“If thou must love me” approaches the overwhelming power of love by thinking about what love isn’t. The poem’s speaker addresses a lover, raising and quickly rejecting the many day-to-day reasons this person might claim to love her: beauty, intellectual connection, and even enjoying each other’s company aren’t enough, the speaker says. Because people and circumstances can always change, love that can so easily explain itself is ultimately not worth much.
As such, the only love the speaker values is love for love’s sake. The speaker’s vagueness about what that kind of love actually is or means only proves her point: the kind of love she values can’t be clearly put into human terms. It is, rather, a mysterious connection that goes beyond human lives and touches eternity.
The speaker’s starts by rejecting all the common reasons one might give for being in love. While it’s a poetic commonplace to observe that physical beauty doesn’t last, the speaker here suggests that any kind of reason for loving someone is vulnerable to time. Even being emotionally close or intellectually simpatico won’t necessarily last forever; the speaker, the lover, or both may change.
Similarly, it’s not enough to be taken care of by a lover; sympathy, too, is subject to change. If the speaker’s lover is moved to love by her tears, and comforts her, and she stops crying—what then?
Every possible reason for loving someone is thus shown to be subject to change—because change is a plain fact of life. Even the nicest parts of the person someone loves are subject to the mutability that marks all of human existence. The only real love, the speaker then argues, is a love that connects lovers to eternity—an eternity that seems, in some mysterious way, to be love itself.
In the last two lines of the poem, the speaker once again insists on loving for “love’s sake.” She doesn’t explain what this means, however, except that love for love’s sake is timeless and unchanging. It’s precisely in her lack of explanation that the speaker hints at what love is really like: love, she suggests, is something that goes beyond explanation in words. It isn’t because of some good quality in the beloved; it just is.
