"Love does not seek to please oneself"

“Love seeketh not itself to please” names the self-forgetting ideal at the center of a four-line stanza from William Blake’s Songs of Experience, set against a second stanza that reverses its terms into a portrait of possessive love. The contrast is more than a difference in feeling: one kind of love accepts another’s ease as its own concern, while the other makes another person’s discomfort the price of its pleasure. Placed immediately before Fred Vincy’s confession to Mary Garth, the poem gives their scene a moral frame without resolving the confession in advance.

Form and Contrasting Stanzas

The poem begins with a compact sequence of self-renunciation: “Love seeketh not itself to please,” “Nor for itself hath any care,” and “But for another gives its ease.” Its final line turns that giving into a paradoxical image of refuge, building “a heaven in hell's despair.” Love is defined not by what it receives but by the ease it yields for someone else; the closing image presents care as capable of making a heaven even amid despair.

After a conspicuous break, the poem restarts with nearly the same opening phrase, altered by one decisive word: “Love seeketh only self to please.” What the first stanza denies, the second makes its governing purpose. The change from not to only transforms the verse’s moral direction, and the following lines trace the consequences: the self binds another to its delight, rejoices in that person’s loss of ease, and builds “a hell in heaven's despite.” The inversion is exact enough to make the two forms of love appear as rival constructions of a shared relationship: one gives ease, the other takes it away.

The balanced parallels make the distinction legible through action rather than abstract definition. The first love gives and builds; the second binds, rejoices, and builds in defiance of heaven. Both stanzas end with an image of a world made by love, but their outcomes are opposed. In the first, care creates a heaven within despair; in the second, self-pleasing makes hell even where heaven might otherwise be. The repeated building image therefore gives emotional conduct a visible consequence: love does not merely inhabit circumstances but helps shape the world another person must live in.

Placement Before Fred’s Confession

The poem appears as an epigraph to the chapter, attributed to William Blake’s Songs of Experience, just before the narration turns to Fred’s visit to Stone Court. He wants to find Mary Garth when she is not expecting him and when she may be alone in the wainscoted parlor. To avoid announcing his approach, he leaves his horse in the yard rather than making noise on the gravel outside. The careful, quiet entrance makes the moment intimate, but the poem above it keeps intimacy under moral examination: the question is not simply what Fred feels, but whether his conduct serves himself or another.

Mary is in her usual corner, laughing over Mrs. Piozzi’s recollections of Johnson. She looks up with amusement still on her face, but it gradually fades as Fred approaches without speaking and stands before her, looking ill. Mary remains silent and raises her eyes to him in inquiry. The visible change in her expression and Fred’s appearance give the scene a bodily tension before either character explains what has brought him there. The poem’s formal contrast thus meets a concrete encounter: another person’s ease is present in Mary’s laughter, while Fred’s illness and silence interrupt it.

The Moral Lens of the Expression

Fred begins, “Mary, I am a good-for-nothing blackguard.” That blunt self-condemnation makes the epigraph’s opposition immediately relevant, but it does not by itself establish which stanza best describes his actions or what Mary will make of his confession. The poem supplies a standard against which the scene can be read, not a substitute for the scene’s unfolding particulars. Its placement invites attention to the effects of conduct on another person, while Fred’s opening words mark a turn from silent approach to direct admission.

The expression’s lasting force lies in how tightly it joins love to consequence. The first stanza makes care costly to the self but sustaining to another; the second exposes self-pleasing as an impulse that can constrain another person and rejoice in their discomfort. By placing both possibilities beside Fred and Mary, the text prevents “love” from serving as an automatically virtuous label. What matters is the direction of its actions—whether it gives another ease or binds them to the self’s delight—and what kind of world those actions build.