The speaker recalls loving an idealized, shapeless image even before meeting the beloved. Once confronted with her actual body, he feels that love must take on physical form to act, so he fixes it in her features. But he immediately senses that this body is too rich, too overwhelmingly beautiful—every hair is "much too much" and threatens to sink love’s fragile vessel. So he retreats to a middle state: love cannot inhabit pure nothingness or dazzling extremes; it needs a tempered medium, like an angel, whose substance is air, not pure spirit. This leads to a final, bittersweet comparison: the difference between air and angelic purity mirrors the gap between a woman’s love and a man’s—suggesting an unbridgeable distance. The mood is intellectually restless and tenderly frustrated, mixing awe with a hint of melancholy resignation as the speaker tries to chart the impossible geography of love.
Air And Angels — Summary
Twice or thrice had I loved thee, Before I knew thy face or name, So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, Angels affect us oft, and worship'd be; Still when, to where thou wert, I came, Some lovely glorious nothing I did see. But since my soul, whose child love is, Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do, More subtile than the parent is, Love must not be, but take a body too, And therefore what thou wert, and who, I bid Love ask, and now That it assume thy body, I allow, And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.
Whilst thus to ballast love, I thought, And so more steadily to have gone, With wares which would sink admiration, I saw, I had love's pinnace overfraught, Ev'ry thy hair for love to work upon Is much too much, some fitter must be sought; For, nor in nothing, nor in things Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere; Then as an Angel, face, and wings Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear, So thy love may be my loves sphere; Just such disparity As is twixt Air and Angels' purity, 'Twixt women's love, and men's will ever be.