Explore the poem

This sonnet begins with a line of iambic pentameter which has echoes of many conventional lines of poetry which seek to describe and define love. In this case,‘our love is like a sail’, but there is no attempt to extend the simile. Instead the poem offers comparison after comparison and transformation after transformation. The sail becomes a swallowtail, a coat, a tear, a mouth and a trumpeter.

How does the poem encourage the reader to consider the changes and transformations that love brings and the way art attempts to make sense of those transformations? Love, time and timelessness in the context of shared, universal human experience are explored in a tone of breathless, wind‑buffeted exhilaration. The final couplet brings together wedding and love and the all-encompassing word ‘everything’, suggesting both a sense of wonder and the cyclical nature of human experience.

Look at the way Oswald use variations within the sonnet form to support the meaning of the poem.

About Alice Oswald

Alice Oswald read classics at Oxford before training and working as a gardener with, originally, no intention of becoming a full-time poet.

However, her first collection of poetry was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in 1996, and her second book, Dart, which explored the River Dart in Devon through poetry and prose, was also extremely well received and won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Her 2011 work Memorial is based on Homer’s Iliad and deals powerfully with death and how the dead might be memorialized.

Oswald’s belief in the importance of rhythm is evident throughout her work and in her admiration for writers such as Milton and Beckett, where rhythmical control of language is significant. Her almost visionary appreciation of nature and her understanding of the historical significance of the landscape along with her deft control of tone are widely admired.