Old Love

“Old Love” is written in free verse, with no regular meter or rhyme pattern. The poem employs simple diction (word choices) and sentence structure which reflect the situation and speech pattern of the individuals it describes. The speaker simply reports an extraordinary moment they have witnessed, without any embellishment or an effort to milk it for pathos. They merely mark their surprise at the uncle’s emotional outburst. The uncle speaks in an emotionally heightened register, without sentimentality or flowery rhetoric. The plainness of their speech contrasts the intensity of their feelings, which contributes to the poem’s emotional impact. The poem presents the uncle and his niece or nephew as two ordinary people, who speak simply but feel deeply.

Since the poem’s speaker is a niece or nephew who witnesses their uncle’s grief, the poem could have described what they see and hear entirely in their own words. If that were the case, the speaker’s perspective would have completely mediated the uncle’s experience, subsuming it into the speaker’s perception. However, the poet gives the uncle his own