Most love poems measure love by what it promises. David John Scanlon's "The Love" measures it by what it refuses to be defined by. The speaker repeats one odd claim, "The love I hold for you is bounded", and keeps qualifying it with "Not in...", as though clearing away wrong answers before reaching the right one. "Bounded" is the poem's puzzle. It could mean fenced in or limited, but the "Not in... But in..." construction pushes it toward "rooted in" or "held within". The final stanza then changes a single prefix to "unbounded", and the whole poem is the journey from one word to the other.
The first stanza names what the love rests on: "the joy of the past / Mingled with pleasure present / And the future beyond it all." Time is laid out as past, present and future, and "mingled" suggests blending rather than stacking. The poem gives "joy" to the past and the slightly cooler "pleasure" to the present, which perhaps hints that daily life is less dazzling than memory. Against this sits the flat, deflating phrase "the mundane of the day", which is deliberately dull.
Stanzas two and three are mirror images and the poem's emotional centre. The speaker confesses to being "Defined by the joyless prison of work" and to an "engrained lack of self belief / Which I hide so poorly." The partner is then described as "Defined by the relentless focus of doing" with an "engrained drive to succeed / Which you hide so poorly." The flaws are opposites, one person doubting and the other driving, yet the shared word "engrained" and the identical closing line make them twins. "Prison" is a striking choice, since a prison is the ultimate boundary, and "defined" carries the same sense of drawing a line around something. The poem sets these limits up in order to say love lives outside them. The verb "appear" matters too. Each person is describing a surface, how they look to the other "each day", and the surface is exactly what love is said not to rest on. In stanza two, the blank line after "work," leaves the sentence hanging before the confession about self-belief arrives, a small hesitation that suits an admission people find hard to make.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Lines vary in length, and punctuation is sparse and uneven, with commas after "day" and "work" but little elsewhere. The music comes from repetition instead. Three stanzas open with the same line, and "so poorly" closes the last three. This echoing mimics the daily grind the poem describes, with its sameness built into the form, and that makes the break in the fourth stanza land harder.
That stanza shifts "I" and "you" to "we" and "each other", and "bounded" becomes "unbounded". The key verb changes as well. Where earlier stanzas dwelt on how each person "appear[s]", the couple now "see each other for what we are". Appearing gives way to seeing, and what is seen is "our gifts", met with "Trusting, supporting and respecting". This is the poem's most abstract moment. Its list of virtues is plainer and less pictured than the "prison" of work, and it can read as sincere or as stated rather than shown.
The ending saves the poem from solemnity. The couple is "managing our desires to do everything. / Which we do so poorly." The refrain has moved from hiding to doing, and "do everything" quietly echoes the partner's "doing" from stanza three, so the drive once pinned on "you" is now shared. A flaw that each hid badly is now admitted together, with a self-deprecating smile. Even in a poem about unbounded love, the people remain gloriously bounded.
What makes the poem worth studying is this honesty. There are no roses, storms or grand gestures, only two tired, ambitious, insecure people recognising each other beneath their working selves. It also shows how much a poem can do with repetition and variation: a refrain that seems to circle in place is quietly turned, word by word, into a conclusion.