Love Quote by Edmund Waller

Waller compresses an entire theology into a couplet that sounds almost serenely balanced, then quietly rearranges the reader’s emotional furniture. “Love” and “dread” arrive as a matched pair: not just feelings, but twin disciplines that “instruct our thought.” The line doesn’t invite private inspiration; it insists on training the mind through contrary pressures. Affection alone can turn religion into sentiment. Dread alone curdles into obedience without tenderness. Waller’s neat yoking of the two is the point: Christian devotion, in this frame, is meant to be mentally bracing, not merely consoling.

The second line lands its force through symmetry that’s almost legalistic: “As man He suffer’d and as God He taught.” It’s a doctrinal tightrope made to look like common sense. The subtext is defensive. In 17th-century England, religious language was never just religious; it was a live wire in an era of civil war, regicide, Restoration, and constant suspicion about what kind of Christian you really were. Waller, a poet and political survivor, writes as someone who knows that precision can be a form of self-protection.

The couplet’s elegance also performs its argument. By giving Christ two roles in parallel clauses, Waller turns paradox into order. Suffering becomes the credential of humanity; teaching becomes the proof of divinity. The rhetorical trick is that the poem doesn’t ask you to resolve the contradiction. It asks you to inhabit it, letting fear and love, flesh and Godhead, work on you at the same time.