Love
The poem’s speaker makes a claim that love—at least the type of love she wants—is an almost mystical force that transcends typical emotional fluctuations. She rejects any declarations of love that tie her lover’s feelings to her own traits, whether those traits are superficial or fundamental to her personality and way of thinking. Love, she argues, should not be subject to these types of cause/effect relationships. It should exist independently, remaining constant even as the lovers change. This also suggests that the speaker is uninterested in boosting her ego. She has no desire for compliments about her appearance, voice, or intelligence. Rather, she hopes for a type of love that reaches beyond compliments and even beyond desire, reaching toward an abstract, ideal form.
Time
Wrapped up in the speaker’s feelings about love is a complex set of stances regarding the passage of time itself. According to the speaker, almost everything in life is fleeting, from the way people smile to the way they think. In fact, she argues, these things aren’t just impermanent—they’re so ephemeral that it doesn’t make sense to base something as serious as love on them. Even as she articulates a vision of a world in which time passes with dizzying speed, she suggests that at least one thing, love, lies outside the realm of time and outside the realm of change itself.
Gender
One of the types of love that the speaker dismisses is a kind formed unthinkingly around gender norms. She asks her lover not to love her for the sake of pity, and not to value the wiping of her tears as a basis for love. In this way, she expresses impatience with a model of heteronormative love in which a man comforts and helps a relatively helpless woman. Interestingly, she points out that one of the problems with such a love is its fundamental flimsiness—the speaker (and women generally) are not and cannot be perpetually in need of help and comfort. Therefore, a love based on such a dynamic cannot last.
