Both Coldplay’s song “Always in My Head” and Meleager’s poem G-P 41 are about lovers unsuccessfully trying to get out of their love for another. Both use the analogy of movement to describe the experience of trying to leave love behind but being caught in paralysis.
Coldplay uses the duality of body and mind: “My body moves…but though I try my heart stays still / it never moves … / And you’re always in my head.” I take “heart” to be a metaphor for the speaker’s seeming incapability to escape love rather than referring to his actual heart, since earlier in the song the speaker says “his body moves.” So, although he is able to physically move and he tries to move out of love, he is unable to escape his love, thus the lyrics “my heart stays still.” It is a case of the speaker knowing what is best for him and being unable to act on it.
Similarly, Meleager uses the idea of paralysis to describe the experience of being trapped in love. He talks about his “soul warn[ing]” him to “flee” his love, but, just like the speaker in ‘Always in my Head’, he doesn’t have the ability to move, displayed in the phrase “I have no strength to flee.”
In ‘Always in my Head’, the speaker talks about the mind and how the lover is “always in [his] head” whereas in Meleager’s poem, the speaker mentions the soul, saying that his “shameless soul’s in love.” This distinction could be due to the historical context differences between the two pieces. It’s common in modern western culture to think about conditions, such as love, that were attributed to the soul in Greek and Roman times to be attributed to the mind. In this case, I’d say this is a semantic distinction and that the two speakers are describing the same experience of being psychologically paralyzed by their love. Though, it leads to a further, quite interesting, question: how is one’s experience of love affected by one’s conceptual framework of the world (ie. materialist, dualist, etc)?
“My soul warns me to flee my lust for Heliodora …
but I have no strength to flee. For even as it’s warning me, that shameless soul’s in love” (lines 1 and 3)