What Is Love?

As I do not attempt to rival your witty description of Love I will try if I can match it in sentiment, and that I may start with a fair chance I begin with your own question What Is Love?

1 ’Tis that delightsome (full) transport we can feel
2 Which Painters cannot paint, nor words reveal
3 Nor any art, we know of, can conceal.
4 Canst thou describe the sun-beams to the blind?
5 Or make him feel a shadow with his mind?
6 So neither can we by description shew
7 This first of all Felicities below.
8 When happy Love pours magic o’er the soul,
9 And all our Thoughts in sweet delirium roll,
10 When Contemplation spreads its rain-bow wings
11 And ev’ry flutter some new rapture brings,
12 How sweetly then our moments glide away,
13 And Dreams repeat the transports of the day,
14 We live in Extasy, to all things kind,
15 For Love can teach a moral to the mind.
16 But are there not some other marks that prove
17 What is this Wonder of the soul, call’d Love?
18 O yes there are but of a different kind,
19 The dreadful horrors of a dismal mind.
20 Some Jealous Fury throws her poison’d dart
21 And rends in pieces the distracted heart.
22 When Love’s a Tyrant, and the soul a slave,
23 No hope remains to thought — but in the grave.
24 In that dark den it sees an End to grief,
25 And what was once its dread becomes relief.
26 What are the Iron chains the hands have wrought?
27 The hardest chain to break is made of Thought.
28 Think well of this, ye Lovers, and be kind,
29 Nor play with Torture on a tortur’d mind.
T.P.

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Title (in Source Edition): What Is Love?
Author: Thomas Paine
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Headnote: The manuscript can be found in the American Philosophical Society’s Richard Gimbel Collection of Thomas Paine Papers, B P165.

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Source edition

Cleary, Scott M., ed. Claeys, Gregory, gen. ed. Thomas Paine Collected Writings. Vol. II. Part 2: Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2026. 5 Volumes.

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