What Love is Like -- Piet Hein

(Poem #1092) What Love is Like Love is like a pineapple, sweet and undefinable. -- Piet Hein

This has got to be one of the nicest analogies I have seen - surprising,
even a little silly, but oh-so-apt, and with an undefinable sweetness of its
own that has me smiling and quoting it to myself at odd intervals. And then
there's the rhyme - it takes a considerable existing reputation to get away
with rhyming "pineapple" with "undefinable", but having gotten away with it,
it only serves to make the poem all the more memorable.

The obvious comparison is with Nash, but despite the superficial similarity,
I don't think today's poem is all that Nashian. True, it's a short poem with
an outrageous rhyme, but unlike a lot of Nash's work, the rhyme isn't really
the point of the grook - it just serves to add impact to the simile.

martin