Daphnis and Chloe Realize “It Must Be Love”

Don Williams iconic “It Must Be Love” closely parallels Daphnis and Chloe’s realization about love after Philetas’ teachings. The simultaneous emotional and physical symptoms of love such as feeling on fire, being unable to sleep, and being in pain over love are described almost identically in the song and text. Both Daphnis and Chloe and Williams reason through the physical, often painful symptoms they are experiencing and respectively come to the same conclusion of “Maybe this is Love” and “it must be love.” The song and the text also discuss thinking that something must be wrong to feel this yearning and aching from love, as Daphnis had mentioned earlier in the text. Both the song and text seem as if the characters/narrator are experiencing the emotions for the first time and are just now making sense of them, realizing they are in love. Even the song references feeling like a sparrow and a dove, and the text has a recurring theme of birdsong and birds in love and mythology such as the story of the wood pigeon (pp. 19-20). Finally, the song describes dreaming of embracing their lover, just as Daphnis and Chloe experienced “dreams of desire” after learning about the physical act of making love from Philetas.

Although this song and passage from Daphnis and Chloe are uncannily similar, there is a slight difference in narration. In the text, Daphnis and Chloe are having an actual dialogue with each other about their feelings and reasoning through what love is together. Don Williams’ song has a single narrator, recounting and reasoning through his feelings of love to himself as an internal monologue. Therefore, the song does not show a confession of shared feelings between lovers as Daphnis and Chloe does. As a result, there is not as much resolution in the song since only the narrator realizes he is in love, and it is unclear whether it is requited as is the case with Daphnis and Chloe.

Daphnis and Chloe
Book II, pp.29

Lovers feel pain – why, so do we! They neglect their food – just as we have done! They can’t sleep – that’s just our difficulty now! They think they’re burning – there’s are in us, too! They long for the sight of each other – that’s why we pray for day to come more quickly! Maybe this is Love, and we are in love with each other without knowing it.