Overview

Symptoms of Love is a short poem by Robert Graves that describes love as something painful and uncontrollable. The speaker talks about how love affects the body and mind, making people feel weak, obsessed, and even ill.

Main Themes

The poem explores the darker side of love. Love is shown as suffering, not joy – it causes emotional and physical pain. The speaker feels trapped and powerless. There’s a sense of obsession and longing.

Tone and voice

The tone is downbeat and pessimistic, presenting love as draining and uncomfortable. The speaker’s voice feels tired and resigned, reinforcing the idea that love brings strain rather than joy.

Context

Robert Graves was a 20th-century poet who had intense relationships and served in World War One. His experiences with love and trauma influenced his writing. He often wrote about love as something powerful and destructive.

Form and structure

The poem is written in free verse, meaning it doesn’t follow a regular rhyme or rhythm. The short lines reflect the idea of being emotionally drained. The final stanza shifts tone slightly, ending with a question that makes the reader think.

Poetic devices to spot

• Metaphor – love is called a “migraine” and a “bright stain”, showing it’s painful and leaves a mark.
• Imagery – descriptions like “burning,” “shaking,” and “haunted” help us imagine how love feels.
• Enjambment – lines run into the next without full stops, showing how love flows and can’t be controlled.
• Rhetorical question – the poem ends with a question, making the reader reflect on love’s value.
• Asyndeton – lists without “and” make the suffering seem fast and overwhelming.
• Tone – the tone is cynical and downbeat, showing love as a negative experience.

by Robert Graves

The text of this poem is available in the CCEA Poetry Anthology, which can be downloaded from the CCEA website.

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A brief but pithy examination of the pain and suffering love can cause for a person who feels it. Published in 1964, three years after Graves became a Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

• Title: “Symptoms” has medical or clinical connotations, as though love itself is a metaphor for some kind of chronic illness.
• Themes: Love, heartache, longing, suffering.
• Tone: Cynical, downcast, pessimistic, disillusioned.
• Speaker: The poet uses second person in the final stanza, directly addressing the reader.

• Robert Graves was the son of a poet and lyricist, inheriting a love of literature and mythology that saw his written work span poetry, short stories, autobiography, historical novels and popular translations of Latin and Greek classics. This breadth of interest and versatility may help to explain the lack of direct first person perspective in what could otherwise be a very personal poem.
• Graves had many tumultuous relationships in his life. He was bisexual at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in England; he was married but involved in many other (sometimes convoluted) relationships, most notably with the poet Laura Riding (who may well have helped inspire this poem, and for whom he ultimately left his wife). His experiences of love could have informed his understanding of it as being something turbulent and painful, as seen in this poem.
• Graves almost died of pneumonia and measles as a child, and was later so badly wounded while fighting in World War One that he was again expected to die from the trauma. He was familiar with physical pain, medical procedures and the long-lasting effects of scars and illnesses – his likening of love to a pathological condition is informed by his own extensive experiences with sickness and medicine.

Only a little context is needed for each poem; where used, it should be applied to the point you're making.

• Graves uses free verse in Symptoms of Love, not following a regular rhyme scheme orpoetic metre.
• He may have felt that this lack of constraint would give him the freedom to fully express his ideas, or that, by refusing to follow a neat structural form, the poem would express how unruly and discomfiting love could be.
• The poem is divided into five three-line stanzas, or tercets.
• Each one is brief and pared-down, perhaps evoking the “leanness” that Graves identifies as one of love’s “symptoms”, or maybe to evoke the sense that the speaker is in too much pain to elaborate beyond these short observations.
• The overall effect is spare and sparse, giving the impression that, far from creating a sense of joy blooming forth and enhancing the speaker’s life, love has instead seemingly stripped them of all but the basic bones of existence.

• Metaphor: The first line baldly states that “Love is universal migraine”, using a metaphor to compare the experience of being in love to the experience of experiencing excruciating and debilitating pain. The adjective “universal” seems to suggest that it is all-encompassing and cannot be escaped.
  
  A further metaphor describes it as a “bright stain”, using oxymoron to evoke a sense of disorientation, given that we usually think of stains as being darker. The fact it affects “the vision” could mean the sufferer’s sense of sight, but ‘vision’ can also be a term used to depict one’s outlook and aspirations for the future; the poet seems to be saying that love not only makes it so we cannot see, but also that it affects our prospects and potential.
  
  “Blotting out reason” further depicts love as something that upsets our ability to think; the extended metaphor clearly evokes love as something that negatively impacts our faculties, supporting the title’s insinuation that love is like a disease.

• Sensory imagery: Graves appeals to several of the reader’s senses to give a fuller picture of the ways in which love can affect people. “Listening for a knock” incorporates auralimagery, our sense of hearing; “a touch of her fingers” is tactile imagery; the “darkened room” and “searching look” are visual imagery, references to sight. Sensory imagery concerning love is usually sensual and enriching, but here it is sparse and on edge, evoking a sense of someone who has become almost paranoid in their desperation to connect with their beloved.

• Asyndeton: The use of asyndeton, in which conjunctions like ‘and’ are left out between words and phrases they might typically connect, occurs many times in the poem. It is noticeable in the second stanza, for example, when Graves writes “leanness, jealousy, / Laggard dawns;” – the effect is one of listing. The lack of a final ‘and’ helps to give the impression that the list could go on and on indefinitely, and that there is no end to the suffering that one in love experiences.

Symptoms of true love
Are leanness, jealousy,
Laggard dawns;

• Enjambment: The poem contains enjambmentacross the lines “a touch of her fingers / In a darkened room”, perhaps as a way of evoking a sense of reaching out, or to show that this item, the touch of his lover’s hand, is too important to be constrained into a single line. Likewise, the enjambment in the final stanza – “Can you endure such grief / At any hand but hers?” – is focused on the lover’s hand, although this time the hand is metaphorically mentioned as a symbol of the whole person. This enjambment is used as the poet is asking a significant question; the fact this question runs over into the next line shows its importance, as well as serving to emphasise the word “grief” at the end of the penultimate line, reminding us of the pain of love.

• Rhetorical question: The poem ends with a rhetorical question: “Can you endure such grief / At any hand but hers?”. Some believe this is Graves’ attempt to alleviate the tension built up in the previous stanzas and that he is suggesting that love is, despite all the pain it causes, worthwhile in the end; however, the fact he chooses to frame this as a question and not a statement is significant.
  
  It implies uncertainty, and perhaps even a wry sense of fatalism, suggesting that one in love will “endure such grief”. Not because love itself is worth the pain, but because the chosen person that they love exerts more power over them than anything or anyone else. It could be that the love of this person does indeed offset the pain and make love worthwhile, but the question leaves the reader unsure – is the poet choosing suffering because it will make him happy in the end? Or is it a loaded question asked by one who is cynically resigned to his fate?

This is not a list of every method or notable use of language and structure in Symptoms of Love.

Look at the poem again. Can you find any of the following?

If you have found these methods, consider what you know about the poem and the poet already.

What effects do these methods create? Why has he used them?

• How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43) – a contrasting poem in which the speaker elaborates on the ways in which the love she feels has enriched and broadened her life.
• Wild Oats – a disillusioned account of love through the lens of a failed relationship, doomed by the fact the poet was obsessed with his fiancée’s friend.
• I Am Very Bothered – a reflection on past actions in which the poet purposely hurt someone, indirectly because of his feelings for her.

Use these questions to hone your knowledge of Symptoms of Love, and to practise using your notes and analysis in organised paragraphs that focus on how particular themes or ideas are shown in the poem. There is an example answer in the following section to demonstrate how you can do this.

• How does Graves illustrate the sense that love involves suffering in Symptoms of Love?
• What does Symptoms of Love show us about Graves’ attitude to love and relationships?
• What poetic methods does Graves use to show how love can affect people in Symptoms of Love?
• How does Graves create a tone of cynicism in Symptoms of Love?

Below is a demonstration of how to use the material in this section to answer an example essay question. The answer below is not a full essay, but only an extract of a longer answer, showing some of the points that could be made.

Q: How does Graves illustrate the sense that love involves suffering in Symptoms of Love?

A: Graves’ poem Symptoms of Love is written in free verse, enabling him to list the aspects of love that he feels cause terrible pain to the one in love without being restricted by a regular rhyme scheme or poetic metre. The title begins this analogy of love as pain and suffering, using the metaphorical term “symptoms” which implies that love is a kind of clinical illness that can afflict us. He employs another metaphor in the first line: “Love is universal migraine”; this bald statement immediately implies that love is an excruciatingly painful headache. A further metaphor describes it as a “bright stain on the vision”, using oxymoron to evoke a sense of disorientation, given that we usually think of stains as being darker. “Vision” can mean sight, but can also be a term used to depict one’s aspirations for the future; the poet seems to be saying that love not only makes it so we cannot see, but also that it affects our prospects and potential. “Blotting out reason” further depicts love as upsetting our ability to think; the whole extended metaphor clearly suggests love negatively impacts our faculties, supporting the idea that love involves suffering.

The poet uses asyndeton in Symptoms of Love to exacerbate the listing effect of these symptoms; when he writes “leanness, jealousy, / Laggard dawns;”, there is no ‘and’ to suggest the final item of the list will follow; instead it seems the list of negative effects will go on indefinitely, showing no end to the suffering love will cause. The language in this triplet also evokes a sense of suffering. “Leanness” implies the one in love is not eating well and has become thin; “jealousy” is a negative emotion; the reference to “laggard dawns” has multiple effects. The guttural-sounding adjective “laggard” suggests slowness, as though the rising of the sun each day is dragged out; we can imagine the poet unable to sleep, enduring a long night in the dark and feeling how sluggishly the light comes back. Laggard itself may also evoke the word “haggard” (an adjective for looking tired and unwell), suggesting the poet is not only thin but also looks unhealthy and traumatised from their suffering, while the hard ‘g’ and ‘d’ sounds give a dragging, listless effect, all contributing to the idea that love involves suffering – no food, no sleep, no relief and no end in sight.

This essay could go on to make the following points, backed up by evidence from the poem and detailed analysis of that evidence:

• Graves uses sensory imagery to suggest how the suffering love causes can affect us in many ways.
• Graves uses caesura before elaborating on the “omens and nightmares” he attributes to love, creating a pause as though he is gathering himself for more terrible details.
• Graves ends with a rhetorical question, which could leave the reader in a state of uncertainty, implying no one can know when the suffering love causes will end.