Love After Love

At its core, Walcott’s “Love After Love” is about looking inward; the poem deals intimately with the concept of the “self.” While the poem’s title implies a primary focus on love, the underlying themes in Walcott’s poem are deeper and more complicated than that. Walcott’s use of language is straightforward, which lends “Love After Love” a narrative tone that belies the piece’s lyricism and use of metaphor.

Consisting of 15 lines arranged in four stanzas, “Love After Love” addresses its audience from the second-person perspective. The disembodied, unidentified speaker tells “you,” who is a general stand-in for the reader or audience, to “Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart / to itself” (Lines 8-9). The speaker’s primary purpose lies in that line. The speaker wants “you” to love “yourself,” but the speaker also makes several interesting observations about the nature of the self as both a stranger—“[y]ou will love again” who “was your self” (Line 7)—and someone close enough to have “loved you / all your life…who knows you by heart” (Lines 9-11). In “Love After Love,” Walcott argues that sustainable love can only come from understanding and actualization through art and other physical expressions of the internal self.

“Love After Love” opens in an imagined future, which the speaker describes as a time when “you will greet yourself arriving / at your own door, in your own mirror” (Lines 3-4). At its opening, the poem establishes the basics of its own setting. The speaker addresses the reader and tells them what they will do in the future when they begin to “love after love.” However, pretty early on, the speaker complicates the message by separating the “you” (the presumed reader) into two independent selves: “you will greet yourself / arriving at your own door, in your own mirror /and each will smile at the other's welcome” (Lines 3-5). By splitting the “you” into separate entities, Walcott implies that there has been a rift. The reader has become disconnected from themselves and must go through a reunion. The rift is so large that “you” have separated from “the stranger who was your self” (Line 7). Essentially, the speaker says the reader has become a stranger to their true self and must work to get to know themselves again.

The speaker states, “Give back your heart / to itself, to the stranger who has loved you” (Lines 8-9). This further complicates the relationship between the speaker and the self, and it also brings into question the functionality of “love” within the context of the poem and the poem’s title. Although the reader has become estranged from themselves, at least enough to find themselves a stranger when they sit down to dinner again after a long absence, the self has continually “loved you / all your life” (Lines 9-10). The implication is that the self knows the reader, inside and out, but the reader has—on a surface level—lost their sense of self.

Even more interesting is Walcott’s explanation for the reader’s loss of self-knowledge. The speaker explains that the reader has ignored their inner self in favor of chasing external love. “You” lose touch with yourself because “you ignored” the self, instead focusing on gaining love from “another” (Lines 10-11). At this point in the poem, Walcott implies that too much focus on external love, the pursuit of romantic admiration from another, detracts from self-understanding and love. At the very least, Walcott seems to gently admonish the reader for forgetting themselves in the pursuit of another’s affections.

The turn of “Love After Love,” or the culmination of Walcott’s thematic exploration of self-love and actualization, turns to artistic expression. In order to truly know themselves, the speaker says readers need to “[t]ake down the love letters from the bookshelf, / the photographs, the desperate notes, / peel your own image from the mirror” (Lines 12-14). While the speaker never uses the word “art” or even the word “expression,” they do use several artifacts that represent artistic expressions of the internal self: “love letters” and “desperate notes” are both forms of written expression, and “photographs” are another, visual representation of the self that readers should consider, devour, and use as a means of reunifying with their true self.

The “love after love” promised by Walcott is the love that comes from moving beyond material love, romantic or otherwise, from other people. In order to find sustainable love, the reader must first return to themselves. After meeting themselves openly again, the reader then is encouraged to painfully “peel your own image from the mirror” (Line 14) and return to art, the deepest expression of the inner self, in order to learn to love “the stranger that was your self” (Line 7) again. Walcott asks us all to “Sit. Feast on your life” (Line 15).