Except for perhaps the dynamic between humanity and the forces of nature and the speculations about the soul and its relationship to anything eternal, no subject has generated more lyrical poetry than love. Indeed, to subject a love poem to analysis might actually be counter-indicated. After all, love is an emotion, impossible to anticipate and happily, joyfully resistant to logic. The heart has a mind of its own. Analysis, by its definition, uses the careful and calculated step-by-step process of scientific objectivity to create causality, to link events and move toward some inevitable outcome. Cummings here attempts the daunting task of understanding love into its elements, knowing the enterprise is happily impossible. What is love, the speaker asks. How does it work? What are its impacts? What are its dimensions?

The answers the poem offers are hardly new. Indeed, the assertions made about the nature of love here are surprisingly obvious, even clichés. The tectonic impact of love is impossible to forget. Love does not happen very often. Love can compel a person to act in extraordinarily unpredictable ways. Love will exist as long as humanity exists—it defies the iron limits of time. Love is not about winning; or losing, for that matter.