“For Love” grapples with the idea that the poet, in the end, can conclude only that love endlessly turns away (Creeley repeats the verb construct for emphasis) from even the most determined efforts to understand it. But mystery, the hobgoblin of the sciences, lifts and sustains.

Mystery provides the poem’s complicated gift of awareness offered to lovers everywhere. You cannot expect love to be deciphered into some neat cause-and-effect logic. The world is thinned by definitions; every phenomenon from the sunrise to a heart attack to weather events to chemical reactions is joylessly tamed into explanation and coaxed into formulas that dull life into expectation and flatline each day into routine. Lovers aspire to move, collectively, beyond the certainties, the dreary, uncomplicated understanding of things. Love is supposed to baffle, running as it so often does against the logic of the intellect. It is unpredictable, its development uncertain, its end always premature. Lovers dream of getting to that point where they acknowledge that they have found a love that cannot be explained, a love so sumptuous and so absolute in its impact that understanding it would only trivialize it.

For the poem’s speaker, tapping into love’s mystery is sufficient. Love becomes an eternal energy that defies the particulars of time and space and expands awareness itself into a time and place beyond measure.