Love Quote by Herbert Trench

That opening “Come” is a hand on the wrist: urgent, intimate, a little theatrical. Trench doesn’t begin with confession or description; he begins with an invitation that assumes complicity. “Thou and I” isn’t just archaic decoration. It drags the line out of casual modern romance and into a deliberately elevated register, borrowing the gravity of liturgy and the direct address of older love poetry. The effect is to make desire feel like a vow.

“Make love deathless” is where the line turns from seduction into ambition. Not “our love,” not “this love,” but love itself - as if the speakers can manufacture permanence in a world designed to dissolve it. The subtext is a dare against time: the lovers can’t stop death, so they try to outwit it by converting the body’s urgency into something that survives the body. It’s erotic, but also metaphysical; the phrase hints that consummation is only one tactic. The deeper aim is artistic and memorial: to fix feeling into a form that won’t rot.

Context matters: Trench writes in the late Victorian/early modernist shadow zone, when poetry is still comfortable with grand address and spiritual language, but modernity is already eroding inherited certainties. The line strains against that erosion. Its intensity is almost defensive, as though tenderness needs to be spoken at maximum volume to stand a chance. That’s why it works: it compresses courtship, prayer, and rebellion into eight words, turning private desire into a small act of defiance.