Most love poems try to make a feeling vivid enough to touch. Dae's does the opposite. It opens with three failures of the senses and builds its argument on them: "My eyes could not see it / My ears could not hear it / My fingers could not touch it." The repeated pattern of body part, "could not," verb and "it" is flat, almost clinical, like someone ticking off evidence that has come back empty. Then comes the hinge, "But I knew it was there," and the poem turns to a different kind of knowledge, one that does not depend on proof.
To make that knowledge convincing, the speaker borrows from nature, and the three examples work on different scales. The sun rising is a daily certainty, winter melting into spring belongs to the year, and the wave beating on the sand happens moment after moment. The phrases "The same way," "The way," "The way" pile up so that the speaker's confidence seems to gather weight. The verb "beat" is a striking choice, since waves more often "break" or "roll." "Beat" is insistent and suggests a pulse, which quietly links the sea to the heart.
The word that complicates the poem is "Lurking." It usually belongs to predators, yet here it describes something that is "still there / Lurking in the shadows." Grammatically, either love or the obstacles could be doing the lurking, and the ambiguity is productive. Love is not glowing in plain view. It is hidden behind things that block it: "Of pride / Of ego / Of distance." These lines are short and stacked, each beginning with "Of," so the reader stops on every one and each obstacle lands separately. Two of the three, pride and ego, are inner states, and only distance is external. Judging by this list, the speaker thinks the main barriers lie within the people themselves.
The next shift is the poem's most hopeful: "all of these things can be overcome / If you allow it." The verb is "allow," not "fight" or "conquer." Overcoming happens through softening and consent. The sudden "you" also changes the poem from private reflection to something closer to an appeal.
The ending is where the construction pays off. "For even though" is cut off at the line break, so the sentence hangs just as the speaker's certainty seems to. Then taste arrives as the fourth sense after sight, hearing and touch, and with it the poem names a specific person for the first time: "your love." The phrase "bittersweet taste" admits that love includes pain. It is also a small paradox, because the speaker claims not to have tasted it and yet knows exactly what it tastes like. The flavour seems to come from memory. Even the qualifier "At all times" is honest. The speaker does not say love was never felt, only that it was not felt constantly.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme, no punctuation and no regular metre. Its rhythm comes from repetition and from the length of its lines, which run from the long, even statements of the opening to the clipped fragments in the middle. The diction is plain and close to speech. Without punctuation, the reader decides where to pause, which suits a poem about things left unstated.
The last line, "I know it is there," echoes the first certainty, "I knew it was there," but the tenses have moved from past to present. The belief that began as a memory has become a current conviction, and the poem ends where it began, only more settled.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it earns its title, "Love is always present." It does not simply announce the claim. It first admits absence, silence and doubt, and then argues that love is something you trust rather than something you perceive. The poem suggests a gap between two people, whether from distance or from quarrel, and its answer is quiet faith that does not need to be proved.