Meaning & Analysis
Love possesses a remarkable ability to overcome obstacles and difficulties, always discovering a means to achieve its ends.
Insights
Persistence of Affection
The proverb asserts that love, driven by desire and devotion, is resourceful and determined; it can surmount barriers that might thwart other motivations.
Ingenuity of Passion
It highlights the creative and ingenious solutions lovers devise to reach one another or to unite, emphasizing love’s capacity to inspire boldness and inventiveness.
Inevitability of Connection
No matter how fortified or defended the heart, or how insurmountable the circumstances, love’s influence will ultimately prevail—entering where it is least expected or even where it seems impossible.
Historical and Literary Resonance
The proverb is echoed in ballads, poetry, and drama throughout the early modern period, capturing a universal theme: from Deloney’s ‘Gentle Craft’ to Francis Bacon’s Essays and numerous folk songs, love is celebrated as unstoppable and ingenious.
Psychological Perspective
Psychologically, the saying reflects how strong emotional motivation enables individuals to overcome fear, devise clever strategies, and persist in the face of adversity. Love amplifies willpower and inventiveness.
Parallels in Popular Wisdom
The related proverbs ‘Love will break out in spite of a man’ and ‘Love and pease pottage will make their way’ reinforce the image of love as a relentless, almost elemental force that refuses to be denied or blocked.
Optimistic Worldview
Underlying the proverb is a hopeful faith in the power of human connection to bridge distances, dissolve barriers, and outlast opposition—an attitude celebrated in romantic tales and folklore worldwide.
Rhetorical Devices
Personification
Love is depicted as an active seeker, a protagonist capable of ‘finding a way,’ making the abstraction vivid and dynamic.
Alliteration
The repetition of the ‘w’ sound in ‘will’ and ‘way’ lends the phrase a rhythmic, memorable quality.
Metaphor
The notion of ‘finding a way’ transforms emotional perseverance into a journey, path, or quest, endowing love with movement and agency.
Transcription
Quotations
Thus love, you see, can finde a way To make both men and maids obey.
Love can find entrance not only into an open heart, but also into a heart well fortified, if watch be not well kept.
In spight of all contesting, Love will finde out the way.
But Love and Money will find or force a passage.
Love will find out the way.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.