In “In Love,” the speaker moves through a morning orchard as a creature of concealed light. Love has made her feel incandescent, but the brightness is too private to show. She casts herself as a firefly “more forlorn, more gravely” straying among “the glories of the morning tree,” where apple boughs are “white as brides’ bouquets.” That simile matters: the orchard is dressed for a wedding, all pale blossoms and daylight, while the firefly’s own light is invisible against such whiteness. By beginning with “No firefly,” the poem avoids saying simply “I am like a firefly”; instead, it insists that even the loneliest firefly is not lonelier than she is. The word “gravely” gives the wandering a solemn, almost funereal weight. She glides “almost invisibly,” a small, unlit presence in a world that seems to celebrate something she cannot openly join. The iambic pentameter gives the sonnet a quiet walking rhythm, though the line often hesitates, as if the speaker is picking her way among the trees rather than striding. The octave then sharpens the secret. A single tulip stops her: “As though my own heart had dropped out of me, / Seems to have guessed that I, too, am ablaze.” The flower becomes an externalized heart, red and flame-like, recognizing her hidden condition. The word “ablaze” ties the tulip, the firefly, and the speaker into one quiet conflagration, flashing just before the sonnet’s turn.
The sestet moves from orchard to body. “My blood is full of gleamings like seafoam, / My body brims with something of the moon / And shakes, as if with wings that would unfold.” Here the imagery shifts from earth to water and sky. The speaker does not simply feel love; she feels physically altered, filled with unearthly light. “Gleamings like seafoam” suggests luminous foam on dark water—light carried in a dark medium, just as her radiance sits inside her blood. The moon gives her a borrowed, silvery glow, but the wings that “would unfold” hint at transformation not yet completed. The rhyme scheme intensifies this sealed-in feeling: “seafoam” is answered by “home,” “moon” by “noon,” and “unfold” by “gold,” as if the poem’s sounds are themselves locking her radiance inside a room.
The final tercet moves from inward glowing to social fear. “So, after dark, I bar the doors of home, / Lest those, who think that I am grey at noon, / Should stare at night to see that I am gold.” The word “bar” is deliberately severe; it protects her privacy but also imprisons her. During the day she is seen as “grey,” dull and unremarkable. By night her true colour flares out. The poem’s central opposition is compressed into those two small colour words, grey and gold. The phrase “those, who think” isolates the speaker: the people around her see only the grey version she allows them to see. To be in love, Welles suggests, is to carry an almost unbearable brightness that the ordinary daytime world cannot accommodate. She must hide it behind locked doors, not because it is shameful, but because it is too revealing.
What makes “In Love” significant is the way it revises old love-poetry images—the bridal orchard, the glowing lover—into a drama of concealment. The speaker is not addressing a beloved; she is speaking about an inward state. The beloved remains absent, and the love is real only as hidden light. The tightly enclosed sonnet form enacts that secrecy: the rhymes return and lock into place, and the final word, “gold,” arrives after the image of a barred door, so the poem ends with a brightness that is shut away. It is a portrait not of romance but of the effort of hiding it.