First Movement: “His eyes are quickened so with grief”
Graves’ “Lost Love” employs the third-person-self technique, wherein the speaker seems to be reporting about someone else, but, in fact, is describing his own experience/feelings/thoughts. The speaker begins, “His eyes are quickened so with grief.” Reporting that some man, some third party, has suffered grief that gives him the keen ability to “watch a grass or leaf / Every instant grow.”
Not only can this suffering individual see foliage grow, he can also see through “a flint wall.” And even more amazingly, he can see the soul leave the body of dying man. Startlingly, this speaker has the soul leaving the body through the “throat,” and not from the spiritual eye, as most souls leaving the body are wont to do. The effect, however, demonstrates the rattled perspective that the suffering man is undergoing.
The rime-scheme that marks this movement is AABAAB, which offers the deftness of the scene a completely appropriate babbling effect.
Second Movement: “Across two counties he can hear”
The speaker continues to catalogue the unique sense-enhancing abilities that grief has opened up for this sufferer. Employing the split couplet rime-scheme, the speaker demonstrates the poor suffering man’s split between worlds: “Across two counties he can hear / And catch your words before you speak.”
His hearing is so amplified that he can even perceive “The woodlouse or the maggot's weak / Clamour.” His “sad ear” matches the supernatural ability of his sad eye.
Third Movement: “And noise so slight it would surpass”
The next rime-scheme features two couplets that continue to delineate the sufferer’s super-sense. He can detect the “drinking sound of grass, / Worm talk, clashing jaws of moth / Chumbling holes in cloth”—all sounds that imply death, the corrupting of the body from lack of oxygen utilization.
Fourth Movement: “The groan of ants who undertake”
Continuing with the two-couplet rime-scheme, the speaker also continues to catalogue the many and varied sounds that the suffering man can detect in his extreme grief. Again, these noises come from the imagined state of death of the body: “the groan of ants” and “whir of spiders.”
The speaker employs a fascinating use of the pathetic fallacy by claiming that the ants will seek to carry heavy loads “for honour’s sake.” But then he also gives them “sinews” while remarking on their breath as “com[ing] thin.”
Again, all such exaggeration serves the purpose of expressing the intense grief this poor man has suffered.
Fifth Movement: “And minute whispering, mumbling, sighs”
The fifth movement features a single couple, in which the speaker unveils his final image of bodily death; the sufferer can detect the “minute whispering, mumbling, sighs / Of idle grubs and flies,” which ply their trade upon the decomposing body.
Sixth Movement: “This man is quickened so with grief”
Retaining the double couplet scheme, the speaker reiterates his claim, “The man is quickened so with grief.” And as he has demonstrated in his little catalogue drama, the man’s senses have become “god-like,” as he searches high and low and all around for “lost love.”
Linda Sue Grimes - As a writer, researcher, and SRF devotee, Linda Sue Grimes has studied poetry and practiced Kriya Yoga for over thirty years..
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