'Love' (SQA National 5 English): Revision Note

Below is a guide to Edwin Morgan’s poem ‘Love’ in preparation for the SQA National 5 English exam. It includes:

• Overview: a breakdown of the poem, including its possible meanings and interpretations

• Writer’s methods: an exploration of Morgan’s techniques and methods

• Understanding the poem: an exploration of the themes and ideas within Morgan’s poem

• Linking the poems: an understanding of how ‘Love’ connects to Morgan’s other prescribed poems for the Scottish text section

Overview

In order to answer questions on any poem it is vital that you understand what it is about. This section includes:

• An overview of the poem

• A ‘translation’ of the poem, section-by-section

• A commentary of each of these sections, outlining Edwin Morgan’s intention and message

‘Love’ overview

‘Love’, written by Edwin Morgan, is a profound exploration of love: how it makes people feel and behave. The poem repeatedly uses the word “love” and the anaphora (opens in a new tab) “Love is” to emphasise the multi-faceted nature of the emotions experienced by those in love.

‘Love’ translation 

Lines 1-2

Translation

• The speaker opens the poem by exploring the overwhelming impact love can have on a person’s emotions

Morgan’s intention

• The poem’s opening word, “Love”, immediately establishes the subject matter

• “Love” is described by three strong verbs in consecutive minor sentences:

  • The word “rules” suggests an overwhelming feeling

  • The verb “laughs” suggests love enables joy and pleasure

  • The word “marches” personifies (opens in a new tab) love as something powerfully forceful

• A longer sentence is then used, with a metaphor (opens in a new tab)comparing love to “the wolf that guards the gate”:

  • This implies love is always a way of protecting ourselves, with the strong wolf offering that protection

Lines 3-4

Translation

• Having used a series of actions to characterise love, lines 3-4 focus on love as an abstract quality, likening it to a form of art that offers inspiration

Morgan’s intention

• “Love” is likened to activities that are an outlet for creativity and the human imagination, such as “music”

• The use of “fills” and “fuels” suggests that love is an emotion that physically sustains us, while the alliteration (opens in a new tab) of “f” emphasises this idea

Lines 5-6

Translation

• Love is presented as varied, bringing wildly capricious emotions

Morgan’s Intention

• Returning to the structure of line 1, the speaker outlines three further forthright statements about the nature of love:

  • The word “terror” captures a sense of anguish

  • The word “sweat” has a double-meaning: to metaphorically sweat over love, suggesting that love is emotionally hard work, or literally sweating through either nervousness or as a result of intense physical intimacy

  • The third statement also hints at the chaos of physical intimacy, albeit with an undertone of violence in “bashed” and “crumpled”

  • Finally, "unenviable fate” highlights love as something potentially shameful, and thematically links back to the ideas suggested by “terror”

Lines 7-8

Translation

• There is a sense of growing intensity in the poem, as the sentence lengths increase

• The focus here on the contrast of emotions triggered by love

Morgan’s intention 

• The assertive tone of the poem continues as the speaker juxtaposes (opens in a new tab) “kills” and “saves”, suggesting the dramatic spectrum of love

• The idea of “honour” implies a moral goodness, or doing the right thing, which furthers the contrast in the poem, clashing with the more negative ideas in lines 5-6.

• The speaker goes on to suggest that love is highly mysterious (“high ambiguity”)

Lines 9-11

Translation

• An extended metaphor (opens in a new tab) is introduced to compare love to a drink

• In the extended metaphor, the lovers are depicted as “ice” and “absinth”, with the speaker describing how these items mix

Morgan’s intention

• One partner, the “ice”, is described as having a sensual reaction (“tingles and shivers”) when the “absinth”, the other partner, is added

• The term “fidgin-fain” is Scots and means to feel restless or nervously energetic

• The use of onomatopoeia (opens in a new tab)(“clinks”) and assonance in the repetition of the “i” sounds in lines 9-10 further enhances the sensual, romantic nature of these lines

• The drink, “absinth”, is known to be a strong alcohol, mirroring the strength of love, and it is “sugar-drenched”, implying a potentially overbearing sweetness

• Finally, the phrase “alter its state” reaffirms how love changes us

Lines 14-16

Translation

• As the poem reaches a conclusion, love is compared to space exploration

Morgan’s intention

• The use of the word “With”, rather than the assertive “Love is” anaphora moves the poem into a more reflective tone

• Imagery (opens in a new tab) of space is used with the idea of a “probe”, suggesting love in a long, distant voyage of discovery that is literally out of this world (“So far from the globe”)

• “No one” implies the unimaginable qualities of love, introducing an unpunctuated list of items:

  • The word “shoals” suggests fish, but more widely a large collection of something

  • “Voids” suggests a vast space

  • Further on, “belts” and “zones” fit with the imagery of space exploration, and also the idea of wide open spaces

  • Juxtaposition is then offered in “drags”, something that pulls you down, and “flares”, things that go up

• These ideas should be “signals”, warnings or clues, to everyone (“all”) of the importance of risking love (“leave”)

• Finally, the speaker urges the reader to “navigate”: to explore what love is

Writer’s methods

Although this section is organised into three separate sections — form, structure and language — it is always best to move from what the poet is presenting (the techniques they use; the overall form of the poem; what comes at the beginning, middle and end of a poem) to how and why they have made the choices they have. 

Focusing on the poet’s overarching ideas, rather than individual poetic techniques, will gain you far more marks. Crucially, in the below sections, all analysis is arranged by theme and includes Edwin Morgan’s intentions behind his choices in terms of:

• Form

• Structure

• Language

Form

Edwin Morgan’s poem, ‘Love’, was written in eight lines, but were it to be the published poem in the Scottish Poetry section, the poem will be presented across 16 lines, as shown in the notes above.

Structure

The use of repetition, tricolon and enjambment (opens in a new tab) is used to explore the intense feelings of those who experience love.

Language

Edwin Morgan uses ‘Love’ as a way to explore the juxtaposition of the human experience, primarily employing word choice, sensual language and imagery.

Understanding the poem

For the SQA National 5 English exam, it’s important to show a clear and thoughtful understanding of the poem’s themes and main ideas, as well as how the poet’s techniques and intentions help to convey meaning. This section focuses on two main themes that Morgan examines in ‘Love’:

• Love

• Juxtaposition of the human experience

Love

• ‘Love’ is, unmistakably, a poem about love, charting its intensity and intoxicating qualities

• What starts as a series of assertive statements about love being dominant and joyous, becomes an exploration of the awesome power of love:

  • Even sentence structure cannot control it

• Love is presented as so many different ideas, qualities and images to suggest that love is both definable and undefinable

• Love encompasses so much that it cannot even be defined by what we find on Earth: instead, we must venture into the wastes of space to make sense of this emotion

• Morgan stresses that part of the brilliance of love is its inability to make sense; nonetheless, he concludes that we must “navigate” to love

Juxtaposition of the human experience

• As humans, we all see the world uniquely, not least when it comes to love

• The opening presentation of love suggests a universal experience: that love “fuels us”:

  • However, thereafter love is presented as multi-faceted, offering potential for upset and danger

• The words “kills” and “saves” perhaps offer the clearest sense of juxtaposition, a stark contrast of what love potentially offers

• Morgan goes onto to say that we must accept uncertainty (“ambiguity”) if we are to embrace love, countering the initial simple statements of line 1

• Furthermore, the structure of the poem emphasises the juxtaposition, with short, staccato sentences contrasting sprawling sentences that defy the rules of punctuation 

Linking the poems

Students often use Edwin Morgan’s poetry to answer the Scottish texts section of the SQA National 5 Critical Reading exam. If you choose, though, you can write your critical essay question on Morgan’s poetry instead. 

If you decide to write about Morgan for the Scottish text section, the final question asks you to demonstrate a wider understanding of his poetry. That means linking more than one poem together by focusing on his ideas and how he communicates them (his techniques). 

The six Edwin Morgan poems on the SQA syllabus are:

• ‘In the Snack-bar’

• ‘Trio’

• ‘Strawberries’

• ‘Love’

• ‘Glasgow Sonnet i’

• ‘Death in Duke Street’

Here are some parallels between the six poems, organised by shared themes: