Being completely honest here, I am having trouble finding the exact message of this poem, and the meaning I have derived may be faulty, so please feel free to comment about it! It would be greatly appreciated.
Thomas Wyatt’s “The Long Love” is a poem about love and control, and how the two conflict. This poem personifies love as a soldier that in our minds we quarter, which I think is a really unique take that I like because it can bring a lot of interpretations for it. It could be used to depict love as a confused, in the context that many soldiers may die not knowing the true cause that they out their lives down for. I think that would be a fun take on that, although in this poem it is not used in that way. In this poem, love is personified as a faithful soldier, who will lie down and die with his host/master. (This is the part I am confused about and still trying to understand)
After the first 4 lines personify love as a soldier which “thought doth harbor,” it introduces a new character assumed to be the lover of the poem. The lover is portrayed as having a certain amount of power or control over the narrator, and thus causes conflict as love’s “hardiness taketh displeasure.” Or, the way the lover reigns control over the narrators love is something the narrator’s love does not like. Love and control are conflicting.
This is solved in the final 6 lines, where the love flees into the forest like a deer (A deer is an animal we hunt for sport so is the poem trying to depict love as vulnerable or innocent??), and love faithfully dies in a field (Weird).
Again, my interpretation of the poem is probably flawed, but I see it as this. The narrators comparison to love as a faithful soldier and the lover as controlling (not entirely manipulative but definitely limiting) is telling us that if we are ever unhappy in a relationship then we have full control to flee??? (And die in a field…. This is definitely a stretch sorry)
This is a really interesting take! I did not even connect love to a soldier and I’m really glad I was able to read the poem again from that perspective. In my mind, I took the idea of love being ‘enduring’ as the main idea of the poem. I think giving love a pronoun was very intentional from the author to establish that love has an identity and has endurance, is able to withstand and persevere through a lot. For example the line, “with his hardiness taketh displeasure,” I interpreted that as the speaker commenting on the up’s and down’s in love and that even with strength and ‘boldness’ of love it has faces of displeasure and hardship. I interpreted this as the speaker being someone who has experienced a long love and have also experienced/are experiencing heartbreak which contributes to the darker tone of the poem. Instead of taking the battle between the speaker and love so seriously I thought it was more of a metaphorical conflict happening within the speaker.
Great job!