Love Quote by John Dryden

Dryden’s couplet flatters love and indicts it in the same breath. “You see through love” sounds like a promise of special access, a romantic X-ray vision. Then the knife turns: that very lens “deludes your sight.” Love doesn’t merely distract; it rewrites perception with the confidence of truth. The comparison is clinically chosen. A straight object looking crooked in water isn’t a hallucination, it’s physics - refraction, a reliable distortion. Dryden’s point is cruelly modern: the problem with love isn’t that it makes you irrational, it’s that it makes you consistently wrong in a way that feels inevitable.

The subtext is about epistemology in a culture that prized reason, proportion, and “correct” seeing. Writing in the Restoration era, Dryden lived through a whiplash of public narratives - monarchy restored, loyalties rebranded, reputations recalculated. In that context, “love” can read as more than romance: passion, partisanship, devotion to a person or cause. The line warns that strong attachment is a medium you look through, and media always bends.

Form does part of the work. The neat symmetry of the couplet mimics the clarity it questions; the balanced grammar feels like reason even as it describes reason failing. Dryden isn’t moralizing about passion so much as mapping its optical trick: love as a persuasive distortion, the kind you can’t argue yourself out of because it masquerades as vision itself.