“Love Poem” is a free-verse poem composed of a single stanza in twenty-three lines. The poet herself was in middle-age—in her fifties—when she wrote it, and it was published as part of a larger collection of poems reflecting on this phase of life. In the moment of this poem, the reader is introduced to the speaker as she states her desire to express her feelings to her beloved. If the reader considers the poem to reflect the poet’s experience, the speaker and her beloved stand at the edge of a new phase of their lives. Perhaps the children are grown and gone from the household, and they are empty nesters left alone again with one another. In any case, the speaker addresses her lover with a desire to qualify this long-term love in a dramatic way by using the metaphor of a rushing stream swollen by winter melt.

The speaker identifies as a poet, doing the work of a poet, from the first line: “I want to write you” (Line 1). In the second line, the reader learns that what the speaker wants to write is a “love poem” (Line 2). Before the reader gets to the second line, however, the meaning is twofold: The speaker wants to write something for the person she is addressing; also, the speaker, as a writer and poet, wants to create or direct the other through the act of writing.