This is a very interesting question to consider. I think if there is a sense of love in this lyrical poem, it is one that focuses on the love of memory and nostalgia and how it is such an important force in our lives. Let us remember the power of the mental images that are evoked in the second stanza of this poem, as the adult speaker is ushered back into the past thanks to the music that he hears in the present:
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
Such emotional expressions as "weeps to belong" and the memories of "old Sunday evenings at home" and the "cosy parlour" show the way in which the narrator loves the memories of his childhood past. He is so much in love with these memories, in fact, that the final stanza declares that his manhood is "cast / Down in the flood of remembrance," and the end of the poem leaves him "weeping like a child" for the past that is now irrevocably lost. If we think of this poem in connection with love, therefore, it is definitely a blind, rosy-tinged love of the past that is present, as the speaker wallows in overwhelming nostalgia. Love is present, but it is based around our concept of memory and our childhood, and conveniently ignores the various negative aspects of such a stage.
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