Unrequited Love
The central theme of "Love Armed" is a popular one for early modern poetry: unrequited love. The speaker imagines that Cupid sits in "Fantastic triumph" amongst the numerous bleeding hearts that surround him, including her own heart. She implies, therefore, that she has been in love but that she has been wounded in the process because her beloved—the "you" to whom the poem is addressed—has not returned her desires and affections, or has jilted her in some way.
Rewriting Classical Mythology
The central figure in the poem is Love, personified here as Cupid, the Roman god of erotic love and desire. While the image of Cupid's love-striking arrows was a conventional one in early modern poetry, Behn's portrayal of the young god is markedly different from his traditional representation. Usually portrayed as playful, mischievous, and childish, Cupid's role in early modern English poems tended to be a relatively innocent one. Here, however, Cupid is portrayed as violent and tyrannical, a more mature and likely more vindictive version of the cherub image with which he is most frequently associated. This reconfiguration of the classical image underscores, for the speaker, her sense of despair over her unrequited love and her newfound understanding of love's cruelty and deception.
Love as Paradox
The speaker of the poem argues that Love has become a triumphant deity because he has taken elements from both her and her beloved. From her, he has taken "desire," "sighs and tears," and "languishments and fears," while from her beloved he has taken "fire," "Pride and Cruelty," and "every Killing Dart" (5-11). By portraying love this way, the speaker suggests that the phenomenon of love is inherently paradoxical; it is composed of both desire, longing, and affection as well as pain, sorrow, and despair. In this way, the speaker re-couples herself and her beloved in her mind, imagining that they have paradoxically created a "Deity" of love through the very fact their love is not mutual (14).
