Few love poems begin by telling you to watch your step. Balachandran V's "Eruptions of Love" opens high in misty grasslands where every blade of grass is wet, and warns the reader: "Tread softly, for you are trampling upon beads of love." Dew becomes something precious and breakable, and love is found first in the ground itself rather than in a person. Only gradually does the poem narrow from landscape to two bodies, and finally to a single plea.
Its central idea is that love is gentle and violent at once, and that it lives in touch. The title promises volcanoes, yet the first stanza gives us dew, and the poem never treats this as a contradiction. "Love erupts slowly," says the second stanza, an oxymoron, since eruptions are usually sudden. The soil "swells," then "surges," then "drips / Drop by drop." A huge geological force is slowed to the pace of seepage, so we feel pressure building beneath something quiet. Then the poem makes the reader take part: "Press your face onto the soil." Love arrives through "your nose, your lips, your tongue" before it "spreads into your blood." Smell, touch and taste come in turn, then the bloodstream. Love is not looked at here but absorbed.
In the third stanza the "you" has become a beloved ("my love!"), and the eruption moves to "the tips of your fingers." The speaker also becomes exposed. The phrases "my ravaged face" and "my ageing skin" are blunt, and the hope that the skin "will glow again / At your touch!" is hedged with a small, human "perhaps." Judging by these lines, the speaker is older, and love here is a form of restoration, a hope of being made visible again.
The fourth stanza is the poem's peak, and its images darken. "Love spurts, my dear, red beads of blood / As you tear into me in ecstasy!" The beads from the opening return, but dew has turned to blood, and the verb "tear" lets pain into the pleasure. The doubled "Love, Love," breaks the syntax as if the speaker has run out of breath, and the stanza ends in a flash: "Flares fly high; I am blinded by the light!" The volcano has finally gone off, and what it takes from the speaker is sight.
The form supports all this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The stanzas run to four, five, five, four and three lines, and the lines swing between long, sweeping statements and abrupt fragments like "Drop by drop." Dashes interrupt thoughts mid-flow, and the exclamation marks gather in the middle stanzas, where feeling runs highest, then vanish. The verbs trace the same curve: erupts, surges, drips, spurts, flares, and finally "flows." That last word is cooler and calmer than anything before it.
The ending is where the poem turns. "Love flows only from your fingertips" shrinks the whole volcanic landscape to one place, the beloved's hands. "Touch me when you love –" is another instruction, echoing "Tread softly" from the first stanza. Both commands tell us how to handle something precious. Then the poem stops: "And – before you leave, for ever…" The sentence is never finished, and we are left to supply what must happen before the leaving. Whether the leaving means death, parting or something else, the poem does not say. The earlier talk of ageing skin makes mortality a natural reading, though that is an inference from the imagery and not something the text states.
The poem is worth reading closely because it builds so much from one metaphor and a handful of plain words. It joins landscape to body, tenderness to violence, and desire to the fear of loss. The ellipsis at the end leaves the poem with its sentence hanging, much as love is held by someone who knows the time is limited.