Thursday, November 13, 2025

"Love Me Do"

Years ago, I noted that the first "Love" in the recurring line "Love, love me do" in "Love Me Do" could be understood as a vocative instead of an imperative verb.  I was thinking about this again recently and realized that if it's taken this way (where this vocative "love" and the later "you" refer to the same person, the object of the narrator's affections), there's a sort of chiasm in the lines "Love, love me do / You know I love you":
Love,
love
me...
I
love
you
This type of structure illustrates the reciprocal nature of the relationship that the narrator wants to have.

It also occurred to me that the first syllable of "always" in the line "I'll always be true" is sung with a longer value than the surrounding notes, lending a sense of this duration.  The whole line is sung a melody something like this: