My Love Has Changed - Analysis

Love’s change as a loss of the shared “pools”

The poem’s central claim is blunt and almost weary: the speaker’s love has altered, and with that change something once generative between the two people has dried up. The opening announcement, “My love has changed,” is less a confession than a verdict. The beloved is expected to be “upset,” but the speaker immediately translates the emotional trouble into a strange cosmic housekeeping image: “The crescent’s sweeper” can’t “spill / the pools of lyrical creation.” In other words, the night’s usual magic-cleaner can’t even wash up enough feeling to make lyric “pools.” Love used to be an engine for making songs; now the universe itself seems unable to produce the conditions for poetry.

The fallen star and the mismatch of consolation

Even consolation arrives in an off-kilter way. The beloved is “upset, but taking in good part / the star that fell upon your brows,” as if a random celestial gift lands on them like a decorative accident. A star on the brow suggests blessedness or inspiration, yet it doesn’t fix what’s broken; it merely becomes something the beloved “takes” politely, the way someone accepts a compliment during a crisis. The tone here is not tender. It’s faintly ironic, as though the speaker is watching the beloved try to convert spectacle into meaning while the real loss remains untouched.

“No house in your heart”: intimacy without shelter

The poem’s hardest line turns the beloved’s emotional openness into a kind of homelessness: “you spilt your heart about the house / but there’s no house in your heart.” The beloved pours out feeling “about the house,” which can mean domestic longing, stability, a shared life, a place where love lives. But the speaker insists that inwardly there is no “house” at all—no structure capable of holding another person. This creates the poem’s key tension: the beloved performs devotion (spilling the heart, singing lyrics), yet lacks the inner shelter that would make devotion real. The accusation is sharp because it suggests the beloved’s feelings are sincere in volume but not in architecture; they overflow because there is nowhere for them to settle.

The expected guest who “passed… like a cynic”

The speaker then reframes the beloved’s waiting as misguided: “The one you waited for to greet / has passed your shelter like a cynic.” The beloved prepared a “shelter” and rehearsed a welcome, but the awaited figure—possibly the speaker, possibly love itself—walks by with contemptuous detachment. That “like a cynic” matters: cynicism here is not simply indifference, but a knowing refusal to believe in the offered hospitality. The speaker’s “My friend” sounds momentarily gentle, yet it leads into a stinging question: “whomever did you gild / the key for with your singing lyric?” A gilded key is ornamental access, a beautiful promise of entry. The poem implies that the beloved has been decorating the idea of intimacy—making keys shiny with “singing”—without ensuring there is a real door, a real home, a real inhabitant.

A ceiling on ambition: the sun, Heaven, and the grounded mill

The closing images widen the rebuke from love to artistic and spiritual ambition. “You’ll never versify the sun / and never see the Heaven’s bound.” The beloved’s lyric effort, once associated with “pools of… creation,” is now presented as fundamentally limited: the sun cannot be captured by verse; Heaven has an edge they won’t reach. The final comparison lands like a judgment on futile motion: “Just like a mill that flaps its fan / but cannot tear off the ground.” The mill’s fan turns and turns—there is energy, even impressive movement—but it is bolted to earth. That is the poem’s bleakest contradiction: the beloved appears active (spilling, singing, waiting), yet their motion never becomes flight, never becomes arrival. Effort is not the same as transformation.

The poem’s uncomfortable implication

If the beloved truly has “no house” inside, then the speaker’s changed love is not simply fickleness; it may be self-preservation. The poem almost dares the reader to ask whether the beloved’s “singing lyric” has been a way of avoiding the harder work of building inward shelter. When a key is gilded, is it meant to open anything—or is it meant to be admired?