Three words open Brian Routh's «This is us», the same three words return in the middle, and they close the poem again. It is built like someone pointing at their own happiness and saying, over and over, *look*. The central idea is that shared love enlarges the people inside it, making them louder, taller and brighter. Yet its real proof turns out to lie in small, ordinary, childlike pleasures rather than in the clouds.
The poem moves through scale. It begins with sound: the lovers are "ringing as bells together," the sound lasts "for longer and longer periods," and their music winds "in ever increasing harmonies." Almost everything here is about increase, and the idea peaks in the odd, almost arithmetical line "The love between us increased us." Love is treated like addition, and the sum is physical growth: "Our heads piercing the clouds." The speaker's question, "Have we grown so big I wonder? / Are we giants now?", is the poem's only moment of uncertainty. It reads less like doubt than delighted disbelief. Then the lovers borrow from weather and sky: "our hearts roar like thunder," and "Our eyes are like moons that shine into each other." A moon shines by reflected light, so the image quietly suggests that each person is lit by the other, which suits a poem so attached to the word "together."
That word matters structurally. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, so the poem holds itself together by repetition. "Together" ends the lines about bells, singing and thunder, and it works like a drumbeat in place of a rhyme. The stanzas vary in length, but the short ones, a couplet at the start, a couplet in the middle and a couplet at the end, act as pillars. The middle one, "This is us. / Yes, truly it is.", is the most interesting. It answers a question nobody asked, as if the speaker, having wondered whether they have become giants, needs to reassure themselves that the happiness is real. The syntax stays plain and in the present tense, and most lines end at a natural pause. That calm tone is why the big images work: the speaker states extraordinary things quietly, like someone too happy to raise their voice.
After that couplet the poem comes down to earth. "We sit up and talk throughout the night / The birds giving us pause to listen to their morning music." The music motif returns, but now it belongs to the birds. This is the first time the outside world is allowed in, and the lovers stop to listen to it. Then comes the simile that undercuts the giants: they "bathe together and laugh and play like two children." Greatness here is measured in joy, not size, and the flat, unadorned line "This is so joyous my darling" says so without decoration.
The ending gathers the poem's themes into one image: "Wrapped together we flow like a heavenly wine into one another." Strictly, "wrapped" and "flow" don't belong to the same picture, since one is cloth and the other liquid. But the mixture fits, because the subject is the dissolving of the boundary between two people. Words like "heavenly" and the earlier "refuge" give the love a faintly devotional colour. Judging by the vocabulary, the speaker treats it as close to sacred. The final "Oh my love this is us" closes the circle where it began.
Many love poems depend on longing, absence or loss. This one has none of that. It is about love already achieved and fully present, and its challenge is to make such contentment interesting. The thunder and moons are familiar images, but the quieter details, such as talking until the birds begin and laughing in the bath, give the poem its freshness. For a reader, the lesson is how a poem can build feeling with repetition, a shift of scale and a change from the cosmic to the domestic. It does not need rhyme or elaborate technique to do it.