WHAT IS LOVE?

Barlett's "Familiar Quotations" contains more than 900 entries under the word "Love." For millennia, philosophers and artists and scientists and holy men have tried to define love.

"Love is never having to say you're sorry," Erich Segal wrote.

"Love is saying you're sorry 1,000 times a day," John Lennon countered.

The day before Valentine's Day is a good day to ask, What is love?

Perhaps a biblical definition to start:

"Though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing.

"And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.

Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." -- 1 Corinthians 13:2-4.

The Rev. Miles White, pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church, points out that the Greek language has three different words for love, differentiating between the erotic, platonic and godly.

"From the Christian perspective, agape love is the love that lasts," White says. "When we experience God's love and can love someone else in that capacity, it's a richer love."

White also finds wisdom in more secular approaches to the question, such as that contained in Leo Buscalia's book "Loving Each Other."

In it, Buscalia theorizes that love is learned, contradicting our presumption that everyone knows how to love.

"Man has no choice but to love," he writes. "For when he does not he finds his alternatives are loneliness, destruction and despair."

Love that comes from within rather from without is learned love, White says.

"If you go through the process of loving someone, first you're attracted physically or intellectually. Later when you peel away the mask they've hidden behind, you find a different core."

Dr. Joan Singer's practice involves working at love. The Cape Girardeau clinical psychologist and marriage counselor says, "(Marriage) takes more than just love or what frequently ends up being infatuation. It takes a lot more to make it really last."

Common interests, common beliefs and values and friendship are ingredients of good love matches, she says.

She says friendship can develop even if people weren't friends when they got married.

Do people misunderstand love?

"I deal with a real specific population -- people who are having trouble," she says. "Those people frequently are mystified."

Intimacy is the state of affairs in a healthy marriage, Singer says. "Intimacy is when each person can be totally themselves with each other. They can be totally open and honest and can be totally accepted."

"Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds," Shakespeare wrote. The sonnet is one of Dr. Robert Hamblin's favorite discourses on the nature of love.

The Southeast English professor, poet and author has never written romantic poetry himself.

"I didn't write any kind of poetry when I was young, so therefore I didn't write romantic love poems," he said. "The poems I write about love in my middle age tend to be about family, grand kids, children, wife. None of that Valentine's stuff, I suppose, at my age.

For Hamblin, W.H. Auden's poem "That Night When Joy Began" is a near-perfect evocation of love.

"That night when joy began,

our narrowest veins to flush,

we waited for the flash

of morning's levelled gun.

But morning, let us pass

and day by day relief

outgrew his nervous laugh,

grows credulous of peace.

As mile by mile is seen

no trespassers reproach,

and love's best glasses reach

no fields but are his own.

While Hamblin appreciates Auden's technical mastery, it's the passion of the opening line and the speaker's surprise at finding that love can last that make the poem memorable for him.

"I get very emotional at weddings, seeing two young people standing there, taking that leap of faith," he says. "And it is a leap, but they love each other so much they're willing to take that leap."

To Hamblin, who has been married to his wife Kaye for 37 years, "Love is what we do for the other person. Not what it does for us."

Love is a state of grace, he says. "You don't expect it, you don't deserve it. It's a given."