Most love poems hurry to announce what love is. Balachandran V's "Lessons in Love" begins by admitting the speaker has no idea. "It ain't easy to write about love," he says, and the slangy "ain't" tells us to expect plain talk, not oratory. He ranks himself below the blind, the deaf and the dumb, who in his rueful logic see, hear and speak better than he can. The wording is dated now, but the point is his humility: he believes he lacks every sense that love requires.
The next two stanzas deepen that failure. He asks whether love is "sorrow," "joy," or "the lust betwixt my legs," a line that jolts because the old-fashioned "betwixt" sits beside something so blunt. He seems to be trying every register to find one that fits. Secondhand sources do no better. Songs earn only "I like the lines, nothing more," and books collapse into "Aay bee cee dee, eee eff gee." The phonetic spelling is a sharp touch. Words turn into a child's alphabet chant, sound without meaning, and the chant stops at *g*, as if the lesson never gets further. There is an irony here too, since the poem is built from the very words it says cannot deliver love.
Then the poem turns, and the language turns with it. A tired traveller opens a gate, hears a bark, and the syntax starts to tumble. "Home am bound" and "Am scratched with nails" drop the "I," as though the speaker has no time to finish a sentence. The verbs pile up: the dog leaps, licks, jumps, bites, pulls, howls, tugs, whirls. The line endings "at me… at me… at me" make us feel surrounded. Two of the lines also answer the opening. "I can't see, for he licks my eyes" and "I can't walk, for he jumps at me" echo the claim that the blind see better than he does. Now he is briefly blind and helpless, and it does not matter at all. Everything in the list sounds like an attack, yet it is affection, and the poem keeps it messy, with scratches and splattered dirt.
The rhythm helps. Lines are short, about a breath long, and mostly end-stopped. The poem is largely unrhymed, so the chime of "close" and "nose" in the sixth stanza stands out. It arrives just as the frenzy eases, and the comic worry, "Taking care he not bites my nose," keeps the moment from turning sugary. Then comes the quietest line in the poem: "In my arms he holds so still." After all that motion, stillness is the surprise.
The final stanza gathers the poem's feeling through repetition: "In my arms… In my heart… In his eyes." The focus moves from body to emotion to the other creature. Love is called "the thing called love," a deliberately plain word for something he can finally hold. The images of a "cup so full" and "limpid pools" are both liquid, and they answer the speaker's earlier emptiness. "Limpid" is also the most lyrical word in the poem, and it appears only at the moment of arrival. The last image is the most striking: "I see my face, I know it not." Reflected in the dog's eyes, the speaker meets a self he does not recognise, perhaps an unguarded, happier one. He gets his sight back, not through his own eyes but through someone else's.
The closing line, "Ladies and Gents, your lesson in love," is a showman's flourish. The man who could not define love now presents it like a ringmaster, and what he presents is a muddy dog. The joke is affectionate, and it is self-mocking too.
The poem matters for its honesty and its method. It does not tell us what love is. It shows a welcome so physical and unembarrassed that definitions seem beside the point. For a student, it is a good example of "show, don't tell." It also suggests that the most convincing proof of love may be the least wordy.