Size is the first thing the speaker of "Big love" announces, and the eight short lines that follow work out what that size costs. "I am big," the poem begins, flat and unqualified, like someone filling a doorway. The comparisons are odd ones: "a declaration of war" and "a laugh in church." Neither is ordinary bigness. A declaration of war is vast in its consequences. A laugh in church is tiny in itself but huge in its setting, because it breaks a silence everyone had agreed to keep. Both are impossible to take back and impossible to ignore. They also pull in opposite directions, one deadly serious and the other helplessly comic, so the speaker's bigness seems to hold menace and joy, grandeur and absurdity, all at once.
Then comes the pivot: "but you." The line break leaves the addressee standing alone for a beat, and what follows is much quieter. "Must have somebody" can be read two ways: you already have someone, or you need someone. Either way, "somebody" is a deliberately plain word after all that war and laughter, and it hides a pun the poem soon picks up. Somebody is "some" plus "body," and a few lines later the speaker calls himself a "sum of others." Sum and some sound identical, so the poem is doing arithmetic and talking about bodies at the same time. One person turns out to be many added together.
The word "therefore" is the cleverest moment. It belongs to proofs and legal documents, yet here it introduces a request: because you must have somebody, "care for / that sum of others / that I am." The plea is dressed as logic, which is both funny and a little shy. If you love one person, the speaker argues, you have signed up for everyone who made them. This is a sharper cousin of Whitman's famous "I contain multitudes," except that Whitman's speaker celebrates the crowd inside him, while this one asks someone to look after it.
That is why the tone changes so much between the opening and the close. The poem starts as a boast and ends as a request. "Care for" is a small, domestic phrase, the language of nursing and tending, and it sits oddly beside battles and church bells. By the end, bigness no longer means power. It means being crowded, being made of everyone who has shaped you, and therefore being a lot to look after. The title "Big love" suddenly reads two ways: love of great size, and a love that comes with a crowd attached.
The form supports this. The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no punctuation at all, and only "I" is capitalised. That gives it the breathless, unedited feel of something said out loud and a little too honestly. The line lengths trace the shift in mood. The longest line, "like a declaration of war," is the stately one, with its rolling "declaration" stopping short on the hard "war." After that the lines settle to about five syllables each, then shrink to the three of "that I am." The last two lines hook onto each other with the repeated "that," as if the speaker were being assembled piece by piece in front of us.
The ending also brings back the opening. "I am big" and "that I am" use nearly the same words, but the weight has moved. At first the sentence stops on size, which sounds like a boast. At the end it stops on "am," on simple existence, after a long clause has defined that existence through other people. The speaker's identity is no longer self-contained, and it is finished by the things he is made of.
The poem is worth reading for how much it fits into so little space. In eight lines it dismisses the idea of a lover as one isolated person, mixes humour and vulnerability, and finds a new way to say that loving someone means accepting their whole history. It also leaves the reader a question: if you are a sum of others, who is in yours?