Intrigue - Analysis

A love that keeps changing its mask

The central claim of Intrigue is brutal: the speaker’s love is not one stable feeling but a series of disguises that grow darker until love and self-destruction become indistinguishable. Each stanza begins with the vow Thou art my love, as if repetition could make devotion trustworthy; yet what follows keeps revising what that love is. The poem’s title matters here: intrigue suggests a plot, a scheme, a tangle of motives. The speaker sounds caught in a romance that is also an investigation—trying image after image to pin the beloved down, and failing. The refrain Woe is me turns the whole poem into a chant of compulsion: he cannot stop naming, and each naming hurts him.

Peace of sundown, then the storm: the first crack in the vow

The poem starts by offering a nearly pastoral definition of love: peace of sundown, blue shadows, grasses and leaves that sleep to little brooks. Love here is a sedative, a landscape that softens edges. But the next stanza snaps that calm into violence: love is a storm that breaks black, drenches, and makes each tree cower. Even the ending quiet is not comfort; it’s the melancholy cry of a single owl. What changes is not just mood but the speaker’s trust in what love does: it can soothe, but it can also humiliate and terrify. The tension is already present in the grammar—he keeps saying thou art, but the beloved can apparently be opposite things without contradiction, which suggests the contradiction lives in him.

Fragility and contempt: love as something he breaks

Midway, the poem admits a different kind of damage: not weather that happens to him, but harm he does. The beloved becomes a tinsel thing—cheap glitter, decoration rather than substance—and he confesses I ... broke thee easily. The sorrow that rises from little fragments feels disproportionate: the thing is flimsy, yet the grief is long. That mismatch is revealing. The speaker’s pain does not prove the beloved’s value; it may prove his dependency on even an illusion. When love is a weary violet drooping and answering ... carelessly, the speaker’s woe becomes the complaint of someone who wants the beloved to behave like a shrine and instead receives indifference. These images tighten the poem’s logic: what he calls love is repeatedly figured as something unreliable—pretty, delicate, inattentive—and he cannot accept that unreliability without turning it into tragedy.

Secondhand love: ashes, a beard, and the shock of rivalry

The poem’s most cutting turn toward degradation comes when love is defined through other men. The beloved is the ashes of other men's love, and the speaker does something intimate and abject: I bury my face in those ashes and claims I love them. It’s a startling image of erotic devotion mixed with humiliation—he is kissing the remains of what has already burned. Then the metaphor gets even more blunt: the beard / On another man's face. Love is no longer a shared bond but a physical marker of someone else’s possession, a sign the speaker cannot remove. The contradiction sharpens: he insists Thou art my love while admitting the beloved is, in some sense, already someone else’s. The woe is not just jealousy; it is the collapse of ownership itself. He wants to claim, yet his own imagination keeps presenting the beloved as a relic, a trace, a feature of another life.

Temple and wretch: devotion curdling into accusation

One of the poem’s most telling pairings places the sacred beside the contemptible. The beloved is a temple with an altar, and on it lies my heart. Love becomes ritual sacrifice: the speaker is both worshiper and offering. But almost immediately, the beloved becomes a wretch, and the speaker calls the whole romance a set of sacred love-lies. This is the hinge where the poem begins to treat love not merely as dangerous but as fraudulent. The speaker claims he has reached a place where he knows your lies as truth and your truth as lies. That reversal is more than an insult; it is a description of mental captivity. He cannot sort reality from deception anymore, and he frames that confusion as knowledge, as if being thoroughly entangled counts as clarity. The tone here hardens from lament into something like scorched prophecy.

Priestess with a dagger: love as ordained violence

The religious imagery returns, but it is no longer a temple of tenderness. The beloved is a priestess holding a bloody dagger, and the speaker’s doom approaches surely. In earlier stanzas, nature inflicted harm; now love is personified as an officiant of sacrifice. The speaker’s fear is oddly consenting—he does not run; he narrates his own execution as inevitability. This prepares the leap to the gothic emblem: a skull with ruby eyes, which he nevertheless says he loves. Ruby eyes suggest false life, ornamented death, a corpse made jewel-like. That detail echoes the earlier tinsel thing: glitter persists in the poem, but it keeps attaching itself to decay.

A hard question the poem forces: does he need love to be lethal?

When the speaker says I doubt thee and then imagines that if peace came with my murder he would commit murder, the poem exposes a terrifying bargain: tranquility is worth blood. The question the poem presses is whether the beloved is truly murderous, or whether the speaker can only believe in love if it costs him everything. His refrain Woe is me can sound like victimhood, but it may also be a chosen identity—an emotional costume as gripping as any intrigue.

Death named plainly: the last devotion

The final stanza stops disguising the endpoint. Thou art death, repeated with Aye, makes the identification explicit, and the color palette collapses into Black and yet black, as if language can only intensify darkness by repeating it. And yet he insists But I love thee, twice. The poem’s last line, Woe, welcome woe, to me, is the fullest statement of its paradox: suffering is no longer merely endured; it is invited. The ending doesn’t resolve the contradiction between love and ruin—it completes it. By the time love is death, the speaker has trained himself to treat devastation as the most convincing proof of feeling. The intrigue, finally, is not just the beloved’s supposed deceit; it is the speaker’s own desire to make love into a fate that can’t be escaped, only worshiped.