Member-only story

W. H. Auden Taught Me More About Love Than Poetry

Reading between the lines

✨ Bridget Webber
4 min readOct 19, 2021
Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

W. H. Auden wrote poetry, but most of all, he studied love under a microscope. Much of his work expressed his inner pondering and debates about defining love. He wanted to get to grips with what he saw as the meaning of life. Love puzzled him, and it was while learning about Auden I also learned more about love, although I intended to extract poetry tips

Auden scrutinized relationships from angles that differ from most inspections of the topic. His poetic gleanings came from thinking outside the regular realms of established notions about love and how it is presented in life. One such example is evident in his observations of the loss of ideal love, that tender golden glow lovers experience while embracing the first flames.

After a while, the fire grows dim, as many people recognize, and soot from the dying embers tarnishes what looks like an ideal relationship. When it happens to us, we might sob or shout. We imagine the other person has let us down because they showed us treasures from the depths of their being and snatched them away without a care.

So often, people talk about how someone was beautiful and kind when they met and for several months or even years afterward, and then they changed. They became less loving, less joyful, and…

--

--

✨ Bridget Webber
✨ Bridget Webber

Written by ✨ Bridget Webber

Spiritual growth, compassion, mindfulness, ancient wisdom, and psychology. You can support me at https://ko-fi.com/bridgetwebber

Responses (8)