To understand the poem "Love's Last Lesson," it is useful to know something about its author, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, who usually published her poetry using only her initials L.E.L. She was a precocious child and published her first poems when she was still a teen. For the era in which she lived, her personal life was quite scandalous. She had numerous affairs, and even gave birth to several children that she gave up to adoption. She died at the age of 36 holding a bottle of prussic acid, a poison which she may have been taking in diluted form as a medical remedy for an ongoing malady.
"Love's Last Lesson" is a poem about unrequited love. The narrator relates that she fell deeply in love with a man and she hoped that he loved her too. If she had "been mistress of the starry worlds" she would have given them all to him. However, the man said that he did not love her. He was, she writes, caught up in ambition, pride, and power, and didn't care "what lovely flowers might perish in his path."
At the beginning of the poem, the narrator longs for forgetfulness, but the wounds of her rejected love and crushed hopes are too deep. Her love is not casual like "light summer love," but it is deeper and more intense. Only in death can she be relieved of her pain.
The last stanza sums up the conclusion she has come to. She writes that a man's dreams of pride and power and a woman's dreams of love are both vain. In the end, when they die, their hopes have already died long before.
"Love's Last Lesson" seems to be about the deep love that a woman (the speaker) holds for a person as yet unnamed. So much of the poem is steeped in her love for the unnamed person that she says, early on, "there is a home of quiet for the wretched," meaning "the grave"—she pines for this person so much that she longs to be dead and put out of her misery.
The woman, who seems to be writing a letter to her beloved, wishes to have "forgetfulness." The speaker wants to completely erase all thoughts of her beloved. But the same speaker goes on to call the object of her affection "my god on Earth." So, obviously, the speaker is not likely to feel forgetfulness any time soon.
To the speaker "each look was counted as a prize" from her beloved, and she suffers when her object of affection does not return her feelings, claiming the only rest she will have is "in the grave."
In the second stanza, the speaker switches to a third-person narrator who portrays the crisis of the woman. The woman questions why she should care at all. She wishes she could simply forget the object of her love. She has only "cold words and scorn and slight" from the person she loves. She is miserable.
In the third stanza, the woman talks about the "red lava stream" that is her unrequited love for the person the poem is referring to. The woman feels the red-hot emotions of love, while the object of her affections seems cold.
The fourth stanza discusses "hopes that lie mute in their own sullenness," meaning that, though she may feel love for her object of affection, she will remain silent.
In the fifth stanza, the woman speaks of "woman's wretchedness" and seems ashamed to feel the way she does. She has love for someone but feels like it makes her weak.
In the sixth stanza, the woman asks how she has come to be in this place, when the object of her affection has shown her that the love is unrequited.
The seventh stanza has the woman questioning all love. She believes that all love must be false because she felt so deeply about the person she loved.
In the eighth and final stanza, the speaker seems to come to the realization that, regardless of how she has suffered in her unrequited love for the other, "the grave closes over those whose hopes have lain there long before."
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