The Billy Collins poem “Aimless Love” has many conditions of the Greater Romantic Lyric such as opening with a description of the landscape, “This morning as I walked along the lakeshore” (1). The poem also contains a shift from the external landscape to the poet’s internal one, “I fell in love with a wren/and later in the day with a mouse/the cat had dropped under the dining room table” (2-4). The poet shifts from describing the landscape to explaining an internal emotion; love. The poem does have a different ending than is typical for a romantic lyric, however, in that it does not end where it began with the poet describing a landscape, but instead describing a bathroom, “So at home in its pale green soap dish” (34).
This poem seems to be about, as the title suggests, love that has no real point. The poem seems to throw the emotion around. To me, it seems that the poem seems to be either a reaction of someone who has been hurt by love, or the disclaimer of someone who finds it easy to fall in love. The poem seems like it might be the reaction of someone hurt by love because at times the poet seems to express bitterness towards romantic love, “This is the best kind of love, I thought,/without recompense, without gifts,/or unkind words, without suspicion,/or silence on the telephone” (10-13). This stanza begins by refering to the things the poet loves in nature and ends with clearly describing love with another person as negative; which is the only way romantic love is portrayed in the poem. The ideas of falling in love presented in the first two stanzas also go along with this kind of reaction because the things the poet falls in love with cannot reciprocate and therefore cannot hurt him. Another reason that it goes along with this idea is that the poet might view love as meaningless after being hurt and therefore throw around the emotion more.
The third to last stanza can also be interpreted multiple ways to suit either way of interpreting the poem. This stanza, “But my heart is always propped up/in a field on its tripod/ready for the next arrow” can be seen as portraying negative or positive vulnerablity (26-28). The arrows mentioned can be viewed as daggers meant to pierce and destroy his heart or as Cupid’s arrows which cause the poet to continually fall in love. If the poem is to be interpreted as the reaction of one who has been scorned, the dead mouse can be seen to symbolize the poet. It is mentioned that a cat has killed the mouse and cats are carelss with their prey until the animal gives up and dies. This could symbolize the way that someone has been careless with the poet and injured him to the point where he just gives up and refuses to partake in that sort of love any longer. The burial of the mouse could be seen to symbolize the poet hiding his vulnerable heart, off an older, more trusting version of himself. When the poet mentions washing his hands, “I founcd myself standing at the bathroom sink/gazing down affectionately at the soap” it could symbolize the poet permanently giving up on love by first burying a vulnerable version of himself and then washing his hands of the whole past ordeal and the idea of future ones (31-32).
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