“Love Poem” by Linda Pastan appears in her tenth collection, The Imperfect Paradise, published in 1988 by W.W. Norton & Company. The poem is free verse, with no formal meter or rhyme scheme. It consists of relatively short lines. In the poem, which Pastan wrote when she was in her fifties, the speaker voices a plain desire to pen “a love poem” (Line 2) as wild and uncontained as a spring creek overflowing its banks. The speaker metaphorically positions herself and her lover at the edge, watching the rushing water wash over and wash away everything in its flow. As the torrent persists, the speaker tells her partner that they must hold onto one another, or risk being pulled into the current. “Love Poem” offers the perspective of speaker who has seen the effects of many seasons and knows how life can come on as powerfully and unexpectedly as a flood. Two people can hang on to one another through life’s rushing waters, the speaker says, if they remember to hold one another safe.

Poet Biography

Linda Pastan was born in New York City on May 27, 1932, the only child of Jacob and Bess Olenik. In an interview she did in 2003 with Jeffrey Brown of The PBS News Hour, Pastan said if she had been a boy, her surgeon father would have insisted she become a doctor—“There is no way I would’ve gotten out of it,” she said. Instead, she received a BA from Radcliffe in 1954, and earned her master’s degree from Brandeis University in 1957. In her senior year at Radcliffe, she won the Mademoiselle Dylan Thomas Award for poetry, edging out runner-up Sylvia Plath.

Pastan married immediately after her graduation from Radcliffe. She attended graduate school while raising a family, but abandoned poetry for a decade before committing again to a regular writing practice. Since her first collection, A Perfect Circle of the Sun (1971), Pastan has published fourteen additional books of poetry. Two collections placed as finalists for the National Book Award. Additional honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Di Castagnola Award, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Maurice English Award, the Charity Randall Citation, and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, as well as the Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumnae Award.

Pastan served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991-1985, and she taught at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for twenty years. “Love Poem,” from her book, The Imperfect Paradise (1988), is emblematic of many of the enduring themes in Pastan’s work, which include the complexities of life and mortality as interpreted through the lens of domesticity, family relationships, and the natural world.

Poem Text

Pastan, Linda. “Love Poem.” 1988. The Writer’s Almanac.

Summary

Pastan’s twenty-three-line “Love Poem” begins with a seemingly simple desire: “I want to write you / a love poem” (Lines 1-2). The speaker’s chosen metaphor is “our creek / after thaw” (Lines 3-4). With that image, the speaker creates a sense of perilousness—a body of water that takes over its landscape, with the speaker and her lover standing by, watching it happen. The force of gravity initiated by the change of season—the melt after winter—pulls everything caught in its rush—“every twig / every dry leaf” (Lines 8-9), even “every scruple” (Line 11). From here the speaker of the poem repeats a directive, saying “we must grab / each other” (Lines 16-17) to keep one another safe from the rush of water that would soak their footwear, and worse—that would pull them apart from one another, that would allow one to be lost to the other.