Love in If Thou Must Love Me, Let it be for Naught, To His Lady, and The Taxi :: To His Lady The Taxi poems

Love in "If Thou Must Love Me, Let it be for Naught", "To His Lady", and "The Taxi" "when a man loves a woman he'd give up all his comfort, sleep out in the rain, if she said that's the way it ought to be" (Percy Sledge). No truer words have ever been spoken when it comes to relationships between man and woman. For when a man and a woman come together for a relationship it should be for the right reason, and that reason is love. Love is much more than just a word though, it is a feeling and emotion that cannot be duplicated, imitated, or simulated. Love is, as described in "If Thou Must Love Me, Let it be for Naught", "To His Lady", and "The Taxi", the emotions of joy, happiness, caring, passion, commitment, pleasure, and even pain all rolled into one, which is shared between two people. The only love is true love. This means that when one loves another, the love that they are feeling should encompass all attributes of the person they are loving. If one were to say that they loved another for their beautiful eyes, this would not be true love. In order for it to be love, one would not just see the beautiful eyes, they would see everything about that person as beautiful. Elizabeth Barrett Browning agrees when she says to not love for a smile or a look, instead one should love for loves sake. ?Thou mayst love on, through love?s eternity? (206 14). True love is also a love that is eternal; true love is never ending. Henry Howard also believed that love should be everlasting. Wedding vows have become, to a certain extent, things of the past. People are getting married only to be divorced with in the first couple years of marriage. Till death do us part no longerholds meaning in the holy union of two souls. This is not true love. Luckily Howard helps us to see what true love is when he paints us a picture in words in ?To "His Lady?. ?In the long night, or in the shortest day/ In lofty youth, or when my hairs gray/ Set me in earth, in heaven, or yet in hell/ Sick, or in health, in ill fame, or in good/ Yours will I be? (277 lines 6, 8-9, 11-12). Through thick and thin, no matter what happens the man in this poem will stick by his lady.