Love Quote by Robert Bridges

The sting in Bridges's couplet is how quickly it shrinks romance down to labor. "When first we met" evokes the airy optimism of beginnings: the story we tell ourselves at the start, when attraction feels like luck, not fate. Then comes the quiet trapdoor: "we did not guess". Love isn't discovered; it's miscalculated. Bridges frames intimacy as an error in forecasting, a failure of imagination as much as of experience.

Calling Love "a master" tilts the emotional balance of power. It's not a partner, not a muse, not even an affliction, but an authority. The word carries a double weight: the master of a craft (demanding discipline) and the master over a servant (demanding submission). That ambiguity is the poem's subtext: love can refine you and also reduce you, ask for your best and take more than you meant to give. "Hard" sharpens the point. This isn't the melodrama of heartsickness; it's the slow grind of responsibility, compromise, and the way devotion reorganizes your life around someone else's needs.

Bridges, writing in late Victorian/early modern England, sits in a cultural moment where feeling is increasingly scrutinized but still socially policed. The line reflects a reserved sensibility that nonetheless refuses to sentimentalize. Its intent is not to dismiss love, but to strip it of its marketing: the first meeting sells freedom; the lived relationship reveals governance. The couplet works because it compresses a whole adult education into two plain, almost conversational lines.