By Tabitha Bozeman
Valentine’s Day is this weekend, and it’s a holiday society seems to have a love/hate relationship with. It can feel overly commercialized, or it can serve as a lovely opportunity to remind those we love how special they are. It can invite us to pamper ourselves and remember that loving who we are matters, too. It can also prompt us to consider the many forms of love in our lives—and to celebrate them. Most often, though, Valentine’s Day feels like a One Size Fits All moment of judgment over whether or not someone has a romantic partner. Yet even a cursory Google search reveals multiple definitions of the word “love,” and the very first entry is “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties, such as maternal love for a child.” Romantic love actually takes a back seat in the order of definitions, appearing second as “affection or tenderness felt by lovers,” followed immediately by “affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests between friends.” Love, it turns out, is a complex and varied mix of relationships and emotions.
In my classes this week, we focused on several literary devices specific to poetry. Literary devices are both tools and containers; constraints often create opportunities to build, adjust, and rebuild. Limitations require creative thinking—working with what you have, where you are, in the moment. That can feel uncomfortable when we are learning a new hobby, practicing a skill, or mastering the structure of an essay. Yet the devices we choose—and the ones we set aside—not only shape what we create, but clarify our purpose.
In similar ways, the forms our love takes with friends, family, and partners shape how we express and understand it. Literary devices do not eliminate limitation; they teach us how to work within it. Love often does something similar when we do the best we can, where we are, with what we have. Rarely do we have ideal conditions for showcasing our love. We love after long work shifts. We love through illness. We love within budget constraints. We love imperfect people, and our love itself is imperfect. Like poetry, love is often more powerful when shaped by sustained intention rather than momentary extravagance. Just as poetry is not merely emotion spilled onto a page, love is not simply a performance reserved for a holiday. There are tools, constraints, and containers we can use to build, refine, and hold both our love and the people we cherish.
Among the devices we discussed were enjambment, rhyme, and diction. Enjambment invites the reader to find meaning in one line, then continue into the next where that meaning deepens. A pause, a continuation, an unfolding—this movement adds rhythm and texture to a poem. It can emphasize sound, heighten emotion, or suggest the passing of time. The device itself is specific, but its application is wide. Rhyme is another deceptively simple tool. Most of us think we know what “rhyme” means, but there are multiple kinds. End rhyme gives poetry its familiar sing-song quality, like a nursery rhyme. Internal rhyme appears unexpectedly in the middle of lines and stanzas. The words still echo each other, but they work differently to serve the poet’s purpose. Then there are eye rhymes—words that look like they should rhyme but do not, like “rain” and “again”—and approximate or slant rhymes, where sounds nearly match but remain slightly off. These echoes create rhythm, mood, and image in subtle ways. Again, one overarching device, but many ways to use it.
Diction is one of my favorite devices to explore with students because they immediately recognize it when I say, “It’s not WHAT you say, it’s…” and they finish with, “HOW you say it.” Our words are powerful, and we all understand that we can say one thing while meaning something entirely different. Words—like “love”—carry multiple meanings. Denotative meaning refers to a word’s dictionary definition (which, as we’ve seen, can be layered and complex), while connotative meaning encompasses the social, emotional, and cultural weight a word carries.
I used to read love poems and assume they were written only to, for, and about romantic love. But the longer I love those I love, the more I recognize how widely those poems apply—to maternal love, familial love, soul-friend love, and romantic love alike. As one of my favorite poets, e.e. cummings, wrote:
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it.
Loving well does not have to be confined to one idealized version; it renews, evolves, and shifts as our roles and relationships change. And just as there is beauty in the structures of poetry, there is depth and richness in the ways we shape and express love in everyday life.
