"Love Poem" is a title that promises tenderness and then delivers a plea for an ending. The word that opens the poem, "surcease," is an old-fashioned term for a stopping, a relief from pain. Seidman says it twice, then twice again after the first group of images. It sounds less like description than like a prayer repeated by someone who doubts anyone is listening. The central idea is that love at its most extreme is an affliction, not a comfort. The speaker is "insane with love," and the only rest on offer looks uncomfortably like death.
Between the chants, the poem gives us a run of images with no explanation attached. The first is "the cloud's edge / a crack / in the sun's face." The sun is given a face, and the face is damaged, so the sky seems to be breaking before the speaker does. Next comes "the church tower / dead east / in the mornings." "Dead east" is an ordinary way of saying due east, but the word "dead" turns it into a small omen. The tower stands where it always stands, pointing at the dawn, and it offers no help. The poem never says what is wrong with this religion, but it gives the tower no power to grant the relief the refrain asks for.
The third group of images changes pace. "Brown hair tied with a black felt ribbon" is the longest line in the poem, and it lingers like a glance that won't leave its object. It is the only moment of the beloved's physical presence, tactile and oddly exact, and the black ribbon quietly brings mourning into the picture. Then the camera pulls away to "a building with the windows gone" and "men throwing boards from a truck." Judging by the imagery, the world outside is one of emptied or half-demolished things and indifferent labour. The building with its windows gone echoes the cracked face of the sun, since both are damaged and no longer looking back. The men with their boards do not know or care that anyone is suffering nearby.
None of these images is joined to the next by a verb or a link. They sit side by side like things noticed by a mind that cannot hold a sentence together. The sound is hard and clipped: "cloud's," "crack," "church," "dead." Nothing rhymes, and the poem relies on repetition, short lines and the heavy stress of "dead east" instead. The sibilance of "surcease" (the hiss of an exhale) makes the refrain feel like breathing out.
Then the grammar changes. The last section is one sentence that runs on, and its short lines drop down the page the way the spider does: "the spider / descended on a thread / again / to bind me into death." The origin of the spider is the most unsettling detail. It comes "from the mind's light," so it is not an outside enemy but something produced by the speaker's own consciousness. The light that should illuminate becomes the place the threat descends from, just as the sun's face was cracked at the start. The isolated word "again" is chilling in its flatness. It tells us this has happened before and will happen again, so love here is a cycle of obsession and not a single event. A spider also does not simply kill. It wraps and binds, and the verb "bind" fits a love that is a kind of captivity.
The poem's final irony is that "surcease" may be answered after all, only not as the speaker hoped. The thing that stops the pain is the thing that takes everything else with it. Seidman leaves that possibility unspoken and lets the repetition and the final image carry it.
The poem matters because it will not make love comfortable. It gives us a love poem with almost no praise in it, only one precise detail of the beloved's hair set against a world of cracks, gaps and falling boards. It also shows how much a poem can do by arrangement alone. Placing images next to each other without comment creates a mood of dread that no explanation could improve.