Summary
The speaker describes Love sitting in "Fantastic Triumph" among a plethora of bleeding hearts (1). She notes that he appears like a tyrant among the hearts as he generates pain rather than love. Addressing her beloved, the speaker says that Love took "fire" from the beloved's "bright eyes," which he used to make his arrows more powerful and wounding (5). She admits that Love also took "desire" from her, an emotion so strong that it was "enough to undo the Amorous World" (8).
In the second stanza, the speaker asserts that Love took from her elements like longing and pining, while he took from her beloved his "Pride and Cruelty," as well as "every Killing Dart" that wounded the bleeding hearts (10-12). She confesses that together, she and her beloved have "armed" Love with unparalleled power and turned him into a "Deity," but that in the process only she has suffered pain while her beloved remains unharmed and "free" (13-16).
Analysis
"Love Armed" is, in many ways, a conventional early modern English love poem. This is to say that the poem relies heavily on the Petrarchan conventions that dominated English poetics in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. This tradition, developed by sixteenth-century poets like Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sidney, stems from the work of the fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, whom the English knew as Petrarch. Petrarchan poetics is a poetics of love: Petrarch wrote a number of poems about the pursuit of the poet's beloved, Laura, and these poems tended to rely on repeated conventions like the professing of unrequited love, the enormity of the poet's sighs and tears, and the blazon—or the elaborate description of the beloved's individual body parts. Petrarchan themes and styles appeared most frequently in sonnet sequences written in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but those sequences had fallen largely out of favor by the time Behn was writing.
That Behn was writing in the post-Jacobean and post-Restoration era of England showcases her interest in poetic forms of the past, particularly in reviving the traditions that preceded her. "Love Armed," which originally appeared as an introductory song in Behn's play Abdelazer, is representative of her innovation within poetic tradition. The poem begins by describing a fairly conventional image for an early modern love poem—Love, personified as Cupid, the young god of erotic love and desire. Behn's portrayal of Cupid, however, is markedly different from many of her predecessors as well as from the classical representations of the god in Greek and Roman mythology. Traditionally portrayed as a playful, mischievous, but ultimately innocent child of Venus, the Cupid in "Love Armed" is a more mature incarnation of this image, associated more with martial power and violence than with playfulness or flirtation. The speaker notes that he sits in "Fantastic Triumph" surrounded by "Bleeding Hearts," against which he leverages "Tyrannic power" (1-4). In this opening image, Cupid is far from a child and appears instead as a despotic ruler among wounded subjects. As such, the poem establishes from its outset a fearful tone and dark mood as the speaker laments the unrequited love that tortures her.
The prevalence unrequited love is also a Petrarchan convention, and indeed the speaker uses the same terminology of "sighs and tears" to describe her longing for her beloved (9). However, Behn once again showcases her penchant for innovation by having the speaker of the poem figuratively re-couple her and her beloved through the metaphor of Cupid as Love. She argues that she and her beloved are responsible for creating this monstrous version of the god, he having taken certain elements from her and others from her beloved. Notably, what was taken from the speaker are emotions like longing, desire, and affection, while her beloved contributed attributes like "Pride and Cruelty" and "every Killing Dart," suggesting that it was him who did not return her love (11-13). The effect of this metaphor is twofold: first, the speaker highlights the paradoxical nature of love as that which is composed of both pleasure and pain—at the same time desire can be a euphoric experience, it is precisely that desire for connection that leads to rejection and despair.
Second, the speaker's argument that she and her beloved both created this version of Cupid casts them both into the role of parental figures who produced a child, or as the speaker says, "thus thou and I, the God have armed / And set him up a Deity" (13-14). The metaphor therefore represents the speaker's attempt to connect herself and her beloved once more, despite the fact that this imagined connection is based on the very nature of their love as an unrequited one. As if to remind herself of this, the speaker concludes the poem on a solemn note, saying, "But my poor Heart alone is harmed, / Whilst thine the Victor is, and free" (15-16). This final image of her beloved as the "Victor" hearkens back to the opening image of the triumphant Cupid among bleeding hearts, drawing a connection between the cruel version of love that has come into existence and the beloved himself.
