The World Had Fled By Rachel Wetzsteon Summary

In the poem “The World Had Fled” by Rachel Wetzsteon, the speaker is literally describing the three phases of love. The first phase is described as that extraordinary moment at the beginning of passionate love when the intensity, closeness, and fullness of one’s relationship makes everything else in the world that at the same time, it makes the world itself disappear. In the second phase, the speaker expresses her despair at the passing of that early love stage in which entirely caught up in one another, their love was truly out of this world, over this world. So she remains longing for that “splendid isolation back” throughout the second phase, but in the third phase, the speaker finally comes to realize that although the first phase “doesn’t