I was listening, by happy accident, to choral matins from St Edmund Hall, Oxford, on Radio 4’s Sunday Worship programme. I’m not a particularly religious person (though I do believe in following a loose moral code while recognising we’re inherently flawed and fallible) but occasionally I find church services very soothing.

The service paid homage to Edmund of Abingdon (after whom ‘Teddy Hall’ is named) and the practises of almsgiving and love that were defining features of his life. Leading the worship, Revd Dr Zachary Guiliano said ‘Love is such a difficult thing to capture in words. It is easier to feel in one’s heart or to see in the face and actions of other people’.

I don’t dispute that love reveals itself in actions, both in small acts of kindness and through large gestures that are almost impossible to repay (the fact that you don’t have to do so is an integral part of the transaction). And it’s not hard to identify examples.

Love was washing my mother’s hair for her after an operation to remove lymph nodes from under her arm temporarily prevented her use of it, a stark reversal of the child-parent relationship. Love was her allowing me to do it without embarrassment or protest.

Love was my father showing up on the train station platform to send me off on my post-university travels despite us having a blazing row in the days before. Love was him hugging me and stashing a £50 note in my back pocket when words failed him. They don’t fail me.

Love is listening to my eldest child as he struggles to express his thoughts. Giving him the time and opportunity to speak without interruption or any visible signs from me of exasperation or fatigue. It’s learning to revel in the occasional randomness of his ramblings and help him sift them into order.

Love is rowing in behind to support when others have left the race. More than once. It’s someone stepping in when the need for help is there and you can’t see clearly enough to ask for it or are simply whittled down too far to the bare core. It’s also occasionally stepping back, being respectful and giving space.

But I do disagree with the Revd Guiliano that love is hard to put into words. It’s easy. Otherwise what have the poets been doing all this time? Just because there isn’t a single expression of love doesn’t mean it’s elusive. To quote the lyricist Paul Francis Webster (via the film Moulin Rouge) ‘Love is a many splendored thing’. So let’s let it be splendid, to each of us in its own way.

I don’t have to work hard to think of ways love has been encapsulated on the page. The poet John Donne’s conceit of the compass in A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning – one soul leaning after another – immediately springs to mind. Donne’s The Flea, in whose swelled body ‘two bloods mingled be’ is perhaps more crude but the analogy is nonetheless striking.

But it doesn’t even need to be that erudite. In Moulin Rouge the young English poet Christian sings to the French courtesan Satine ‘I hope you don’t mind / That I put down in words / How wonderful life is now you’re in the world’. It may be quite simple, but it’s true. And that is the genius of Elton John.

Perhaps an example that might have more traction with the Revd Guiliano (though he struck me in his sermon as an open-minded person) would be Paul the Apostle’s Epistle to the Corinthians, much used at weddings and literal testament to the ability to use language to define not only what love is, but what it’s not.

To quote another line used in the Baz Luhrmann film, ‘The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return’. For the willing student there is a lifetime of texts to study – from metaphysical poetry to mainstream music – each one a different but discernible distillation of love.