Emblems of Love
She
ONLY to be twin elements of joy
In this extravagance of Being, Love,
Were our divided natures shaped in twain;
And to this hour the whole world must consent.
Is it not very marvellous, our lives
Can only come to this out of a long
Strange sundering, with the years of the world between us?
He
Shall life do more than God? for hath not God
Striven with himself, when into known delight
His unaccomplisht joy he would put forth,—
This mystery of a world sign of his striving?
Else wherefore this, a thing to break the mind
With labouring in the wonder of it, that here
Being—the world and we—is suffered to be!—
But, lying on thy breast one notable day,
Sudden exceeding agony of love
Made my mind a trance of infinite knowledge.
I was not: yet I saw the will of God
As light unfashion’d, unendurable flame,
Interminable, not to be supposed;
And there was no more creature except light,—
The dreadful burning of the lonely God’s
Unutter’d joy. And then, past telling, came
Shuddering and division in the light:
Therein, like trembling, was desire to know
Its own perfect beauty; and it became
A cloven fire, a double flaming, each
Adorable to each; against itself
Waging a burning love, which was the world;—
A moment satisfied in that love-strife
I knew the world!—And when I fell from there,
Then knew I also what this life would do
In being twin,—in being man and woman!
For it would do even as its endless Master,
Making the world, had done; yea, with itself
Would strive, and for the strife would into sex
Be cloven, double burning, made thereby
Desirable to itself. Contrivèd joy
Is sex in life; and by no other thing
Than by a perfect sundering, could life
Change the dark stream of unappointed joy
To perfect praise of itself, the glee that loves
And worships its own Being. This is ours!
Yet only for that we have been so long
Sundered desire: thence is our life all praise.—
But we, well knowing by our strength of joy
There is no sundering more, how far we love
From those sad lives that know a half-love only,
Alone thereby knowing themselves for ever
Sealed in division of love, and therefore made
To pour their strength always into their love’s
Fierceness, as green wood bleeds its hissing sap
Into red heat of a fire! Not so do we:
The cloven anger, life, hath left to wage
Its flame against itself, here turned to one
Self-adoration.—Ah, what comes of this?
The joy falters a moment, with closed wings
Wearying in its upward journey, ere
Again it goes on high, bearing its song,
Its delight breathing and its vigour beating
The highest height of the air above the world.
She
What hast thou done to me!—I would have soul,
Before I knew thee, Love, a captive held
By flesh. Now, inly delighted with desire,
My body knows itself to be nought else
But thy heart’s worship of me; and my soul
Therein is sunlight held by warm gold air.
Nay, all my body is become a song
Upon the breath of spirit, a love-song.
He
And mine is all like one rapt faculty,
As it were listening to the love in thee,
My whole mortality trembling to take
Thy body like heard singing of thy spirit.
She
Surely by this, Beloved, we must know
Our love is perfect here,—that not as holds
The common dullard thought, we are things lost
In an amazement that is all unware;
But wonderfully knowing what we are!
Lo, now that body is the song whereof
Spirit is mood, knoweth not our delight?
Knoweth not beautifully now our love,
That Life, here to this festival bid come
Clad in his splendour of worldly day and night,
Filled and empower’d by heavenly lust, is all
The glad imagination of the Spirit?
He
Were it not so, Love could not be at all:
Nought could be, but a yearning to fulfil
Desire of beauty, by vain reaching forth
Of sense to hold and understand the vision
Made by impassion’d body,—vision of thee!
But music mixt with music are, in love,
Bodily senses; and as flame hath light,
Spirit this nature hath imagined round it,
No way concealed therein, when love comes near,
Nor in the perfect wedding of desires
Suffering any hindrance.
She
Ah, but now,
Now am I given love’s eternal secret!
Yea, thou and I who speak, are but the joy
Of our for ever mated spirits; but now
The wisdom of my gladness even through Spirit
Looks, divinely elate. Who hath for joy
Our Spirits? Who hath imagined them
Round him in fashion’d radiance of desire,
As into light of these exulting bodies
Flaming Spirit is uttered?
He
Yea, here the end
Of love’s astonishment! Now know we Spirit,
And Who, for ease of joy, contriveth Spirit.
Now all life’s loveliness and power we have
Dissolved in this one moment, and our burning
Carries all shining upward, till in us
Life is not life, but the desire of God,
Himself desiring and himself accepting.
Now what was prophecy in us is made
Fulfilment: we are the hour and we are the joy,
We in our marvellousness of single knowledge,
Of Spirit breaking down the room of fate
And drawing into his light the greeting fire
Of God,—God known in ecstasy of love
Wedding himself to utterance of himself
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
Lascelles Abercrombie stages this poem as a dramatic exchange between lovers who try to understand what their union means. At first, the woman speaks of love as the long-awaited joining of what has been divided, while the man answers with a sweeping metaphysical vision that links human sexuality to divine creation. Their intimacy becomes a doorway into speculation: they do not simply feel love, they interpret it as a pattern built into the structure of reality.
As the conversation deepens, the lovers move from bodily delight toward a spiritual climax. Each discovers that the body and the soul are not enemies but interdependent forms of the same ecstatic force. The poem's central tension lies in that movement from sensual experience to religious vision: the lovers' passion is both intensely personal and representative of a larger cosmic design. By the end, human love appears as a reflection of God's own self-expression, a moment in which desire, knowledge, and fulfillment briefly become one.
Form Breakdown
Theme
- Love as cosmic unity - The poem presents romantic union as more than private affection; it becomes a model for how reality itself is organized, joining divided parts into a larger whole.
- Body and spirit - Abercrombie refuses to separate physical desire from inward life. The lovers repeatedly insist that bodily longing and spiritual recognition are intertwined rather than opposed.
- Creation through division - Separation is not treated as failure but as a necessary condition for desire, beauty, and self-knowledge, both in human love and in the making of the world.
- Knowledge through ecstasy - Understanding arrives through overwhelming emotional and sensual experience, not detached reasoning. Love becomes a mode of revelation.
- The divine mirrored in human love - The lovers interpret their relationship as an image of God's creative and self-reflective life, making marriage or union a theological emblem.
- Fulfillment and longing - Even in the poem's most exalted moments, desire retains its force. Completion does not erase yearning so much as transform it into praise.
- Complementarity of male and female - The exchange imagines man and woman as twin forms whose differences are necessary to love's full expression and to the poem's vision of harmony.
Literary Devices
- Dramatic dialogue - The poem is built as a spoken exchange, which gives abstract ideas emotional immediacy and allows two voices to test and complete each other's thinking.
- Metaphor - Love is repeatedly figured as flame, song, light, and worship, turning the lovers' experience into a series of vivid equivalents that expand its meaning.
- Extended analogy - The poem draws a sustained comparison between human love and divine creation, using that parallel to explain sex, spirit, and the structure of the world.
- Elevated diction - Formal, exalted language lends the conversation philosophical and religious weight, matching the poem's ambition to make love a metaphysical event.
- Paradox - The poem insists that division creates union, and that surrender to desire leads to knowledge, using contradiction to express emotional and spiritual complexity.
- Imagery of light and fire - Radiance, flame, burning, and brightness shape the poem's spiritual atmosphere and suggest both revelation and intensity.
- Repetition - Key ideas such as joy, love, spirit, and division recur throughout the poem, reinforcing the circular, meditative movement of the argument.
- Personification - Life, Spirit, and even joy are treated as active powers with intentions and desires, which helps the poem turn abstract forces into dramatic presences.
Symbolism
- Light - Often associated with divine presence, understanding, and pure being, light symbolizes the overwhelming clarity that the lovers think they glimpse in love.
- Fire - Fire suggests both desire and creation, especially when the poem describes love as a burning force that divides, joins, and transforms.
- Song - Song symbolizes harmony, expression, and the union of body and spirit, especially when bodily experience is imagined as music.
- Breast - The physical embrace stands for intimacy but also for revelation, since it becomes the setting in which the man's vision of divine order arises.
- Body - The body symbolizes not limitation but a vessel through which spirit becomes visible and meaningful.
- Spirit - Spirit represents the inward principle that gives love its highest significance and links human passion to the divine.
- World - The world stands for created reality as a whole, the outward shape of the same longing and self-division the lovers experience within themselves.
Tone
Abercrombie's tone is intensely exalted, speculative, and reverent, as if the lovers' conversation must rise into philosophy and prayer. The emotional atmosphere for the reader is one of mounting fervor: the poem begins in ardent intimacy and gradually opens into a visionary, almost trembling grandeur. Even when the language becomes abstract, it remains charged with bodily warmth and awe.
Historical Context
Abercrombie belongs to the early twentieth-century world of serious philosophical and religious poetry, when many writers were rethinking modern experience through symbol, myth, and dramatic monologue. His work often reflects a desire to recover large spiritual meanings without abandoning psychological complexity or the physical world.
The poem also fits a broader modern interest in uniting the sacred and the erotic. Rather than treating love as merely private sentiment, it participates in a literary tradition that reads human passion as a clue to ultimate reality, drawing on metaphysical and mystical modes of thought while retaining a distinctly modern dramatic intensity.