A Passion Unreturned - Yukki

In “The More Loving One”, poet W. H. Auden uses rhetorical questions, rhyme and enjambment amongst other poetic devices to effectively elicit empathy and a subtle melancholy within the reader, illuminating the theme of unrequited love.

Poetic Devices

As aforementioned, the poetic devices used include rhetorical questions, rhyme, enjambment and personification.

The example of a rhetorical question within the poem can be found in line 5-6, “How should we like it were stars to burn/with a passion for us we could not return?” The use of the rhetorical question in this case is to encourage the reader to feel pity for those who feel unrequited love. Auden continues to make a point based on the rhetorical question, saying “If … let the more loving one be me”, which makes a point about the ‘more loving one’ having to suffer more from unrequited love, demonstrating a sense of selflessness in the narrator in their unwillingness to see the other suffer.

The rhyme pattern here is AABB, with pairs of rhyming words such as “burn” and “return” placed at the end of each two lines. Enjambment is used in line 3-4, “...indifference is the least/we have to fear…” which makes the poem more flowing. The entire poem is written from a first person perspective, using ‘we’ to allow the audience to empathise with the narrator.

Stars are personified throughout the poem, given the ability to be uncaring or to ‘burn with passion’, almost as a metaphor for the person whom the narrator feels unrequited love for - unreachable and too bright for the world.

Theme

The main theme here is ‘unrequited love’, as Auden speaks of “..passion that we cannot return” and describes how it will take time to get used to a world without the loved one, but eventually the pain of unrequited love will heal in the last stanza - but is this necessarily true?

And is it not better to move on as soon as possible from unrequited love?