Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s “Truth About Love” is a self-effacing meditation on the speaker’s shortcomings as a man, the moral value of art, and the fundamental imbalance that love introduces into life and mortality. The poem’s tone is wry, self-aware, and ultimately tender, resisting grand declarations of romance in favor of a more personal, almost pragmatic reflection on the nature of devotion. Hicok, known for his ability to blend humor with profound emotional insight, constructs a poem that both questions and affirms love’s meaning through the lens of everyday life, work, and the inevitability of death.

The poem begins with an apology, an acknowledgment of failure: “I apologize for not being Gandhi or Tom the mailman who is always kind.” The juxtaposition of these two figures—one a global icon of nonviolence and moral authority, the other an ordinary postal worker—immediately establishes Hicok’s approach. Rather than setting up unattainable ideals, the speaker contrasts himself with a figure as monumental as Gandhi and as local as Tom, suggesting that even kindness in its simplest form is something he struggles to embody. Tom, the mailman, is a humble, unheralded force of good, delivering people’s words “no matter the mood of the sky,” a quiet persistence that contrasts with the speaker’s own insulated occupation. Gandhi, on the other hand, embodies a more radical form of selflessness, liberating a nation without violence. The speaker, by comparison, describes himself as playing with words in a small room while others “go foraging for food.” This admission is both self-deprecating and existentially weighty, raising the question of whether poetry—or art in general—has any real moral or practical value in a world where survival remains a struggle for many.

The next admission, “I’m a better poet than man,” is delivered without embellishment, followed by the equally humbling assertion that “it’s well known how little my verbs are worth.” The speaker recognizes that his poetic abilities do not translate into ethical superiority or meaningful action in the world. There is a clear contrast between his internal creative world and the external world of necessity, responsibility, and sacrifice. In saying “I am my only subject, being the god of my horizons,” the speaker acknowledges a certain self-absorption inherent in artistic pursuit. However, rather than accepting this solipsism, he immediately subverts it with a quiet confession: “What saves me is that just beyond my skin the world of yours is where I’d rather live.” The speaker’s salvation lies in connection, in stepping outside his own self-imposed artistic exile and into the life of his beloved. This moment provides the emotional pivot of the poem, revealing that while the speaker may see himself as limited, it is love that anchors him, that offers him an alternative to mere introspection.

Hicok then introduces an unexpected perspective on love—statistical and economic: “The AMA says you’ve added seven point six years to my life. In a phrase, love is a transfer of wealth.” The American Medical Association’s finding that love lengthens life serves as an empirical, almost bureaucratic validation of romance. Love, in this framing, is not just an abstract emotion but something quantifiable, a literal extension of existence. The phrase “a transfer of wealth” reinforces the idea that love is an unequal exchange, though not necessarily in financial terms. Instead, it suggests that love redistributes time, health, and well-being, an idea humorously underscored by the reference to Adam Smith, the father of modern economics. Smith, the speaker jokes, abandoned romantic verse, perhaps because he understood the inherent imbalance in love’s transactions. This shifts the poem’s focus to one of love’s central paradoxes: it often benefits one person more than the other, and in this case, the speaker acknowledges that he is the one receiving more.

This asymmetry becomes clearest in the most brutal lines of the poem: “I’d be dead sooner without you, you’ll die faster for being a Mrs., raw deal can’t be more clearly defined.” Here, the poem confronts the often-overlooked reality that marriage, statistically, tends to benefit men more than women. While love may extend the speaker’s life, it accelerates his partner’s mortality—a bleak but undeniably honest observation. The phrase “raw deal” is jarring in its directness, stripping away sentimentality to expose the hard truth that love, in a practical sense, is not always fair. This acknowledgment does not lead to a grand romantic promise but rather to a small, almost comical attempt at restitution: “To make amends I offer ten percent more kisses each year.” The speaker treats love as a kind of ongoing negotiation, where affection can be measured and increased in increments, as if making a conscious effort to offset the inherent imbalance.

The poem then poses an unspoken question: does proximity in love ultimately do more harm than good? The speaker wonders, “Or do I do more harm the closer we become? If yes, leaving would be love and a better man might.” This moment of doubt introduces the possibility that true love, if it causes harm, might require self-sacrifice. A “better man” might leave to preserve his partner’s well-being. But the speaker is not that man, and he does not pretend to be. Instead, he confesses to the comforts of domesticity, the small, selfish joys that tether him to love: “But my thrills are selfishly domestic. I like sweeping words into piles and whispering good night.” The final lines bring the poem full circle, reaffirming that for all the speaker’s shortcomings, his love exists in the quiet, everyday rituals—language, companionship, and the small intimacies of shared life.

Hicok’s style in “Truth About Love” is deceptively simple, employing a conversational, almost confessional tone that allows for moments of humor, irony, and sincerity to coexist. The poem’s structure is fluid, moving through self-doubt, statistical analysis, economic metaphor, and emotional honesty without ever settling into a single mode. The enjambment and lack of punctuation in certain lines create a sense of natural speech, as if the poem is unfolding in real time, with thoughts spilling out as they arise.

At its core, the poem resists traditional romantic tropes. There are no grand declarations, no sweeping metaphors of undying devotion. Instead, Hicok presents love as flawed, uneven, and often absurdly practical. Yet within this pragmatic approach, there is a deep, undeniable tenderness. The speaker may not be Gandhi or even Tom the mailman, but his love is real in its imperfections. It exists not in heroics but in the small, persistent gestures—kisses, whispered goodnights, the quiet presence of another life just beyond his own. In acknowledging love’s imbalance, its contradictions, and even its burdens, the poem ultimately affirms its worth, not as an ideal but as something tangible, lived, and deeply human.

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