Arthur Stringer, a Canadian novelist, poet, and screenwriter born in 1874, wrote “If I Love You” during the early twentieth century, when Darwin’s long view of human origins and Freud’s language of the unconscious were reshaping how writers imagined desire. Born in Chatham, Ontario, Stringer spent much of his career in the United States, where the loosening rules of modern verse allowed poets to risk more conversational and bodily language. He is less remembered today for poetry than for popular fiction and film work, yet in this short lyric he strips a declaration of love down to something older and less personal than courtship, giving the poem an unusual biological seriousness.
From its opening address to a “woman of rose / And warmth and wondering eyes,” the poem seems to begin as a conventional love lyric. That mood shifts with the conditional “If I love you” and the odd detachment of “if it so fall out / That you are the woman I choose.” The speaker does not celebrate a unique beloved; he asks what choice even means when the body’s deepest drives are involved. The answer arrives through startling physical imagery: “under the two white breasts / And the womb that makes you woman / The call of the ages whispers / And the countless ghosts awaken.” Love here is not a private emotion between two people. It is an inherited pulse, a voice from ancestors and from the whole reproductive history of the species. The central idea is that desire is older, larger, and more impersonal than the lover’s will; it speaks through bodies and makes individual choice feel almost irrelevant. “This want that builds the world” is the poem’s final, ringing name for that force.
The poem’s form reinforces that idea. It moves in free verse, avoiding the tidy rhyme and meter that might make desire feel composed or domesticated. Lines are uneven, some as short as seven syllables, some reaching toward speech-like or prayer-like phrasing. Repetition gives the poem its rhythm: the opening triple question—“what is there left to say, / And what should it matter to me, / Or what can it mean to you?”—creates a rising, almost breathless momentum. Later, repeated “And” phrases at the starts of lines gather force like whispers becoming a chorus: “And stronger than sighs and weeping / The urge that makes us one, / And older than hate or loving or shame / This want that builds the world!” The contrast between soft words such as “rose,” “warmth,” and “wondering” and harder physical words like “breasts,” “womb,” “hate,” and “shame” keeps the poem from settling into either romance or brutishness. The alliterative pairings “womb that makes you woman” and “want that builds the world” bind womanhood and cosmic creation together, making the female body the site of an ancient, world-making desire. That forward pull rarely lets a line feel finished; each statement spills into the next, much as instinct overrides hesitation.
What makes “If I Love You” significant is its refusal of sentimental comfort. Stringer does not present love as a meeting of unique souls; he presents it as a moment when the individual is briefly overtaken by the species. In an era when many love poems dressed desire in polite metaphor, this poem speaks plainly about anatomy and instinct while retaining a kind of awe. The “countless ghosts” and the “call of the ages” recast attraction as evolutionary memory, not mere feeling. It suggests that the real power of love is not that it belongs to us, but that we belong to it—to a current of want older than morality, older than affection, and strong enough to build the world.