Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.
Line 1
The time will come
- “Love After Love” begins with a prediction. Given the poem’s title, you might guess that the prediction has something to do with love, but come on, we’re only in line 1—it’s too soon to say. The prediction is phrased as a simple statement of fact, without any clue about what’s to come.
- Maybe the speaker will predict something good, like, “The time will come when that bad haircut of yours will be all grown out, and you’ll finally look like a normal human being again.” Then again, maybe the speaker will predict something bad, such as, “The time will come when you’ll regret not studying more for that biology exam.”
- There’s only one way to find out about this prediction. Read on, Shmoopers…
Line 2
when, with elation
- Whew, turns out that the prediction is about something good (we were starting to sweat bullets about that bio exam). We can infer that some positive event is pending, because people are evidently happy about it—and not just kind of happy. Whatever will happen is apparently a cause for great joy, or “elation.”
Lines 3-4
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
- Whoa—anyone see that coming? By the third line of the poem, our speaker has already nailed readers to the wall with the totally unexpected, surreal image of greeting “yourself.” This vision of a second self seems to materialize in two different locations: at the door and in the mirror.
- There’s no way you can wriggle out of confronting this bizarre situation head-on, because this poem is not about people in general or the poem’s speaker in particular; this poem is about Y-O-U. Notice how the speaker drives this point home by repeating various forms of the second-person pronoun (“you […] yourself […] your own […] your own”).
- Even though this situation is way weird, we think that line 4 sounds kind of calm and comforting. A comma divides the line neatly into two halves: each half has the same number of words and the same sentence structure and even some of the same words. The comma creates a mid-line pause known as a caesura. Even though lines 2 and 4 both have commas embedded within the lines, all of the lines so far are enjambed, ending without a punctuation mark. (See our “Form and Meter” section for more on caesura and enjambment.)
- Speaking of poetic techniques, did you notice that the first four lines of this poem are unrhymed? There’s no regular metrical pattern on display either, so we must be dealing with free verse here.
- Hopefully, this little digression about poetic technique has given you a moment to recover from the shock of coming face to face with yourself. But now it’s time to face the music, Shmoopers. Gather your courage, and we’ll peek around the corner to see what’s happening in the next line…
Line 5
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
- Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it? The speaker seems quite sure that you and your other self will be happy to see each other. Speaking of the speaker, we still don’t have any idea who this person is or why this person keeps making prophetic pronouncements. Do you think the speaker really knows what he-she is talking about? Let’s keep reading to see…