Love’s Diet

Song Meaning

These lyrics open with a striking image: love as a creature grown to "cumbersome unwieldiness / And burdenous corpulence." The speaker, determined to regain control, puts this overgrown emotion on a strict "diet." Its sustenance? "Discretion"—a surprising, almost ironic choice for something typically fueled by passion. The central tension here lies in the speaker's active, almost clinical, sabotage of emotional nourishment. He meticulously limits his love to "one sigh a day," and if a "she sigh" from a mistress appears, he dismisses it as insincere. Even his own tears are "brined... With scorn and shame" to prevent them from feeding his affection. This isn't just passive resistance; it's a deliberate, calculated starvation of feeling. The craft truly shines in the extended metaphor of love as a creature. Initially a bloated burden, it transforms into a trained "buzzard love," a bird of prey now completely under the speaker's command. This shift from being overwhelmed by love to becoming its master, a "falconer" who can "spring a mistress" at will, is a powerful and chilling display of agency. The cynical word choices, like calling a mistress's tears "counterfeit" and her affections a mere "fortieth name in an entail," underscore this detached mastery. Ultimately, these lyrics are effective because they articulate a ruthless, almost Machiavellian approach to managing one's emotional life and relationships. The speaker, having seemingly suffered from an excess of love, now wields absolute control, treating romantic pursuits as a "game" to be won or lost without emotional investment. It's a stark, unromantic vision of love, where calculation triumphs over raw feeling.