LOVE AND LOYALTY
Loyalty is the primary attribute of
love. It is not confined only to human love but to universal love including
families, friends, pets, places, groups , occupations, hobbies, tastes, styles,
etc.
The English poet S.T.Coleridge ‘s
poem “Love” begins with the lines: All thoughts, all passions, all
delights,/Whatever stirs this mortal frame,/All are but ministers of Love,/And
feed his sacred flame.
Loyalty keeps love alive. But it is not always
there. There are disloyal friends and unfaithful companions in every age and
very field of life. The absence of loyalty in love is painful.
Matthew Arnold , the English poet, essayist and critic (1822-1888) tells
his beloved in the poem Dover Beach :
Ah,
love. Let us be true
To
one another for the world, which seems
To
lie before us like a land of dreams,
So
various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath
really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor
certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And
we are here on a darkling plain
Swept
with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where
ignorant armies clash by night.
And to conclude, here is a love
sonnet by the English poet and playwright Willliam Shakespeare (1564-1616):
"Love is not love
/ Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove:
. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken; .
"It is the star to every wandering bark, / Whose worth's unknown, although
his height be taken."
"Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips
and cheeks / Within his bending sickle's compass come:" "Love alters not with his brief hours and
weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom."
"If this be error and upon me proved, / I
never writ, nor no man ever loved."
*********
G. R. Kanwal
24 January 2026
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