love armed annotations

Behn personifies Love as someone who is ruthless and brutal, which helps her show the capacity love has to inflict harm.

Behn wants to depict love as something that isn’t a force of good. This is in contrast to usual depictions of love as something benevolent, kind and harmless. She wants to convey the fact that there is a dark side to love, especially when that love is unrequited, and it can make someone feel as if they are being attacked by Love.

‘every killing dart from thee’

• Shows how Love is sourcing his weaponry from the Beloved and how love can hurt people through the people they love.
• ‘killing’ denotes death and connotes pain and violence.
• Shows that the Beloved has the ability to hurt the speaker.
• This is contrasted with the speaker’s attraction to Beloved.
• ‘dart’ has connotations of entertainment (game of darts) and it could show how Beloved is entertained by the pain speaker is feeling.

‘pride and cruelty’

• Says that Love took these negative qualities from the beloved.
• Shows the cognitive dissonance between the speaker’s attraction to the Beloved and the Beloved’s usually offputting personality.
• Rhyming of ‘cruelty’ and ‘thee’ in the 2nd next line emphasises the character of the beloved being cruel.

‘Thus thou and I the god have armed’

• Poet shows the harmful relationship between the beloved and speaker, both of them arming the thing that will hurt them.
• ‘thou’ being earlier than ‘I’ shows how speaker idolises Beloved and puts them before themselves and can show how people irl idolise someone they love, even if that person isn’t good for them.

‘While thine the victor is, and free.’

• This shows how the speaker thinks of the Beloved as winning something that wasn’t supposed to be a competition in the first place. This shows how warped the speaker’s worldview is because of love.
• The caesura in the middle of the line lets the reader stop after the admission that the Beloved is the victor.
• It adds more gravity to that realisation and shows how negatively love can make someone think. The addendum at the end shows how the speaker also feels trapped by love, possibly reflecting people’s experiences irl.
• The end stopping and this line being the final line also establishes this as a melancholic revelation at the end of the poem, ending with a sombre tone and reflecting love’s ability to depress people.

‘Whilst bleeding hearts around him flowed’

• Gory and visceral imagery show brutality of Love in the poem and irl. -‘Bleeding hearts’ is a double meaning. Obviously it means hearts are bleeding but it can also mean someone who is very sympathetic to people in need. Behn may be trying to convey how - Love takes advantage of the kind hearted. ‘flowed’ has connotations of multiplicity, suggesting lots of liquid and thus lots of hearts suggesting how successful love is in finding victims.

‘set him up a deity’

• Shows how much Love has been put up on a pedestal and shows how irl we glorify love even if it hurts us.
• ‘deity’ implied to have power and be someone to be feared. This reinforces how our society has highlighted love as a crucial part of the human experience.
• Also a classical allusion, alludes to Eros who is also quite ruthless, like Love.

‘round in sport he hurled’

• Shows how Love takes pleasure from hurting people. Shows damaging nature of love and how it isn’t compassionate to ppl’s struggles.
• ‘hurled’ connotes a sense of excessive violence and in combination with the use of ‘sport’, which implies a sense of entertainment at one’s actions, creates semantic field of sadism.

‘strange tyrannic power he showed’

• Shows how Love forcefully takes power from people, alludes to the same thing happening when someone falls in love.
• ‘Tyrannic’ implies a sense of oppression and power and it implies that the speaker feels unwillingly controlled by Love.
• ‘strange’ connotes unfamiliarity and shows how speaker isn’t used to feeling this way. This could reflect how people in real life often feel unsettled by the effect love has on them.

Rhyme scheme (ABAB mostly) and iambic tetrameter

• Existence of a rhyme scheme elevates the feeling of a traditional love poem while the use of iambic tetrameter subverts the traditional ‘Cupid’-like views of love.

Behn characterises the beloved as someone cruel and arrogant while still being alluring to speaker, showing how people cannot choose who they love.

Behn uses the beloved to further express the pain and, sometimes, the confusing nature of unrequited love. The beloved is characterised as a cruel person and someone who shouldn’t be loved because of their negative traits. The speaker’s continued love of them shows how love isn’t governed by reason but by emotion.

Behn depicts the speaker of this poem as suffering and feeling powerless because of love, also making the reader feel pity for the speaker.

Behn connects the speaker’s unrequited love to the antagonisation of the Beloved. She uses the characterisation of the speaker to show the extent of how someone can be harmed by love. She also makes the speaker an unreliable narrator, showing how people’s judgements can get clouded by love.

‘But my poor heart alone is harmed’

• Shows how Love has isolated the speaker and how the speaker feels alone in their struggles with love, even through this is most likely not true.
• ‘poor’ and ‘alone’ have connotations of pity and this shows how the speaker feels sorry for themselves.
• Feeling of loneliness is contrasted with the beginning of the poem, where there are many ‘bleeding hearts’
• This shows how isolating unrequited love can make a person feel.

‘he took desire’

• Shows the desire is one sided, only being taken from the speaker.

‘he took his sighs and tears’

• ‘took’ suggests that he feeds on the negative emotions of the speaker and that he unwillingly takes them.
• Balanced phrasing of ‘his sighs and tears’ and ‘his languishments and fears’ shows a repeated pattern of behaviour and it shows how unrequited love continues taking and taking.