"Where love is like a tree which breaks when you lean on it" - I've never understood it that way. It's the lover who turns out to be unreliable when push comes to shove, rather than love as such.

That may sound like a quibble, but I think the distinction is actually crucial to the song, which isn't about being miserable but rather about being betrayed and abandoned.

I think the general consensus about the wise men describing an elephant is that they didn't come up with a very helpful description. Their problem was that they got it completely the wrong way around - they didn't start with an idea of the elephant as a whole, and then pick out the various ways in which it was like different things; nor did they bring together the various similarities they identified, and build up an overall picture; what they did was grab at some random similarity, and then proceed to insist that that was an adequate account of a creature that was much more complicated.

The point is that, if you start with a real thing (such an elephant, or a story, or a vivid and real image), and then tease away at it, on its own terms, you can learn from it things that are relevant and true about other matters. "Applicable" as Tolkien said.