In “Late Love,” Jackie Kay uses a variety of figurative language and variations in meter to help express her themes. Let's look at how this works.

We will start with the figurative language. Notice how the poet vividly describes people in love. They strut about, “pleased with themselves,” standing tall, looking their best. “They don't remember who they have been,” the speaker notes. The last is hyperbole, of course, for people do not really forget themselves, but they feel separated from their previous lives.

The speaker also calls people in love “filmic,” like they are in the movies. They have a secret, somehow above the regular order of things. The church bells are ringing for them—not literally, of course, but symbolically, indicating something extremely important. In this case, it is love.

The poem continues with a contrast to people who are not in love. There is hyperbole here, of course, for people who are not in love are not shabby or clueless or messy except in the eyes of those who are in love. They do not spend all their time reminiscing about the past, but the image is vivid. Notice how the past is metaphorically described as a “rush of velvet” with a “secret hush.”

The poem's meter is quite regular for the most part, in iambic tetrameter, yet there are added syllables here and there that mirror the poem's contents. The first couple stanzas almost skip, but the last couple have extra syllables that mimic the trudging of the people not in love. Notice, too, the extra line at the end of the poem that fades away, again parallel to the content.