Love—what is love? A great and aching heart; Wrung hands; and silence; and a long despair. Life—what is life? Upon a moorland bare To see love coming and see love depart.
Where this text comes from
First published in New Poems and Variant Readings (1918). This date is uncertain. Taken from the 1918 Chatto & Windus volume. That is not the first printing: this volume's own preface credits the Bibliophile Society of Boston with having first given these poems light in a privately printed edition. The year of that edition, and which poems it carried, are not established here. [1]
Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-20.
Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/robert-louis-stevenson_poetry, poetry.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (8)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L4.
Cite this poem
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894).
“Love, What Is Love?.” First published in New Poems and Variant Readings (1918).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/robert-louis-stevenson/love-what-is-love/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
More by Robert Louis Stevenson