Everyone knows the comparison: love is like a rainbow. It is the kind of line found on greeting cards, and Karen Bassey begins with it on purpose. In eight short lines she lets the cliché run for a while, then turns it back on itself. The central idea is that the very qualities used to praise love, its beauty and its endlessness, can also describe something that was never real.
The opening is deliberately impersonal. "Love is compared to a rainbow" is in the passive voice, so nobody in particular is doing the comparing. It is simply what is said. The next two lines, "Beautiful" and "Colourful", stand alone like items ticked off a list. They also chime, since both end in *-ful*, which gives the praise a smooth, almost automatic sound. Then comes "Having no beginning or an end." Here the poem sounds like a compliment, since love that never stops is what most people hope for. Notice too that there is no punctuation at all up to this point. The lines flow on without friction, like an easy thing everyone agrees on.
The pivot is the word "But". It promises a contrast, yet the line that follows says "our love can *also* be compared to a rainbow". The "also" makes us expect more of the same praise, and the change from the general "love" to the personal "our" suggests we are about to hear something warm. Instead the second half repeats the first with small but damaging changes. "Colourful" has vanished, so the love has lost its colour. "Beautiful" survives, but only "to the mere man". The word "mere" is quietly dismissive. It suggests an ordinary onlooker who sees the surface and is easily impressed. The beauty exists only in the eye of someone standing outside, which implies that the speaker, who stands inside, sees something different.
The repeated line, "Having no beginning or an end", is where the poem's meaning flips. The words are identical, but the context has changed. Before, endlessness meant love that lasts forever. Now it is explained by the last line: "For it is non existent." The small word "For" works like a verdict. There is no beginning or end because there was never anything to begin or end. The final line is also the only one with a full stop, so the poem closes like a door. The missing hyphen in "non existent" makes the phrase look flat and blunt, with no decoration left.
The choice of image is clever. A rainbow looks solid and magnificent, but nobody can walk up to it and touch it. It is a trick of light that seems to move away as you approach, and it depends on where the viewer is standing. Bassey doesn't spell this out, but the comparison fits the poem's meaning closely: a love that is gorgeous from a distance and impossible to reach or hold. Judging by the text, the speaker is describing a relationship that looks wonderful from outside and has no substance within.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme scheme and no steady metre. The lines are short and uneven, from one word to a handful, and the diction is plain. Even the slightly awkward phrasing, "no beginning or an end", gives the voice a spoken, unpolished quality, as if the speaker were thinking aloud and arriving at a painful conclusion. The tone is hard to pin down. It could be bitter, resigned or simply numb, and the poem doesn't tell us. That ambiguity is part of its pull, because the reader has to decide how much it hurts.
The poem is worth studying because it shows how much a poet can do with repetition. Repeating the same words in a new setting changes their meaning, and the ending makes us reread everything above it. In a few lines, a familiar romantic comparison becomes a statement of disillusion, and the reader is left to wonder what the word "love" ever referred to.