Poetry and the personification of Love - 2/6/12

Poetry's fictional addressee is the personification of Love.  When Love leaves, Love is abandoned.  A character only in literary space: a character who can only be fictional, which is what makes the personification so sad.  That's what's going on in Bishop, Shelley's "When the Lamp is Shattered" and Yeats's "When you are old." NB: I think that I come close to being able to say what I mean here.