Question

Refer to Explorations in Literature for a complete version of the poem.

Answer 1

The answer is: A- They show the speaker's feelings and behavior at the start of her marriage, when she was young and less mature.

Answer 2

The correct answer is A.

The first 7 lines of the poem are a description of what love is not. Despite this negatory character, one can deduct this is exactly what the author imagined love was when she was younger. Further she also nostalgically recalls past feelings and she questions if she was capable of paying the price to experience it again. However, as a mature person, in the last line, she states with a confidence that she wouldn't be able to do so. She probably realized that love has rather different dimensions that these feelings she encountered at the beginning.