But to see her was to love her,
Love but her, and love forever.
Had we never lov’d sae kindly,
Had we never lov’d sae blindly,
Never met—or never parted—
We had ne’er been brokenhearted.

These lines come from Robert Burns’s song “Ae Fond Kiss,” a lyric of farewell and regret written in Scots-inflected English. Burns composed it in the early 1790s, during a period when he was turning intensely to song-writing and adapting older airs for publication. The poem is widely read as a parting address shaped by Burns’s own experience of complicated attachments and separations, though it is not securely tied to a single documented breakup. In the song, the speaker looks back on a love that felt inevitable and total, and laments that the very depth of feeling has made the loss unbearable.

These lines juxtapose the irresistible force of attraction (“to see her was to love her”) with the lasting cost of such devotion. The speaker frames love as totalizing—exclusive (“Love but her”) and enduring (“forever”)—yet immediately turns to the counterfactual refrain: if they had never loved so deeply or so blindly, and if they had never met or never separated, they would have been spared heartbreak. The stanza captures a classic Burns tension between passionate immediacy and reflective regret, suggesting that the very intensity that makes love meaningful also makes loss inevitable and wounding.