Love Song V 2 - Analysis

Overall impression

This short lyric registers intense, almost physical feeling of love through striking sensory language. The tone shifts from questioning and restraint at the opening—"What have I to say to you / When we shall meet?"—to an exuberant, almost overwhelmed confession by the close. The mood moves from quiet longing and isolation toward a kind of ecstatic excess, then returns to a fragile uncertainty in the last line.

Contextual note

William Carlos Williams, a modernist American poet and physician, often favored direct, imagistic language that registers everyday perception. That aesthetic helps explain the poem’s focus on vivid, concrete details rather than abstract declaration.

Main theme: Love as physical stain and transformation

The poem treats love as a bodily, material force—"The stain of love / Is upon the world"—that alters perception and environment. Repeated color imagery, especially "Yellow, yellow, yellow", conveys how love saturates the speaker’s senses and transforms ordinary nature into something altered and intensified.

Main theme: Isolation and exaltation

The speaker alternates between solitude—"I am alone"—and buoyant elevation—"The weight of love / Has buoyed me up / Till my head / Knocks against the sky." This paradox shows love as both isolating and exalting: it lifts the speaker above ordinary life while leaving them singularly affected.

Imagery and symbols

The recurring image of stain and nectar—"honey-thick stain," "My hair is dripping with nectar"—conflates sweetness with spoilage: the stain both beautifies and "Spoiling the colours / Of the whole world." Yellow functions as a complex symbol: warmth, ripeness, intoxication, but also excess that smears and alters. Birds ("Starlings carry it / On their black wings") extend the speaker’s condition outward, suggesting love’s spread and its public visibility.

Ambiguity and final question

The poem ends with a vulnerable doubt: "How can I tell / If I shall ever love you again / As I do now?" After the vivid present-tense images of saturation and exaltation, the speaker acknowledges love’s instability. The rhetorical question leaves open whether this intensity is repeatable or unique.

Concluding insight

Williams uses concentrated, sensory images to make love legible as a physical force that both elevates and alters the world. The poem’s power lies in its ability to render inward feeling as outward stain and nectar, ending with a poignant recognition of love’s fleeting, uncertain nature.