O love, O fire! once he drew With one long kiss my whole soul through My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the profound and consuming nature of love, likening it to a necessary force that invigorates one's soul.
In this quote, Tennyson poetically illustrates the intensity and transformative power of love through the imagery of a deep kiss that connects souls. The comparison of the kiss to sunlight nourishing dew emphasizes how love can rejuvenate and completes one's existence, suggesting that love is an essential and life-giving force.
In practice
This quote can be used in a wedding speech to emphasize the transformative power of love between partners.
Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark; For though from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crossed the bar.
How many a father have I seen, A sober man, among his boys, Whose youth was full of foolish noise.
O Love! what hours were thine and mine, In lands of palm and southern pine; In lands of palm, of orange-blossom, Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine!
Earth is dry to the centre,_x000D_ But spring, a new comer,_x000D_ A spring rich and strange,_x000D_ Shall make the winds blow_x000D_ Round and round,_x000D_ Thro' and thro',_x000D_ Here and there,_x000D_ Till the air_x000D_ And the ground_x000D_ Shall be fill'd with life anew.
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills, And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me, And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was, in ashes. - Tithonus
Gone - flitted away, Taken the stars from the night and the sun From the day! Gone, and a cloud in my heart.
Now I felt the long-forgotten urgency of lovemaking, when it seems one's human selves leave, to be replaced by hungry beasts bolting their food. Gone are the civilized beings who talk of manners and journeys and letters; in their places are two bodies straining to give birth to a burst of inhuman pleasure followed by a great, floating nothingness. An explosion of life followed by death - in this we live, and in this we foreshadow our own sweet deaths.
The problem with idealizing love is that it causes us to develop unrealistic expectations about what love actually is and what it can do for us.
Sooner or later all mankind will realize that the greatest cure for all the ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrow and crimes of humanity rests solely in acts of love. Love is the greatest gift from God. It is the divine spark that everywhere produces and restores life. To each and every one of us, love gives us the power to work miracles with your own life and those we touch.
Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way.
A boy spends his time finding a girl to sleep with. A real man spends his time looking for the one worth waking up to.
Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.
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