Falling in love

The speaker joins falling in love with falling for war and imagines that lack of experience might prevent giving up his life.

The speaker treats knowledge through experience as a source of vulnerability. The page allows both love and war to occupy the pronoun it, without settling them into a single event.

Under the title 'Falling in love', the poem begins 'And falling for war' and continues 'If I don't know it / If I haven't had it / Then I would be intelligent / Then I would not give / my life for it'.

The title and the first row join love and war through the same verb. The conditional treats inexperience as the only intelligence, so the speaker, who has known it, is left ready to give his life. The poem does not praise that readiness; it presents it as the cost of having fallen.