Marriage Quote by Thomas Moore

Moore’s line lands like a velvet-gloved slap: romantic love doesn’t die because we were unlucky, he suggests, but because the thing we called “love” was built to dissolve. As a poet of the early 19th century, Moore is speaking from inside a culture that marketed romance as both moral uplift and social glue, even as marriage remained an economic contract and a reputational cage. The sentence stages that collision. “Illusion” is not merely disappointment; it’s misrecognition, the mind projecting transcendence onto something that can’t sustain it.

The craft is in the pivot. He offers two checkpoints where the “truth” arrives: the melodramatic end of an affair, and the supposedly respectable entry into marriage. That second clause is the dagger. Moore refuses the comforting narrative that commitment completes passion. Instead, he implies marriage is where fantasy gets audited by routine, obligation, and the daily friction of selves. The “sweet emotions” aren’t villainized; they are seductively framed as guides that “lead us” into marriage, like charming accomplices in our own self-deception.

“Turn down their flames” is domestic imagery disguised as romance: not a lightning strike but a dimmer switch, not tragedy but gradual cooling. The subtext is almost sociological: the institution that promises permanence can also expose how much romantic intensity depends on uncertainty, distance, and idealization. Moore isn’t arguing against love as such; he’s puncturing a specific cultural product - the notion that passion is a stable foundation for lifelong partnership - and showing how the bill comes due precisely when society tells you you’ve “won.”