The Full Text of “Love Armed”
1Love in Fantastic Triumph sat,
2Whilst Bleeding Hearts around him flowed,
3For whom Fresh pains he did Create,
4And strange Tyrannic power he showed;
5From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,
6Which round about, in sport he hurled;
7But ’twas from mine he took desire
8Enough to undo the Amorous World.
9From me he took his sighs and tears,
10From thee his Pride and Cruelty;
11From me his Languishments and Fears,
12And every Killing Dart from thee;
13Thus thou and I, the God have armed,
14And set him up a Deity;
15But my poor Heart alone is harmed,
16Whilst thine the Victor is, and free.
The Full Text of “Love Armed”
1Love in Fantastic Triumph sat,
2Whilst Bleeding Hearts around him flowed,
3For whom Fresh pains he did Create,
4And strange Tyrannic power he showed;
5From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,
6Which round about, in sport he hurled;
7But ’twas from mine he took desire
8Enough to undo the Amorous World.
9From me he took his sighs and tears,
10From thee his Pride and Cruelty;
11From me his Languishments and Fears,
12And every Killing Dart from thee;
13Thus thou and I, the God have armed,
14And set him up a Deity;
15But my poor Heart alone is harmed,
16Whilst thine the Victor is, and free.
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“Love Armed” Introduction
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"Love Armed," which appears in the first scene of Aphra Behn's 1676 play Abdelazer; or, the Moor's Revenge, tells a tale of love's terrible power. Love, the poem's heartbroken speaker imagines, is a triumphant war god, gloating over all the "Bleeding Hearts" he's conquered. He gained all his might by taking weapons and powers from the speaker and their beloved: he got his fiery arrows from the beloved's eyes, for instance, and his power to inflict languishing, hopeless desire from the speaker's heart. Love, the pining speaker laments, has destroyed them, but he's let the hardhearted beloved off scot-free.
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“Love Armed” Summary
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Love sat in fantastical, glorious victory while broken hearts oozed blood around him. He devised more and more new tortures for those hearts, displaying his awful, merciless power. He took the fires he carelessly threw around straight from your brilliant eyes. But it was from my eyes that he took his stores of longing—enough of it to destroy a whole world of lovers.
He took his sad sighs and weeping from me; he took his cruelty and pride from you. He took helplessness and terror from me, and he took his deadly arrows from you. So you see, between us, you and I have given Love all his weapons and made him into a god. But in the end, it's only my heart that has been hurt. Yours is the winner, and it's untouched.
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“Love Armed” Themes
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The Tyrannical Power of Love
In "Love Armed," the mighty "Deity" of Love isn't some sweet little Cupid bopping around with pink-tipped arrows. Rather, he's a cruel tyrant, a world-conqueror who mercilessly crushes hearts underfoot. The speaker of this poem (which opens the first scene of Aphra Behn's play Abdelazer) personifies Love as a triumphant warlord gloating among the "Bleeding Hearts" of the people he's struck down. Love has beauty and might: he's "armed" with the passionate "fire" that springs from a lover's "Bright Eyes," and with his infamous "Killing Dart" (that is, his arrow, which readers might recognize from the popular image of Cupid shooting his bow). As the master of "desire," Love has strength "enough to undo the Amorous World"—to lay waste to a whole world full of desperate lovers.
Those who fall under Love's power, the speaker warns, will suffer from "Languishments and Fears"—heart-stopping helplessness and anxious terror—and bow before Love's "Pride and Cruelty," his unstoppable and merciless ability to do his own will. Love, in other words, does exactly what it wants to. It doesn't respond to reason, and it's as likely to leave a person totally miserable as rapturously happy.
This vision of love as a tyrant does away with sentimental images of Love as rose petals and daydreams. If Love makes the world go round, this poem suggests, he does so by conquering it like a tyrannical emperor. (Even the image of love sitting in "Fantastic Triumph" calls up an ancient Roman festival of bloodshed: a "triumph" could mean a ceremonial procession to honor a military victory.)
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The Pain of Unrequited Love
Besides painting a portrait of love as a tyrannical god-king, this poem laments the pain of a specific kind of love: the unrequited variety. The speaker is terribly in love with someone who doesn't feel the same way about them (at least, not any more). They imagine that the conqueror Love takes his destructive powers from the feelings they and their beloved have toward each other, and is thus "armed" with two very different sets of skills.
From the beloved, for instance, Love takes its "Pride and Cruelty," its arrogant mercilessness. This line suggests at once that Love itself is unkind in forcing lovers to fall for people who don't love them back—and that the speaker's beloved has unkindly turned them away, discarding them as if they were trash. Similarly, Love takes its passionate "fire" from the beloved's "Bright Eyes," a metaphor in which the beloved's beautiful gaze can only burn the poor speaker to a crisp.
The unfortunate speaker's eyes, meanwhile, give Love "desire / Enough to undo the Amorous World." That is, the way they look at their beloved reflects a yearning so great that it could lay waste to an entire world full of heartsore lovers. They also have to endure "Languishments and Fears," helplessness and anxieties, endlessly suffering over their beloved's refusal; these sufferings, too, are part of Love's arsenal.
The different kinds of weapons that Love takes from the speaker and the beloved set up a picture of love, not just as a merciless and powerful force, but as a horribly uneven one. As the speaker puts it, "my poor Heart alone is harmed" once Love has put on its armor and picked up its weapons: the beloved, with their "Bright Eyes" and their "Pride and Cruelty," has all the power in this relationship. Love is terrible and powerful at the best of times, the extended metaphor of arms and armor suggests. But it's most terrible when it's shared out unequally.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Love Armed”
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Lines 1-4
Love in Fantastic Triumph sat,
Whilst Bleeding Hearts around him flowed,
For whom Fresh pains he did Create,
And strange Tyrannic power he showed;“Love Armed” opens Aphra Behn’s 1676 play Abdelazer, a dark tale of lust and vengeance. As the play begins, the title character—a prisoner in the Spanish court—is sitting in a “rich chamber,” an elegant room, listening to this song. In other words, “Love Armed” sets a scene. A gory and alarming scene it is, too.
As the poem begins, Love is personified as a “Tyrannic,” cruel warlord. He sits in “Fantastic Triumph”—a turn of phrase that here doesn’t so much mean “amazing triumph” as “fantastical, almost surreal triumph,” as if the poem is gazing into the speaker's nightmare. (The word “triumph” might even suggest Love looks something like a Roman emperor in all his glory: a “triumph” was originally a splendorous parade celebrating a Roman military victory.)
And Love does appear to have conquered all—but not in the way we’d usually say so. In his fantastic triumph, he looks out over a field of “Bleeding Hearts,” his conquests: metaphorically speaking, all the unfortunate souls who have suffered (and perhaps even died) for love.
Readers here might think of the traditional image of Love as Cupid or Eros, the Greco-Roman god who shoots arrows into the hearts of unsuspecting civilians and sends them head over heels. But this version of Love isn’t satisfied simply to make people fall inconveniently in love. He’s a downright sadist, dreaming up “Fresh pains” with which to torment his fallen victims and reveling in his “strange Tyrannic power.”
This song, then, will be a hellish vision of Love as a tormentor and a destroyer. Aphra Behn frames her grisly images in a simple form:
- The poem is built from two eight-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter. That means that each line uses four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “For whom | Fresh pains | he did | create.”
- Behn does sometimes break from that rhythm, though. For instance, the first line begins with a bold trochee, the opposite foot to an iamb (with a DUM-da rhythm): “Love in | fan tas- | tic Tri- | umph sat.” Love enters the poem with a bang!
- The singsongy rhymes run ABABCDCD EFEFGFGF. In other words, the poem uses a pattern of alternating rhyme, strengthening it in the second stanza with that persistent, echoing F rhyme. Keep an eye out for that pattern as it develops: the poem’s mood intensifies just as the rhyme does.
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Lines 5-8
From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,
Which round about, in sport he hurled;
But ’twas from mine he took desire
Enough to undo the Amorous World. -
Lines 9-12
From me he took his sighs and tears,
From thee his Pride and Cruelty;
From me his Languishments and Fears,
And every Killing Dart from thee; -
Lines 13-16
Thus thou and I, the God have armed,
And set him up a Deity;
But my poor Heart alone is harmed,
Whilst thine the Victor is, and free.
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“Love Armed” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Personification
The speaker’s personification of Love portrays a classical love god—Cupid or Eros—as a terrible warlord, a vision that captures love’s power to hurt and destroy.
Modern-day readers may be more familiar with an image of Cupid as a cherub with a quiver of heart-tipped arrows, but he was once imagined as an adult man (or, most often, a beautiful winged youth). Here, he turns into something more like a Roman emperor, a tyrant sitting in “Fantastic Triumph.” The word “triumph” might even suggest he’s enjoying a parade in his honor: in ancient Rome, a “triumph” was a ceremonial procession celebrating a military victory.
This triumph is a particularly gory one. Love sits among all the “Bleeding Hearts” he’s laid waste to, gloating, relishing his “strange Tyrannic power” over the whole “Amorous World.” This is not the serene, beautiful Eros of classical art, or even the popular image of a mischievous trickster causing trouble among foolish mortals. This is a vision of Love as a monstrous, sadistic dictator.
In personifying Love this way, the speaker is getting a dig in at their merciless beloved as much as they're making a broader point about the pains of romance. After all, Love takes much of his metaphorical armor—like his “Pride and Cruelty”—straight from the proud, cruel beloved.
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Extended Metaphor
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Assonance
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Repetition
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"Love Armed" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Love
- Fantastic
- Tyrannic
- Thee, Thou, Thy, Thine
- In sport
- Hurled
- 'Twas
- Undo
- Amorous
- Languishments
- Killing Dart
- Set him up a Deity
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Love here is personified as Cupid or Eros, the classical love god. Here the speaker seems to be imagining him in his more imposing adult form, not as a winged cherub.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Love Armed”
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Form
"Love Armed" is the song that opens Aphra Behn's play Abdelazer, a tale of love and treachery. This little ditty is what Abdelazer himself is listening to as the play begins; a captive in the Spanish court, he's brooding over his forbidden lust for the Queen of Spain. The poem sets the tone for the stories of sex and violence that follow.
The poem's 16 lines are written in iambic tetrameter (lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "From me | he took | his sighs | and tears") and divided into two eight-line stanzas. This simple form is meant to clue the play's watchers into the poem's themes right away, inviting them into a world in which love is a conqueror and a destroyer.
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Meter
"Love Armed" is written in iambic tetrameter. That means it uses lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in line 15:
But my | poor Heart | alone | is harmed,
These iambs lend the poem a steady, driving heartbeat. But Behn often varies that rhythm to give this little song flavor. For instance, the very first line plays with meter:
Love in | Fantas- | tic Tri- | umph sat,
The first foot there is a trochee—the opposite of an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm. That strong stress up front introduces the "Tyrannic" figure of Love with a bang. Small variations like this appear throughout the poem to add interest and emphasis.
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Rhyme Scheme
The rhyme scheme in the first stanza of "Love Armed" runs as follows:
ABABCDCD
This simple, singsongy alternating rhyme scheme suits a poem meant to be sung. In the second stanza, though, the speaker intensifies that pattern. The poem still uses alternating rhymes, but it drills down hard into one rhyme in particular:
EFEFGFGF
The insistent return to the F rhyme ("Cruelty," "thee," "Deity," "free") in the second stanza subtly turns up the heat under the speaker's declaration of heartbroken despair.
While modern-day readers might hear a slant rhyme in the pairing of "sat" and "Create" in lines 1 and 3, listeners in Behn's time would have heard a perfect rhyme: the word "sat" was once pronounced (and often spelled) sate.
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“Love Armed” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a heartbroken lover. Imagining Love as a "Tyrannic" king relishing his "Triumph" over the world, the speaker details how this warrior god was equipped. His beauty, strength, and terrible cruelty he got from the speaker's beloved. His ability to strike people down with "languishments" (frailties) and desperate "desire" he took from the unfortunate speaker. The implication is that the speaker has all the painful longing, the beloved all the cruel rejection. This is a speaker who has come to know Love all too well as a merciless god.
It's not clear whether the beloved once loved the speaker back, or whether this is a case of fully unrequited love. Either way, it hardly matters: the speaker is suffering as terribly as if their "Bleeding Heart[]" were oozing at the love-god's feet.
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“Love Armed” Setting
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There's no clear setting within the poem beyond a "Fantastic" (or fantastical) dreamworld in which the cruel, beautiful god of Love sits in triumph, enthroned like a Roman emperor after a victory on the battlefield. This vision presents Love as a merciless but splendid warlord, a guy one can neither resist nor tear one's eyes away from.
There is a setting around the world of this poem, though. This song opens Aphra Behn's play Abdelazer, a tale of lust and vengeance. The title character (a prisoner in the court of the King of Spain) is listening to this song in what the stage directions call a "Rich Chamber," an elegantly appointed room in the palace. Such a setting hints that material can't console a frustrated lover any more than it can console a prisoner. Perhaps unrequited love and imprisonment even have a few things in common!
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Literary and Historical Context of “Love Armed”
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Literary Context
Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was one of the most striking and enigmatic writers of the English Restoration (the 17th-century period during which King Charles II was restored to the throne after the rebellious "Lord Protector" Oliver Cromwell died). Renowned as the first woman to make a living through her pen, Behn was famous in her day as a writer and a public figure. Nonetheless, much of her life story remains a mystery.
There are no records of Behn's exact date and place of birth (though she was certainly British), and things only get murkier from there. Some believe Behn herself obscured or destroyed records of her life to preserve her aura of mystery. All we can gather of Behn's early life is that she may have lived for a time in the European sugar colony of Suriname, South America (perhaps as a spy for King Charles II), and was reportedly married to a man named Johan Behn, who died or separated from her sometime around 1664.
Upon her return to England, Behn had little money. She took up writing in order to stay out of debtor’s prison, producing poems, plays, and novels. A woman writer making her own living, she was groundbreaking in more ways than one. Not only was she one of the first English novelists, she also treated subjects that were then thought to be far outside a woman's grasp. For instance, her novel Oroonoko (arguably her most famous work) tells the story of an enslaved African prince who rises to courtly power by dint of his brilliance and inherent nobility. It became an important text in early arguments against the slave trade.
Behn was also an active part of London’s theatrical world and a noted playwright. Through the theater, she became friends with other Restoration writers like John Dryden (as well as more scandalous figures like the notorious John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester). This poem comes from her popular 1676 play Abdelazer, a sensational tale of murder and lust set in the Spanish court.
Behn's artistic legacy influences writers to this day, and she's often heralded as an early feminist hero. As no lesser writer than Virginia Woolf said in her famous essay "A Room of One's Own": "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn [...] for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."
Historical Context
Aphra Behn was one of the most important writers of the Restoration: that is, the wild, fun-loving, and often debauched era that followed King Charles II's return to the English throne in 1660. Charles had been in exile since 1649, when the Puritan rebel Oliver Cromwell overthrew—and beheaded—Charles II's father, King Charles I. But the intensely moralistic government Cromwell installed in the place of the monarchy was neither popular nor stable, and it didn't take long for the country to welcome its exiled king-in-waiting back.
When Charles II took the throne, he ushered in a new era of freedom and pleasure. Cromwell, a severe Puritan, had cracked down on art, holidays, and fun in general. The canny Charles realized that one way to win his people's affections was to encourage all the pleasures that Cromwell had outlawed. His court was full of poets and artists—and also full of new opportunities for unusual figures like Aphra Behn, who may even have served as Charles's spy at one point. Theater in particular (strictly verboten under Cromwell) saw a creative boom under Charles, and Behn's plays stand alongside those of satirical writers like William Wycherley and William Congreve as exemplars of Restoration drama.
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More “Love Armed” Resources
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External Resources
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about the strange and wonderful life of Aphra Behn, the poem's groundbreaking author.
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Abdelazer — Examine an early printing of Abdelazer, the play in which this song appears.
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Behn's Legacy — Read a recent appreciation of Behn that argues she should be a more widely known and celebrated figure in English literature.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a dramatic reading of the poem.
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A Portrait of Behn — See a posthumous engraving depicting Behn.
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