If read too superficially, you might think from her latest
poem, she intended to become a nun – which would be a gross misinterpretation
since the opposite seems to be true.
On one hand, you could also misread the poem into thinking
she is attempting to seduce someone into an affair, making an argument not so
much different from Shakespeare, who argued best to give up one’s virginity since
the worms will devour it eventually anyway.
This would be a mistaken interpretation, too, although the poem
is definitely about her attraction to someone that has gone unrequited, but it
is not because this other person is resisting her charms.
It is difficult to know who the poem is about, although it
is clear she has found someone she is attracted to, and she is debating whether
to pursue it to its next “natural” conclusion.
The poem is a debate within herself, about whether she
should pursue someone she is attracted to, who is like married, but who has become
a kindred spirit.
Does she take the affair to the next logical level or keep
it as a love affair in her mind.
She is struggling with her own lust, and the urge to strip
the whole thing of its spiritual trapping and get down and dirty, a relationship, which “begs to un-transmogrify into
run of the mill evolutionary forms,” to engage in something that is “best
shared naked,” a natural progress most would assume, though she admits “something
about flesh on flesh means death to the original lust.”
She wonders if doing the nasty need will ruin something that
is special, when if she keeps it contained, she might maintain her lust as
something saintly (she refusing to disrupt someone else’s life) into something
sinful if she does, “transformed from sin to saintly if styed safety in the
head and out of the bed.”
Her sinful side might remain aloof, saintly, but she can’t stop
thinking about it.
“It lives on there, protected, kind, unrejected, and blind.”
Yet like Shakespeare, she seems to understand that a platonic
relationship is unnatural and can’t possibly survive in the real world. At
best, someone can keep it locked away, never acted on, also never betrayed or a
cause of disappointment by real people in the real world.
She calls it “a love affair of the mind” or kindred spirits,
which may become diminished into base lust. But she seems to argue that it is
the way of things, flesh on flesh, which may ruin the original appeal, “death
to the original lust,” she writes.
Although she may mean Shakespeare’s meaning here, in which
death equals orgasm.
She appears to be scared she might spoil something special
if she takes it to the next and natural level. He might even reject her. And if
there is another woman involved, a wife, then she would be “kind” by showing
restraint.
The poem seems to suggest the folly of and self-deception in
believing you can lust for someone and not act on it, and thus keeps love pure,
when love making itself is an animal act, sweaty and full of animal passion,
hardly the ethereal stuff poets sometimes make it out to be.
Lust can’t be made pure by holding back, lust is lust, sex
is sex, and you can drive yourself crazy by keeping in your head rather than
taking it to be.
Yet part of her, at least, wants to do the right thing, only
you can feel the other part of her winning the argument, perhaps echoing Shakespeare’s
take on the folly of purity, about maintaining virtue until the worms get it
after death.
As run of the mill and common as sex might seem, maybe even
a little unpoetic, it is the natural result of lust.
She being the educated poet that she is, may well be
alluding to Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” in using the term “a love affair
of the mind,” which in Mann’s work means love not acted on leads to decay and death.
The poem implies an extramarital relationship which she
might put at risk if she goes to bed with him.
And it seems pretty clear, she doesn’t believe they can
remain friends, kindred spirits, nor is she certain she can keep the beast
locked up in her head anyway.
She does not seem to believe that a platonic relationship
can survive, there is a natural progression lust always brings, and ultimately spiritual
love needs to be demystified and to surrender to the sweaty reality of flesh on
flesh.
She seems to be saying lust is natural and so is its
eventual resolution in sex. What’s not natural is pretending you can keep lust
contained in your head and not acted upon.
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