem contrasts two modes of being: Love, rooted in the earth and human embrace, and Thought, which is free to fly and explore beyond worldly bounds. Love clings, makes visible traces and finds fulfillment in staying and possessing. Thought, by contrast, leaves prints only briefly, ventures into the heavens, gathers distant knowledge and returns changed. The closing lines pose a tension: Love secures beauty by remaining, while Thought seeks and discovers beauty elsewhere, suggesting both containment and quest have different but valuable outcomes.
Read Complete AnalysesLove has earth to which she clings With hills and circling arms about- Wall within wall to shut fear out. But Thought has need of no such things, For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings. On snow and sand and turn, I see Where Love has left a printed trace With straining in the world’s embrace. And such is Love and glad to be But Thought has shaken his ankles free. Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom And sits in Sirius’ disc all night, Till day makes him retrace his flight With smell of burning on every plume, Back past the sun to an earthly room. His gains in heaven are what they are. Yet some say Love by being thrall And simply staying possesses all In several beauty that Thought fares far To find fused in another star.
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