Persuasion
Persuasion
I At any moment love unheralded
Comes, and is king. Then as, with a fall
Of frost, the buds upon the hawthorn spread
Are withered in untimely burial,
So love, occasion gone, his crown puts by,
And as a beggar walks unfriended ways,
With but remembered beauty to defy
The frozen sorrows of unsceptred days.
Or in that later travelling he comes
Upon a bleak oblivion, and tells
Himself, again, again, forgotten tombs
Are all now that love was, and blindly spells
His royal state of old a glory cursed,
Saying 'I have forgot', and that's the worst.
II If we should part upon that one embrace,
And set our courses ever, each from each,
With all our treasure but a fading face
And little ghostly syllables of speech;
Should beauty's moment never be renewed,
And moons on moons look out for us in vain,
And each but whisper from a solitude
To hear but echoes of a lonely pain, —
Still in a world that fortune cannot change
Should walk those two that once were you and I,
Those two that once when moon and stars were strange
Poets above us in an April sky,
Heard a voice falling on the midnight sea,
Mute, and for ever, but for you and me.
III This nature, this great flood of life, this cheat
That uses us as baubles for her coat,
Takes love, that should be nothing but the beat
Of blood for its own beauty, by the throat,
Saying, you are my servant and shall do
My purposes, or utter bitterness
Shall be your wage, and nothing come to you
But stammering tongues that never can confess.
Undaunted then in answer here I cry,
'You wanton, that control the hand of him
Who masquerades as wisdom in a sky
Where holy, holy, sing the cherubim,
I will not pay one penny to your name
Though all my body crumble into shame.'
IV Woman, I once had whimpered at your hand,
Saying that all the wisdom that I sought
Lay in your brain, that you were as the sand
Should cleanse the muddy mirrors of my thought;
I should have read in you the character
Of oracles that quick a thousand lays,
Looked in your eyes, and seen accounted there
Solomons legioned for bewildered praise.
Now have I learnt love as love is. I take
Your hand, and with no inquisition learn
All that your eyes can tell, and that's to make
A little reckoning and brief, then turn
Away, and in my heart I hear a call,
'I love, I love, I love'; and that is all.
V When all the hungry pain of love I bear,
And in poor lightless thought but burn and burn,
And wit goes hunting wisdom everywhere,
Yet can no word of revelation learn;
When endlessly the scales of yea and nay
In dreadful motion fall and rise and fall,
When all my heart in sorrow I could pay
Until at last were left no tear at all;
Then if with tame or subtle argument
Companions come and draw me to a place
Where words are but the tappings of content,
And life spreads all her garments with a grace,
I curse that ease, and hunger in my heart
Back to my pain and lonely to depart.
VI Not anything you do can make you mine,
For enterprise with equal charity
In duty as in love elect will shine,
The constant slave of mutability.
Nor can your words for all their honey breath
Outsing the speech of many an older rhyme,
And though my ear deliver them from death
One day or two, it is so little time.
Nor does your beauty in its excellence
Excel a thousand in the daily sun,
Yet must I put a period to pretence,
And with my logic's catalogue have done,
For act and word and beauty are but keys
To unlock the heart, and you, dear love, are these.
VII Never the heart of spring had trembled so
As on that day when first in Paradise
We went afoot as novices to know
For the first time what blue was in the skies,
What fresher green than any in the grass,
And how the sap goes beating to the sun,
And tell how on the clocks of beauty pass
Minute by minute till the last is done.
But not the new birds singing in the brake,
And not the buds of our discovery,
The deeper blue, the wilder green, the ache
For beauty that we shadow as we see,
Made heaven, but we, as love's occasion brings,
Took these, and made them Paradisal things.
VIII The lilacs offer beauty to the sun,
Throbbing with wonder as eternally
For sad and happy lovers they have done
With the first bloom of summer in the sky;
Yet they are newly spread in honour now,
Because, for every beam of beauty given
Out of that clustering heart, back to the bough
My love goes beating, from a greater heaven.
So be my love for good or sorry luck
Bound, it has virtue on this April eve
That shall be there for ever when they pluck
Lilacs for love. And though I come to grieve
Long at a frosty tomb, there still shall be
My happy lyric in the lilac tree.
IX When they make silly question of my love,
And speak to me of danger and disdain,
And look by fond old argument to move
My wisdom to docility again;
When to my prouder heart they set the pride
Of custom and the gossip of the street,
And show me figures of myself beside
A self diminished at their judgment seat;
Then do I sit as in a drowsy pew
To hear a priest expounding th' heavenly will,
Defiling wonder that he never knew
With stolen words of measured good and ill;
For to the love that knows their counselling,
Out of my love contempt alone I bring.
X Not love of you is most that I can bring,
Since what I am to love you is the test,
And should I love you more than any thing
You would but be of idle love possessed,
A mere love wandering in appetite,
Counting your glories and yet bringing none,
Finding in you occasions of delight,
A thief of payment for no service done.
But when of labouring life I make a song
And bring it you, as that were my reward,
To let what most is me to you belong,
Then do I come of high possessions lord,
And loving life more than my love of you
I give you love more excellently true.
XI What better tale could any lover tell
When age or death his reckoning shall write
Than thus, 'Love taught me only to rebel
Against these things, — the thieving of delight
Without return; the gospellers of fear
Who, loving, yet deny the truth they bear,
Sad-suited lusts with lecherous hands to smear
The cloth of gold they would but dare not wear.
And love gave me great knowledge of the trees,
And singing birds, and earth with all her flowers;
Wisdom I knew and righteousness in these,
I lived in their atonement all my hours;
Love taught me how to beauty's eye alone
The secret of the lying heart is known.'
XII This then at last; we may be wiser far
Than love, and put his folly to our measure,
Yet shall we learn, poor wizards that we are,
That love chimes not nor motions at our pleasure.
We bid him come, and light an eager fire,
And he goes down the road without debating;
We cast him from the house of our desire,
And when at last we leave he will be waiting.
And in the end there is no folly but this,
To counsel love out of our little learning.
For still he knows where rotten timber is,
And where the boughs for the long winter burning;
And when life needs no more of us at all,
Love's word will be the last that we recall.
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
John Drinkwater's sonnet sequence presents love as something that arrives with sovereign force and then tests every attempt to control it. Across the poem, love appears first as a sudden royal presence, then as loss, resistance, tenderness, pride, and finally as a truth that outlives argument. The poems move through a series of situations in which the mind tries to explain, defend, or manage affection, only to discover that love refuses to stay neatly inside logic, social custom, or self-protective thought.
The voice is intensely personal but also argumentative, as if the poem were a long inward debate with experience itself. The lover speaks at times with reverence toward the beloved, at times with defiance toward nature, society, and prudence, and at times with hard-won self-knowledge. A central tension runs through the sequence: love is both fragile and enduring, both subject to change and somehow larger than the changes that threaten it. By the end, the poem suggests that love's deepest meaning lies not in possession or certainty, but in the way it teaches attention, humility, and a lasting resistance to cold explanations.
Theme
- Love's sovereignty - Love arrives as a ruling power, something that takes command of the self before reason can object, and the poem repeatedly returns to its authority over human life.
- Loss and impermanence - The poem keeps imagining what happens when love fades, separates, or is forgotten, giving emotional weight to the fear that even the most intense feeling may not last.
- Resistance to convention - Social caution, prudence, gossip, and "good sense" are treated as forces that diminish love rather than protect it, so the poem values inward conviction over public judgment.
- Love as knowledge - The poem repeatedly suggests that real understanding comes through affection and attention, not abstraction; love teaches the lover how to see the world more truthfully.
- Nature and beauty - Flowers, spring, stars, and the sea are not just scenery but ways of showing how love transforms ordinary perception into something radiant and memorable.
- Memory and endurance - Even when love is threatened by separation or age, the poem insists that it leaves behind a lasting inward record that cannot be fully erased.
Literary Devices
- Extended metaphor - Love is imagined as a king, a beggar, a journey, a fire, and a key, allowing the poem to explore many aspects of affection through shifting but connected images.
- Sonnet sequence structure - The poem unfolds in multiple linked sonnets, which creates the feeling of a sustained meditation rather than a single lyric moment.
- Apostrophe - The poem directly addresses the beloved and, at points, abstract forces such as nature, creating intimacy and dramatic intensity.
- Paradox - The poem often joins opposites, suggesting that love can be both painful and enlightening, fleeting and permanent, private and universal.
- Personification - Nature, love, and beauty are given human or active qualities, which makes the emotional struggle feel like an encounter with living powers.
- Rhetorical declaration - Many sections sound like vows, refusals, or assertions, giving the poem the urgency of a speaker arguing his own case before an unseen judge.
- Imagery - Frost, lilacs, spring, birds, stars, and sea-light create a rich sensual world that mirrors the poem's movement between joy and vulnerability.
- Repetition - Repeated phrases and patterns, especially around love, remembering, and refusal, reinforce the poem's insistence and emotional pressure.
Symbolism
- King - Love's sudden appearance as a king symbolizes its absolute authority over the self.
- Frost - Frost suggests emotional withholding, damage, and the death of tenderness when love is absent.
- Hawthorn buds - The buds symbolize beauty that is vulnerable to early ruin and unfulfilled flourishing.
- Lilacs - The lilacs stand for shared beauty and the possibility that love can leave a lasting bloom in memory and art.
- April sky - April evokes renewal, first discovery, and the youthful freshness of love's beginning.
- Keys - The idea of act, word, and beauty as keys suggests that love unlocks inward truth and human meaning.
Tone
Drinkwater's tone is ardent, reflective, and often defiant, as if he is trying to protect love from every force that would reduce it to convenience or sentiment. At moments the voice sounds almost combative toward nature, society, and reason, yet that combative energy is rooted in devotion rather than anger. The mood for the reader shifts between tenderness, melancholy, and exaltation: the poem can feel intimate and wounded in one line, then expansive and celebratory in the next. That emotional movement gives the sequence both urgency and dignity.
Historical Context
John Drinkwater wrote within the early twentieth-century English lyric tradition, where poets often combined formal discipline with an interest in modern emotional life. His work reflects a period when many writers were still drawing on traditional sonnet forms even as they explored more personal, introspective subjects. The poem's language and structure show the influence of a long love-poetry tradition, while its skeptical edge and self-questioning voice belong to a later, more modern sensibility.
Its concern with the tension between private feeling and public judgment also fits a broader literary culture that valued both inherited forms and individual sincerity. The poem's imagery of nature, seasons, and celestial beauty recalls Romantic and Victorian precedents, but its argumentative movement toward inward truth gives it a distinctly modern psychological sharpness.