Love After Love

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1976

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Stranger: The Two Selves

In “Love After Love,” Walcott deeply considers the concept of the “self.” While the poem's title implies a standard love poem might follow, the poem deviates from everyday love poems to explore love of self over love of others. Walcott first asks the question, “What is the self?” Or, more directly, he calls for the reader to ask the questions: “Who are you?” and “Do you still know yourself?” It would be easy enough to consider these questions rhetorically and therefore strictly lyrically; however, Walcott’s attention to this theme digs deeper. He doesn’t just pose the question of self-knowledge, he makes “the self” its own separate entity, some person who has become “the stranger who has loved you / all your life” (Lines 9-10). Here, Walcott implies that readers can be strangers to themselves, that the needs of daily life (including romantic love and yearning for admiration from others) can distort the understanding of self to the point of strangeness and disassociation.

The poem's heart offers a way to break this cycle of disassociation: It is only through reunification with the stranger that is the self that the reader can again attain love. Love, the speaker argues, must come from within, and it cannot be discovered with ease without knowing oneself intimately and coming to love this inner self. The stranger in Walcott’s poem feels particularly disturbing and scary to the reader because the stranger is an aspect of “the self” that has been ignored and must be nurtured (through art) in order to reassert a singleness of thought and oneness with one’s innermost needs, desires, and feelings.

Art as a Mirror to the Self

Mirrors are commonly used as symbols or motifs for inward-focus and self-study in literature. However, what makes the use of the mirror in “Love After Love” particularly unusual and interesting is the active role it plays in the scene of the poem. The mirror appears twice in “Love After Love.” Its first appearance in Lines 4 and 5 describes the reader looking “in your own mirror / and each will smile at the other.” Immediately, something about the phrasing sticks out. The poem suddenly goes from a poem directed to a singular “you,” the reader, to a piece focusing on two “people” meeting again after a long separation. The mirror has a cleaving effect on the subject of the poem. Rather than using terms like “reflection” or “mirror image,” Walcott pulls the image in the mirror into the action of the poem, making the “self” in the mirror a real participant, separate from the “you.”

The image from within the mirror performs actions, has autonomy, and reacts to the reader. When the mirror appears again, near the end of the poem, it is in the form of a directive from the speaker: “peel your own image from the mirror” (Line 14). The image in the mirror is the reader’s “true self,” forgotten over time, and the poem is essentially an exploration of the reader’s return to themselves. First, they must meet themselves as strangers in the mirror, then they must reunite through the enjoyment of food and art and become one with “the self” from the mirror. Art specifically plays a role in this action because it is the vehicle through which the reader is able to achieve the reunification with themselves. Figuratively, in the realm of the poem, the reader uses letters, notes, and photographs to peel their “own image from the mirror” (Line 14). The readers of “Love After Love” are also using art (the poem itself) to connect with themselves on a deeper level.

Art as Love

One of Walcott's major focuses in “Love After Love” is the effects of love and heartbreak on “your” sense of self. By introducing the “self” as a stranger who has been “ignored / for another” (Lines 10-11), Walcott focuses the reader’s attention on the negative consequences of losing oneself in love. According to Walcott, when the reader ignores themselves for too long, they lose that core sense of self—the place from which all love is funneled and from which artistic creation begins. Walcott’s poem begs the question of what love is and what it is for—the speaker tells the reader how to find themselves again, and while that finding begins with a meeting and a lunch date, it ends in artistic expression.

For Walcott, love equates to art. Art is at the center of this poem; art is love, and art is the core of the human self. To deny an understanding of oneself for the sake of others is to fail to love oneself. Moreover, a lack of self-love and actualization affects the ability to create, enjoy, and respond to art. Conversely, art is also a way back to one’s inner self. The road to self-actualization and self-love also begins with art. Walcott creates a system that holds art at the heart of all humanity, and he asks the reader to follow this ouroboros in order to achieve an appreciation for the self and for artistic expression.