Love. It’s elusive and precious. It’s the thing we’re all chasing but nobody can quite describe. Given its centrality to human life, we should listen up whenever somebody finds a way to capture it in words.

The core challenge of writing about love is that it’s so abstract. How does Gibran overcome this obstacle? By writing about it as a person. In doing so, love ceases to be a vague feeling and becomes a complex character we can see and interact with. It beckons, speaks, shatters, crowns, and crucifies.

The stakes of the paragraph are heightened with religious language too. Words like “crown” and “crucify”, and phrases like “follow him” and “believe in him” feel like they could’ve been pulled from the Gospel of John. Portraying the divine as masculine adds to the biblical overtone. If it’d been female, it would’ve had a more mythological aura. These reverent words speak to the worthy sacrifice and suffering that elevate love into a sacred (and spiritual) dimension.

For Gibran, love is neither good nor bad, but paradoxical in nature. This is why the passage is filled with contradictions. They force the reader to grapple with the tumultuousness of love itself.

Love can be hard to describe directly. It’s such an intense emotion that it transcends the capacity of language. Gibran captures the spirit of it by writing about it like a person, using biblical language, and capturing the paradoxes of it with symbolic imagery.