ABSTRACT
A fair copy MS in WBY's hand with corrections may or may not pre-date the poem's first publication: this is reproduced with transcription in Cornell ISWGH, 44–45. In modern critical discussion, H. Bloom continued to set the poem alongside ‘Adam's Curse’, judging that it shows, at a period of WBY's work where little was wholly successful, ‘some success in an against-the-grain mode’. In early printings, the poem formed a single fourteen-line block and, despite its being constructed entirely of rhyming couplets, was still instantly recognisable as an exercise in the sonnet form. The sonnet could well be read, therefore, as deeply traditional, and even Shakespearean, in its tendency: arguments against love are given their full rhetorical weight, but are refuted by the different eloquence of love itself, in a ‘heart’ that cannot be argued into changing.
