The poem ‘Love Recognized’ by Robert Penn Warren seems to portray the onrush of love less as a time of connection or magical transformation than as some kind of isolating and cataclysmic event. The guiding metaphor is one of snow that far from cosseting the landscape or allowing us to hunker down cosily against a backdrop of brilliant white instead serves to obscure and befuddle, clogging up the highways and thoroughfares of a city, precipitating crisis.
In this way ‘Love Recognized’ might seem both romantic and decidedly modern. It captures a sense of fledgling love as tumultuous in a way that echoes the Byronic passions or the Romantic sense of the sublime while its setting appears mid-century at the earliest and it effects a contemporary kind of code-switching between the subjective and objective or between the rural and rustic and the urban or urbane.
Warren’s use of metre and language or the poetic idiom is both lyrical and free. The result emphasises the rhythms of falling in love, with its sense of headlong rush and tumbling or hapless release. But the poet also dishes out a bit of salt or grit and makes a few swerves in the road, while leaving just enough space for reflection, in which clearing we might find a certain eeriness or even the bare trace of a doubt. Let’s take a look at the poem:
‘Love Recognized’ by Robert Penn Warren
There are many things in the world and you
Are one of them. Many things keep happening and
You are one of them, and the happening that
Is you keeps falling like snow
On the landscape of the not-you, hiding hideousness, until
The streets and the world of wrath are choked with snow.
How many things have become silent? Traffic
Is throttled. The mayor
Has been, clearly, remiss, and the city
Was totally unprepared for such a crisis. Nor
Was Iāyes, why should this happen to me?
I have always been a law-abiding citizen.
But you, like snow, like love, keep falling,
And it is not certain that the world will not be
Covered in a glitter of crystalline whiteness.
Silence.
The first thing a reader of ‘Love Recognized’ might notice is the repetition of ‘many things’ and Warren’s use of enjambment whereby the syntax and its meaning appears to run on over the end of a line. ‘There are many things in the world and you / Are one of them’ is the first full sentence but ‘There are many things in the world and you’ coheres as the first line, blurring subject and object and immediately positing a dichotomy or juxtaposition between its component parts: the ‘you’ which is to say the beloved, and on the other hand the world at large.
‘Love Recognized’ repeats this gesture throughout the first verse. ‘Many things keep happening and’ – now we get a pregnant pause at the end of the second line – ‘You are one of them’ the poet continues, here separating and colliding the world of many things and the cherished ‘you’ via different means. The effect of the enjambment here is almost of one car crashing into the other, a rear-ender after the first car suddenly pulls up short.
But having established that world of teeming or ‘happening’ things in contrast to a ‘you’ which at first seems kind of static, the soft-focused or statuesque object of desire, Warren quickly subverts that understanding by continuing ‘and the happening that / Is you keeps falling like snow’. Now the cherished ‘you’ becomes something much more than an object of desire. More active and more nebulous, a ‘happening’ in its own right whose sudden activity and definiteness seems to occur with somewhat ambiguous portent.
This ‘you’ that is ‘happening’ keeps ‘falling like snow/ On the landscape of the not-you’ as Warren makes that distinction between the beloved and everything else ruthlessly complete. On the one hand we have a ‘you’ which is to be cherished and marvelled at while on the other we appear to have detritus or an indiscriminate mass of disenchanted stuff. In fact it is worse still for the ‘not-you’ because the snow which falls on that particular landscape now, in a sudden and even somewhat startling darkening of the scene, is ‘hiding hideousness, until / The streets and the world of wrath are choked with snow’.
Over this first verse then Warren has established a dramatic tableau. We have a narrative voice who juxtaposes a cherished figure – the ‘you’ of the poem, the voice’s beloved and the symbol and recipient of love itself – with the rest of experience, which in a dark turn is portrayed as hideous and wrathful. This is in a sense or from a certain vantage point very romantic. But the poet Warren seems to go beyond the conventional notion of a lover being captivated or even consumed by their love.
For a start there is a disorienting movement between foreground and background over these first few lines of the poem, as the world and the beloved seem to switch stances and grow more active or passive. And we may wonder why the turn has to be quite so dark, why the ‘landscape of the not-you’ and the streets and the world at large must become hideous or wrathful rather than simply a secondary concern. What’s more the sense of violence or wrathfulness doesn’t only belong to the world but also to the beloved, for the ‘you’ which keeps on ‘falling like snow’ ends up choking – a violent if sputtering phrase – ‘the streets and the world of wrath’.
***
The second verse consolidates the turn from the end of the first verse. From a world of gentle cadences and the picturesque or pastoral image of falling snow – as though we were watching from the inside of a snow globe, in fact – we have now moved to a distinctly urban setting, though it feels less like a major city or metropolis than a quintessential American small town.
The ‘many things’ of the first verse have fallen silent. And the perspective has also shifted to become more reflective, turning away from extolling the ‘you’ or the beloved and from an observation of the landscape towards a critical analysis of results. Seemingly caught under a blanket of snow ‘Traffic / Is throttled’ and the narrative voice – which is more stable, less rapt, more conversational yet perhaps no less anxious – is inclined to blame the mayor who ‘Has been, clearly, remiss’. Plans were not made for the sudden change of weather and while the place and our poem is swaddled by an eerie silence the narrator’s complaints in this second verse carry the bark and echo of a typically disgruntled meeting at a town hall.
Leaving the city, whatever its size, behind in its state of palpable disarray the narrator now begins to wallow with just a trace of self-reproach. Nor were they adequately prepared for this moment of crisis but its effect and consequences still feel wholly undeserved: ‘why should this happen to me?’ is the eternal scorned cry for after all, in this contemporary urban setting, ‘I have always been a law-abiding citizen’ and in other words have done my part or at least everything that could have reasonably been asked.
‘But you, like snow, like love, keep falling’. The steady pace and the repetition stun the complaint, cutting through the bustle of the city and the gripes of the narrator and reasserting a sense of wonder. Once more we are back inside of that snow globe. It is notable too that the narrator never really blames the snow or their beloved for their role in causing the crisis. So the juxtaposition or dichotomy between the awe-inspiring beloved and the disruly world at large remains intact.
There is a sense as this wondrous snow, like love, keeps falling and reclaims the tempo of the poem of a mutual comfort, as though the narrative voice is both cradling their beloved as they drift earthbound and being cradled in a way that carries them from all the unkempt cares of the world.
Then the flow of the poem shifts again as Warren delivers a long run-on sentence over two lines which seem to blur or softly shake up the scene, especially via his use of a double negative, as with a kind of quavering or vacillating portent those lines suggest ‘And it is not certain that the world will not be / Covered in a glitter of crystalline whiteness’.
Warren’s metrical shifts – including the stress on the first syllable of the word ‘Covered’ in the second line as the anxious series of short functional phrases gives way to long flowing descriptors – delivers us to a rapt but also somewhat abrupt or definitive halt. From that anxious patter of double negatives we get a line full of assonance and a kind of liquid consonance, as breathy vowel sounds and the consonance of the letters ‘l’ and ‘t’ draws to a close through the sibilance of ‘crystalline whiteness’ poetically capturing the very essence of snow itself.
There is a hypnotising or transfixing and at the same time a declamatory nature to these run-on lines. Slight cacophony gives way to sheer or limpid euphony. And what is left after the stop is nothing more than a silence – just that, ‘Silence.’ – uttered and enacted as a kind of emptying out. The narrative voice yields to this silence, depicted as the last falling and final blanketing of the landscape by the snow.
***
Crucially this ‘Love Recognized’ by Robert Penn Warren works stunningly as a conventional love poem. This is how it presents itself and it’s important that it works on this level, that we feel what the narrator feels, that we can tap readily into our own experiences of love and its first flush, that in short we get what all of the fuss is about. ‘Love Recognized’ is one of the great love poems and that is because it fully captures that sense of rapture which seems to rupture our brain and fill up our senses and make us apt to forget or drop anything else that might have been going on in our lives.
But precisely because he manages to capture this shift of perception so thoroughly, Warren also nags at the sense of turbulence and separateness that can be the result of such an encompassing love. Where there is rapture and glory there is also a certain abandonment or hostility – indeed a coldness or iciness – that subsumes or subjugates all else. The swell of love like an expanding balloon so thoroughly crowds out everything else in the frame that we become hostile to anything that would squeeze or pinch much less threaten to puncture it.
Look even at the poem’s title: ‘Love Recognized’ which seems in a certain sense to say analysed, stared in the face or put under the microscope. And indeed Warren probes love through the course of the poem, takes oblique angles and shifts perspective in ways that are both masked and emphasised by his rhythmic or sometimes even euphonious verse. Still more to his credit, he manages to suffuse his poem with humour and whimsy without softening any of those contrasts or juxtapositions or tough questions nor its subtle psychological bent.
There is an almost comic stop and start or ebb and flow to the first verse, Warren’s phrases stretching out then shunting together like bumper cars as the quick syllables of ‘many things’ crash into the cherished but implacable ‘you’. There is also a comic absurdity to the bundling together of everything in the surrounding world under the makeshift concept of the ‘not-you’.
We have already noted how ‘Love Recognized’ toys with Romantic conventions around the landscape which here isn’t beautified nor does it simply magnify or aggrandise the nature of the narrator’s love. The falling snow as our metaphor for love does serve the usual function of elaborating or spotlighting or giving form to the narrator or protagonist’s psyche. But we see that the descent of snow just like love itself might well come at a steep cost.
The snow hides hideousness, chokes the streets and the surrounding world at large, throttles traffic. It is both concealing violence and committing its own, which violence may be construed – owing to the perception of the narrator – as anything that is not love or that would threaten love, an act of violence which in turn must be wrangled, choked, throttled, in a word smothered and stopped.
Rhythmically there are three moments or parallels, one in each of the verses, which thread together some of these concerns. The phrase ‘hiding hideousness’ – which introduces a suddenly serpentine aspect to the first verse, a slithering sibilance as the snow, though falling, is pulled back to reveal the ugliness which the narrator perceives lurking beneath – is mirrored in the second verse by the lines ‘and the city / Was totally unprepared for such a crisis’. Those final four syllables of ‘such a crisis’ match almost pace for pace the word ‘hideousness’ and share the same sibilance, echoed or prepared for in this instance by the earlier hiss of ‘remiss’.
Love then as an outpouring of nature begins to blanket the faceless landscape, hiding the grim not-love which lies underneath, but this same snow in an everyday urban setting causes a crisis which exceeds a collective or top-down capacity for planning. Warren again peppers his verse with comic effects. But the intensification or emphasis or hyperbole behind the narrator’s use of the words ‘clearly’ and ‘totally’ – as if to doubly scold the mayor and the city for their lack of planning, while suggesting that with adequate preparation some of the impact may have been averted – is really moot in so far as the crisis has already occurred.
Otherwise the lover’s complaint – why should this happen to me? – is both specific and general. They feel singled out because love (or snow) seems to be happening to them in particular even while the complaint itself is generic and mundane, the type of thing anyone might utter when stuck in traffic with a destination in mind, while also entailing a familiar defence.
***
The implication is that love pries at the fabric which holds society together, from the normal circulation or functioning of a city to the established roles of the citizenry and even the very rules of law. And in the face of love the pouting or defiant ‘why me?’ and the assertion of one’s law-abiding character seem impotent as defences or complaints.
A higher law is exerting its sway and both the routines of life and the lover’s staid conceptions of self have been upturned, in a way that rends. They observed the landscape from an almost playful remove for much of the first verse. But now that the rubber has met the road and love has stopped being equivalent to the gradations of a nature poem, this ‘snow’ or this love has had stark consequences, severing their connection to the workaday, leaving them perilously adrift.
Because this relentless and implacable ‘you’ keeps falling ‘like snow’ and ‘like love’. We get our third moment of cascading sibilance in the short verse ‘And it is not certain that the world will not be / Covered in a glitter of crystalline whiteness’ where that double negative and all of that liquidity and hard crystallinity culminates through a dying sparkle in one last double consonant, the slight hiss of the final ‘ss’.
The phrase ‘crystalline whiteness’ and its five long syllables brings the poem to a rhythmic halt. All that’s left is ‘Silence’ with a stop. We might wonder what this silence means, which is to say what state of affairs it refers to in the natural world. Has the snow stopped suddenly, or has it succeeded in totally blanketing the landscape? Has love ceased to mutter its spell and cast its magic or has it decisively won out? Does peace reign and what is the state of the traffic?
We might have an answer or we might be left with a degree of uncertainty as to where we and the narrator stand. It seems enough though to observe, awestruck for a moment, just what has transpired. Robert Penn Warren’s brilliant love poem ‘Love Recognized’ has been lovesome and watchful and then critical or even frantic. In language, in imagery and in sentiment it has been rhapsodic before finally falling mute.
