Love Quote by Robert Bridges

Bridges catches love at its most persuasive: the moment it feels like nature itself has signed off on your certainty. The scene is almost aggressively pastoral - April, morning, a thorn hedge - and that prettiness is doing double duty. It’s not just setting; it’s an emotional amplifier, the way new love borrows springtime’s fresh-light mythology to make permanence feel like common sense.

The craft is in the pivot hidden inside repetition. “So sweet... So strangely sweet” starts as swoon, then tightens into something more self-aware. “It was not strange” is a little sleight of hand: the lovers recognize the intensity is odd, yet they normalize it instantly. That’s the psychological tell. Love doesn’t simply intoxicate; it edits your risk assessment. Bridges lets the line enact the self-justification it describes.

Then comes the quietly devastating move: “we thought.” The poem doesn’t declare love unchanging; it reports a belief held in the glow of first contact. That verb puts a pane of glass between the speaker and the past, implying experience has revised the original certainty. Even the “thorn” beside the kiss reads as a pricked omen - romance framed by something that scratches.

Context matters: Bridges, a late Victorian turned early modern poet, often prized clarity and musical restraint over melodrama. That restraint sharpens the subtext. The poem doesn’t rage at love’s mutability; it memorializes the exact moment when change was unthinkable, which is another way of admitting it happened.