A rainbow usually stands for variety, and that is how Balachandran V begins. "Love is like a many-coloured rainbow" is a plain, open simile, but the poem stretches it at once: there are "many more shades, many more hues, / Than the sky could ever paint." The sky becomes a painter who has run out of paint. The speaker then lays out love as a spectrum. At one end sits "the love of self", and the other end is somewhere "eyes never ever can reach", which echoes the way a real spectrum runs past what we can see. Each colour "gleams" for someone who gave the speaker their love. Love here is plural, and the poem admits it.
The second stanza is where the tension arrives. The abstract voice of the opening gives way to a direct address, "But, my love", and the speaker makes a request that is both tender and slightly odd. He has just shown the beloved a whole spectrum of attachments, and now begs, "Do not, please, compare / Do not, please, ask if I love you more." The repeated "Do not, please" sounds like a plea, almost a flinch. The poem seems to know that honesty about loving many people could sound like a threat to the one person listening. Even the sentence structure suggests nerves: the questions he fears ("for whom else I do", "whether it shines brighter for you") are stacked up with "And" and left hanging.
The third stanza brings the poem's neatest idea. Light falls on the beloved's face, and she becomes "a prism". A real prism splits white light into colours, so the poem reverses the physics: "Instead of scattering, you converge / Me into a single beam of light." The beloved doesn't divide the speaker's love into shades. She gathers it. The grammar is slightly strained, since "converge" is used as if it were something done to a person, but the strain suits the meaning, because the speaker is being pulled into one shape. The lines then shorten into a rising list, "Of the stars / Of the moon / Of the sun", which covers night and day and every light source the sky has. After the earthbound, rain-dependent rainbow, the poem reaches for permanent sources of light, and the closing "forever and ever" has the sweeping, storybook ring of a promise.
The poem is in free verse, with no regular metre and no fixed rhyme scheme. Line lengths swell and shrink with the thought. There are faint echoes, such as "you" and "do" in the second stanza and "more" and "compare" near the end, but they sound like accidents of speech rather than design, which keeps the tone confiding. The real music comes from repetition: "many more shades, many more hues", "each shade, each tinge, each glint of light", "Do not, please". Light words keep returning too: "glow", "gleams", "glint", "shines", "sunshine". The stanzas also shrink and expand deliberately, from seven lines to five, then eight, then a closing three. The final stanza is the quietest, as if the speaker has lowered his voice.
That ending is its cleverest move. A poem built almost entirely from visual images tells the beloved to "think no more of the myriad of colours / Just close your eyes and bask." Colours are for looking at, but sunshine is something you feel as warmth on your skin. The speaker's answer to the problem of comparison is to stop counting and start feeling. The trailing ellipsis after "love" leaves the line open, as though the warmth carries on past the last word.
The poem's significance lies in how it handles a delicate emotional problem. Plenty of love poems claim to be the only love there ever was. This one admits that love has many shades and then argues that the beloved's light gathers them into one, which is a more grown-up and slightly riskier claim. Some of the language is familiar ("forever and ever", the stars and the moon), and the prism image is not perfectly consistent. But the central picture of a rainbow turning into a single beam is easy to remember, and it gives a simple, sincere poem a real argument. The dateline reads "Trivandrum 29.05.2009", but the poem gives no hint of the occasion behind it, so its force comes from the text alone.