Harriet Monroe is best known as the founding editor of Poetry magazine, the Chicago journal that gave early voice to T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Carl Sandburg. “Love Songs 2,” published in her 1914 collection You and I, shows Monroe’s own quieter art. Written just as modernism was beginning to reshape American verse, the poem stays close to an older lyric tradition: a brief song about love expressed through natural landscapes. The title suggests one movement in a larger sequence, and the poem itself behaves like a short musical phrase, built from echoing rhymes and contrasting images.
The central idea is that love contains opposing moods and places. The speaker first compares the beloved’s love to a “blue, blue wave” where “little rainbows play,” then to a “mountain cave” where “cool shadows darkly stay.” These opening similes pair bright movement with dark stillness. The wave is active, light-filled, and full of color; the cave is hidden, cool, and sheltering. Love, Monroe suggests, is not one single feeling. It can thrill “like great gales at war” and soothe “like softest singing.” It can carry the speaker inward to “clear rivers” with “reeds and rushes swinging” or outward to “pearly shores afar” where “temple bells are ringing.” In ten lines, the poem maps love as a landscape of extremes—turbulence and calm, intimacy and distance, fresh water and far-off sea.
The construction reinforces that idea through rhythm and rhyme. The poem alternates four-beat and three-beat lines, creating a rocking, wave-like movement: “Your love is like a blue, blue wave / The little rainbows play in.” The rhyme scheme moves from abab in the first four lines to cdcdcd in the final six, with soft falling rhymes such as “playing,” “staying,” “singing,” “swinging,” and “ringing.” Those endings make the poem feel open-ended, as if each image flows into the next rather than snapping shut. The repeated grammatical pattern—“Your love is like,” “It thrills me,” “It soothes,” “It bears me”—works like a refrain, while each new image shifts the emotional key. This is lyric poetry doing what song does: using repetition and variation to make feeling memorable.
Monroe’s imagery is deliberately simple, but its sounds and word choices create a rich sensory texture. The repetition of “blue, blue” deepens the color, while “little rainbows” adds a flicker of fragile light. The cave’s “cool shadows darkly stay” uses the adverb “darkly” not just to describe shade but to make stillness feel heavy and intentional. The phrase “great gales at war” is rougher, its hard g and r sounds briefly breaking the poem’s smoothness before “softest singing” restores it. Later, “clear rivers” and “reeds and rushes swinging” press sibilant and liquid consonants together, so the line itself seems to sway. The final couplet moves into another register entirely: “pearly shores afar” and “temple bells” introduce a distant, almost spiritual landscape, as if love expands beyond the body into something vast and serene.
The significance of “Love Songs 2” lies in its concentrated lyricism. It is not experimental in the way much of the poetry Monroe published would become, but it demonstrates how much emotional range a short lyric can hold. By balancing wildness and shelter, movement and stillness, the poem turns a familiar subject—love’s power—into a small musical world. For readers today, it also offers a fuller portrait of Monroe herself: the editor who championed modern poetry also wrote love songs that belong to an older, but still vivid, tradition of nature and feeling.