Separation, agony, and pain
These two lovers love each other with an existential, powerful love. Their love brought meaning to their lives in a way that they never experienced elsewhere, and which they are confident could never happen again. Nonetheless, fate separated them, and the thematic question of the poem, therefore, is the mystic union of impossible opposites. They know they belong together, but instead, their lives are now forever defined by separation, disappointment, agony, and suffering. This makes the love story into an existential argument for the suffering of human life. It is properly understood as a myth about suffering.
The mystic union of opposites
This archetypal theme is embedded in the poetry in a deep way, but more importantly, it defines the era of the poem. This poem belongs in the 1400's in Medieval Europe, and the poet is clearly alluding to the alchemical principle of union of opposites. To bring the love to his lover would hypothetically fix the universe. Although the reader can see that or not, the lover knows it to be true; his experience of reality is the subject of the poem, so that to him, the union of opposites is the same as the harmony of the universe and the redemption of suffering. The question, then, is not just about whether he will be reunited with his wife, but what is the union of opposites which, if attained, would end human suffering and redeem it?
The value of dreams
The original title of this poem was Livre de Morpheus, "The Message from Morpheus." What is Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, teaching the reader through these lines of poetry? Perhaps one interpretation would be this thematic response to loneliness and suffering: If dreams come from the heart, then perhaps the lover is healed because he finds in his dream an infinite well of love (symbolized by the Fountain of course), which is this fact, that he and his beloved are truly united already. In spirit, they are unified, but their bodies are obscuring that fact from them by the illusion of reality. The value of dreams, therefore, is that through dreams, one can encounter the mystic union of the soul, and one can see reality as the illusion, and the dream as the truth. That is what the Medieval, Troubadour interpretation of this poem might be.
