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Variations on the Word Love

Margaret Atwood

I know that my blog is about books, but when I was trying to think of a book that I love the only thing that kept popping into my head was this poem that I loved. Yes, I wanted to write about love this week and the best thing that encompasses everything that I have to say about this subject is within the couple lines of this magnificent poem. I came across this poem over three years ago and I have not forgotten about it ever since. Whenever I hear people talking about love, this poem always, and I mean always come to my mind.

First of all, what is love? What does it mean to each one of us? Isn’t it a feeling, something that we feel deep within ourselves?

Frankly, a feeling that most of us are not lucky to experience. At least the real kind of love. To many love is associated with the color red, with large red roses, and large red hearts, filled with good chocolate, or anything else that companies have made us think as romantic. Atwood touches upon this aspect of commercialism, that love to most has become buying gifts and doing things that are supposed to be romantic. Shouldn’t we know and feel ourselves what would be most romantic of all to our partner??

“This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It’s the right size for those warm
blanks in speech”

How has it come to be that we plug holes in speech with the word love. This word should be rarely said. It carries such gravity with it that we should be scared to utter it, because of the responsibility and greatness attached to it. Instead people have made it become impersonal, normal, meaningless really. Love can be found anywhere. We don’t have to be in a beautiful expensive restaurant to fall in love and enjoy each others company. We can be just as much in love if we do it just like the “cool debaucheries of slugs under damp pieces of cardboard”. It’s not where we are, but rather with whom.

 Atwood lets us regain some hope about love in the second stanza. The writer then progresses into the other side of love. It is directed to those who know what love is, who know how strong and important of an element in life it is. She divulges into the depths of feelings that are attached once we let ourselves fall in love. It can bring us wonder and pain, but no matter which end of the spectrum we experience, she makes it known that this is a ride worth going on.

All we have to do sometimes is fall off the cliff with our eyes closed, and hope that we land safely…

Variations on th Word Love

This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It’s the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn’t what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.

Then there’s the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It’s not love we don’t wish
to fall into, but that fear.
this word is not enough but it will
have to do. It’s a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.

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