Love :)

Paul Laurence Dunbar

If

If life were but a dream, my Love,
And death the waking time;
If day had not a beam, my Love,
And night had not a rhyme, --
A barren, barren world were this
Without one saving gleam;
I'd only ask that with a kiss
You'd wake me from the dream.

If dreaming were the sum of days,
And loving were the bane;
If battling for a wreath of bays
Could soothe a heart in pain, --
I'd scorn the meed of battle's might,
All other aims above
I'd choose the human's higher right,
To suffer and to love!

http://www.poetry.com/lovepoems/lovepoems.asp

I believe the theme of this poem is what if we all chose to love? To live a life around love. To suffer because of love, but to be joyous because of love. Our life would seem to be a dream if we loved all our waking moments, for love is like a dream. The metaphors that jumped out at me were the way it talked about the night having a rhyme and the day having a beam. The day's beam and the nights rhyme is the limit of love we are able to express because of a limit of time. This poem shows that if we centered our life around love that we would be happy but we would suffer, because to love is to live but to love is to suffer as well.
Make sense at all?
It does to me, but maybe not to you.