Judge Wayne Miller’s comment: “Perhaps I’m a sucker for poems that interestingly evince some sort of emotional evasion; in additional to the winners, I find myself drawn to ‘The Lifeless Light of Love.’ Here, a discussion of Auden rolls into a tentative mode of self-praising, as if the speaker is looking for something in his/her romantic life to latch onto as good (‘I have / lost consciousness / in the scent of roses,’ ‘I have deferred my true self / to duty’). Yet in each of these moments of affirmation, he/she also discovers a simultaneous self-negation for the sake of love; herein lies the problem (perhaps with love itself). Thus, the speaker arrives at small-scale craft making as a metaphor for the way he/she loves, which moves away from the direct inquiry of the previous stanzas. By the end, he/she will simply talk about anything -- here, Jupiter -- to not have to talk about love. Though I don’t love the title, and the opening moves feel a bit less compelling to me than the end, I’m very interested in the way this poem essentially reverses itself, and in the process reveals something of the tangled relationship between love and ego.”

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