ANALYSIS - A Love Song for Lucinda

The poem strikes the reader’s attention mainly thanks to its regular pattern: the stanzas look to totally symmetrical and are the result of an anaphoric structure that focuses the attention of the world "Love" which recalls the title itself.

The title makes clear the text is a song and more precisely a love song addressed to a privileged recipient namely Lucinda. The reader may associate to the lady’s name the idea of light and therefore something able to be a direction or a guide preventing one to get lost.

In the text the reader associates the Love to different imagines from the nature using similes. For example, in the first stanza, Love is compared to a ripe plum that will never let you be with its sweet enchant.

Reading the stanza, the intelligent reader may notice the fullness of value sounds which are in the first lines, this magnifies the plum that is ripe and full of flavor and tastes very sweet. Another thing that is easy to see is the use of gerundive form in the third line is not a case: the gerundive highlines the progressive aspect of the action, then the poet is saying Love is dynamic and keeps changing.

So, if in the first tercet the poet introduces the simile with a plum, in the second tercet of the first stanza, he writes the consequences of that. In this section, the use of imperative prevails, indeed the poet seems not to admit reruns.