Summary
“Love After Love” is written as a second-person address to a reader who is coming back to themself. In the first paragraph, the speaker predicts that a “time will come” when the addressee will finally return to themself. This moment is written as a scene, with both selves personified as individuals. The addressee sits at home, while their returning self comes to the door or appears in the mirror. Continuing with the metaphor of home, each invites the other to sit down and eat. Over wine and bread, they come to love one another again.
At the end of the first stanza, Walcott begins to obliquely reference the conflict that first separated the self from the self. In this poem, the addressee has begun to feel a stranger to themself, although the self is the one person who has loved them all their life, and who knows them best. At the end of the second stanza, this realization prompts the speaker to give another set of instructions to the addressee. In an ambiguous turn, they are told to “take down” various sentimental items: love letters, photographs, “desperate notes.” This seems to suggest that the speaker wants the addressee to remove sentimental objects in order to focus on themself.
However, in the final stanza, the speaker insists that the addressee also “peel your own image from the mirror,” which suggests that the various sentimental objects may also be aspects of themself, rather than other people. The poem ends with a command to sit down and “feast on,” or enjoy, their own life, rather than anyone else’s.
Analysis
"Love After Love" is a somewhat elusive poem, because its subject matter is so abstract. However, in essence, it describes the process of returning lovingly to oneself. It is ambiguous what initially rendered the self a stranger. The title “Love After Love” suggests a new love found “after” the end of a more conventional love, likely romantic love. In this interpretation, the poem describes the difficult process of finding oneself after the end of an all-consuming love affair in which one’s romantic partner becomes the only person who matters.
That reading is strengthened by the second stanza, where the poet contrasts the self with someone else by declaring, “the stranger who has loved you / all your life, whom you ignored / for another.” The stranger here is the self, who has been present from the beginning. The "other" who the addressee preferred could then be a romantic partner, for the sake of whom the self was ignored or forgotten. Walcott emphasizes the irony of forgetting who you are when you fall in love by reminding the addressee that the self has been present for far longer than any lover.
“Love After Love” does not reject romantic love, but rather suggests that the self might be the ultimate love object. The opening scene echoes that of an old lover arriving at the door to share a meal; the domestic scene, with its wine and bread, is almost like a date. However, Walcott subtly differentiates this meal from a regular date by emphasizing its reciprocity. In “Love After Love,” both self and self “smile at the other’s welcome”; there isn’t one person who owns the house, and another who is welcomed in. This absence of hierarchy might be part of what makes self-love so special.
However, by the second stanza, Walcott also begins to suggest that, despite the title, this poem is as much about knowledge as it is about love. While the opening scene mirrors a conventional romantic reunion, the rest of the poem becomes more surreal. Walcott emphasizes to the addressee that the self not only has “loved you all your life,” but also “knows you by heart.” This perfect knowledge of self and self complicates the lack of hierarchy in the first stanza, because here it seems that the forgotten self knows the addressee perfectly, while the addressee has completely forgotten the self they rejected, the self they rendered a “stranger.”
The specific phrase “knows you by heart” is also worth paying attention to. Despite being about love, an extremely popular topic for poetry, most of “Love After Love” avoids cliché because of its strange subject matter and Walcott’s skill as a poet. His use of the cliché “knows you by heart,” then, is probably not a failure of imagination, but an intentional decision. The word “heart” appeared first in the first stanza, where the speaker tells the addressee to “give back your heart/to itself.” In this instruction, the heart represents the part of the addressee that has always belonged to the lost self. In rendering that lost self a stranger, the heart was stolen away, but now, when they reunite, it can be returned. The conventional association of hearts with love emphasizes the implicit romance of this exchange.
However, in the second stanza, “heart” shifts from being an individual character in the poem to an abstract idea. Rather than one heart which can be returned to the self, it suggests a way of knowing that the self has always been able to practice, even when the addressee had forgotten them. In this way, the poem here subordinates love to knowledge. The final scene of the poem, which begins at line 12 and continues through the end of the poem, is a product of this shift from love to knowledge.
Rather than the gracious host, the addressee here becomes a kind of self-researcher, gathering their effects in order to make sense of their own life. The speaker begins by telling them to “take down” their “love letters,” “photographs,” and “desperate notes”—all belongings which seem to come from someone else, perhaps even the lover for whom the self was forgotten earlier in the poem. The phrase “take down” is ambiguous; at first, it seems, in tune with the beginning of the poem, that the addressee is being told to get rid of these reminders of past love affairs. However, the speaker goes on to tell them to “peel your own image from the mirror.” Suddenly, these personal affects become part of the same category as the addressee’s own image. Rather than mere souvenirs of past romances, these objects are as much parts of the addressee as their own face.
The contrast between love and knowledge helps to make sense of this movement. While love might demand a simple romance between the addressee and the self, self-knowledge can allow for a more expansive sense of the self, one that understands that any individual is actually a product of the people they have loved, the books they have read, and even the things they surround themselves with. Rather than feasting on bread and wine with a lover, the poem ends with an invocation to “sit” and “feast on your life.” The joy described in “Love After Love” is not in forgetting everything that came before, but rather in sitting with the past and understanding that it has now become part of the self.
