Love Just Is Not That Simple

Love is never as simple as it sounds. With love comes a plethora of emotions such as hurt, guilt, forgiveness, and even loneliness. In William Carlos Williams’s This is Just to Say, E.E. Cummings’s 1(a, and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine the complexity love and all the emotions it brings with it are displayed.
In This is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams the speaker presents a simple poem about plums, and how he or she ate the plums that were in the icebox and were sorry for it. The speaker is speaking directly to the person’s whose plums he or she ate, and is asking for forgiveness, remarking on how delicious they tasted and how much they enjoyed them. While the speaker speaks of plums, they are obviously implying more than that. The speaker is not asking for forgiveness for eating the plums of another person—possibly a counter part, rather they are asking for forgiveness for hurting the other person in being selfish. Similarly to enjoying something at someone else’s expense and hurting them, the speaker of the poem enjoyed the plums without caring about whom they belonged to. Here an underlying theme of deceit exists, where the speaker is dealing with the guilt of hurting their counterpart and is asking for forgiveness indirectly by admitting to eating their plums. While the poem is structured simply with colloquial wording, no punctuation or complex sentences, the content is complex when reading in between the lines, just as love is.
E.E. Cummings’s poem 1(a, the poem is written in a way that it is unable to be spoken. When taking apart the poem, it reads: l(a leaf falls) oneliness, implying that a leaf falling signifies loneliness. While the poem is hard to read, having four words divided into nine lines, at first glance it seems as it has no complex meaning. Reading more into the poem and trying to understand why the author wrote it, a reader can draw conclusions that maybe the author is facing so many emotions that he is unable to express them in a standard structured poem. Just as love is so complex and full of varying emotions, so is the author of such a simple poem. The author is so engulfed in so many emotions, no one is possible able to comprehend what he is going though just as readers are unable to understand the poem—on the surface it looks simple, but the content is complex.
In Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich the main character Lipsha remarks on his childhood, living with his grandparents, and through them understanding the meaning of love. Being a naïve, innocent child, Lipsha does not understand why people stop loving each other—such as his grandfather no longer loved his grandmother. He believes love is something simple, and that getting someone to be in love again can be fixed easily by “love medicine” or some kind of potion. Lipsha devises a plan to feed both his grandparents a heart of a goose, thinking this will make them stay together for life. The irony in this situation is that while trying to make the grandfather eat his share of the heart, he chokes on it and dies. After the loss of his grandfather, Lipsha is able to comprehend the full extent of love and its complexity while watching his grandmother mourn over her dead husband. When seeing his grandmother suffer over her loss, Lipsha comes to a revolation about love saying how “love is a true feeling” and cannot be brought back by medicine, but rather by the depth of love.
While some poems or literary works may speak of love in simple terms, being direct and straightforward, other authors such as E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Louise Erdrich decide to take a different path, and portray love as how it is complex and full of a variety of emotions.