I’ve started flipping through my burgeoning collection of
poetry books, but nothing's really called out to me except for the first poem in
another Mary Oliver book that I borrowed from the library, and since I just
wrote something about Oliver, I decided to look back over the samplers instead.
Alternately skimming and reading the post-war sampler again, I was struck by
how much I liked W. H. Auden’s “Law Like Love” on
second reading. The first time, as I recall, only the last stanza out to me. It
sounded so incredibly cynical about love that my internal skeptic could barely
contain its glee. But I had a whole sampler to finish reading, after all, so I
continued on without reading the poem a second time.
Coming back to it now, I think I like it because Auden’s
tone throughout the whole poem (at least, in my opinion) seems subtly
pessimistic. It seems to me like he’s calling out society; we always act like
we know how things are, like we’re right, like we’re good, when in reality we
don’t and we’re not. The last line is what really seals it for me. “Like love
we seldom keep.” It sounds almost scathing. I suppose you could read it as a
reference to loves lost, but my gut instinct is to read it as a reference to
how fickle people can be—an accusation rather than a lament. When I first read
the poem, without really stopping to think about it, I took it as a quaint
observation of how everyone defines things differently, using the example of
both love and the law. But I think there’s actually this subtle undercurrent of
cynicism going on. The way I interpret it, law isn’t necessarily what we think
it is, and neither is love. We build up these grand ideas about these concepts,
romanticizing and idealizing them, but in fact they aren’t quite so grand as we
imagine. The law isn’t perfect, and neither is love. Both are flawed, unstable,
and ultimately unreliable. That’s my take, anyway.
I think the form of this poem also makes it really effective.
It’s not so repetitious that it gets boring, but it’s not so formless as to be uncompelling.
His language is understandable and clear, and it sounds to me like the way
people actually talk. Also, it’s kind of fun to read out loud; it helps you see
the differences between the stanzas and the different people in them.
Furthermore, I just like the comparison between love and the law. I think it’s very
clever.
