Witter Bynner’s Romance is a luminous meditation on the elusive, protean nature of love—not as a fixed condition or a sentimental trope, but as a force that defies rational comprehension, resists possession, and transcends the boundaries of selfhood. Written with lyrical economy and philosophical depth, the poem unfolds as a series of rhetorical questions and paradoxes that evoke love’s simultaneous proximity and distance, cruelty and kindness, universality and intimacy. Far from a conventional love lyric, Romance interrogates love not through narrative or confession but through personification and metaphysical inquiry, presenting love as both a cosmic principle and an intimate presence—“I am heaven. I am you.” This duality anchors the poem’s emotional resonance and philosophical ambition, inviting the reader into a contemplative space where certainty dissolves and wonder begins.

Historically, Romance emerges from the early twentieth-century American poetic landscape, a period marked by transitions between romanticism, modernism, and the lingering influence of fin-de-siècle aesthetics. Bynner, though often overshadowed by contemporaries like Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens, occupied a distinctive position as a poet deeply influenced by classical forms yet attuned to spiritual and emotional interiority. His time in Taos, New Mexico, and his engagement with Eastern philosophy and indigenous American cultures further shaped his poetic sensibilities toward an appreciation of mystery, impermanence, and the sacred interpenetration of self and world. Though Romance does not overtly reference these biographical currents, its thematic preoccupations—the ineffability of experience, the refusal of definition, the invocation of natural phenomena as metaphors for inner states—resonate with Bynner’s broader poetic project. The poem’s voice is neither confessional nor detached; it is oracular, issuing pronouncements that hover between declaration and riddle, much like the Delphic “know thyself” that undergirds so much Western introspection.

The poem opens with a triad of existential questions: “What and where am I and who?” This syntactic compression—three interrogatives bound into a single breath—enacts the very disorientation it describes. Identity, location, and essence collapse into one irresolvable knot. The speaker, who we soon realize is Love itself, disavows the possibility of self-definition: “I can never tell. Can you?” The shift to the second person is crucial; it implicates the reader in the same epistemological quandary. This is not merely a statement about love’s mystery but an invitation to recognize one’s own limits in grasping it. The rhetorical strategy here aligns with a long tradition in lyric poetry that treats love as an unknowable absolute—think of Sappho’s fragmented yearnings or Rumi’s ecstatic surrender—but Bynner reframes this tradition with a modern, almost Zen-like economy. The comparisons that follow—“a sunset after rain,” “a moonlit wave,” “a willow,” “a star”—are not decorative but epistemic. Each natural image embodies a kind of silent eloquence, a presence that communicates without explaining. In doing so, Bynner suggests that love, like nature, operates beyond the logic of cause and effect. It simply is, radiant and inscrutable.

This motif of unanswerability recurs throughout the poem, deepening in emotional consequence. In the second stanza, the speaker invites pursuit—“Follow me in any face / To some far and lovely place”—but immediately withdraws the promise of permanence. The conditional joy of finding love is tempered by a prohibition: “Never ask me where I went / Seven moons ago nor when / I intend to come again.” Time, here measured in lunar cycles, becomes a symbol of love’s cyclical yet unpredictable rhythm. The speaker’s refusal to be pinned to a timeline reflects a worldview in which love resists historical anchoring; it belongs to no calendar, no archive. This stance resonates with both romantic idealism—the notion of love as transcendent—and a more existential perspective: love, like consciousness, cannot be fully historicized or narrativized. The past and future are irrelevant to its presence. The emotional impact of this passage lies in its tender yet firm boundary-setting. It does not reject intimacy but redefines it on terms that honor love’s autonomy. There is no bitterness here, only clarity—“If you find me, be content”—which renders the poem’s tone uniquely generous even in its evasions.

The third stanza intensifies this theme through a sequence of rhetorical questions that pivot on the binary of foolishness and wisdom: “Am I foolish? Am I wise? / Never ask me to advise.” The refusal to offer counsel is significant. In many love poems, the beloved is a source of moral or existential guidance—a compass, a light. Here, love explicitly declines that role. Instead, Bynner offers a cascade of impossible analogies: “Ask a hawk about his wings, / Ask a robin why he sings, / Ask a tree to be a city.” Each comparison underscores the futility of demanding rational justification from that which is essentially instinctual or ontological. The hawk does not “know” its wings; it is them. The robin’s song is not a reasoned choice but an expression of being. Most striking is the image of the tree asked “to be a city”—a surreal leap that collapses scale and category, suggesting that to demand love explain itself is as absurd as asking nature to transform into civilization. This stanza thus functions as a critique of anthropocentrism in matters of the heart. Love cannot be domesticated into utility or moral instruction; it exists prior to and beyond human agendas.

This autonomy reaches its apotheosis in the fourth stanza, where love declares its “shiftiness” with a kind of proud inevitability: “Who is shiftier than I? / I can go without good-bye. / I can come without your leave.” The verbs “go” and “come” acquire almost mythic force, suggesting a deity or spirit that appears and disappears according to its own will. Yet this is not caprice; the stanza immediately qualifies love’s freedom with its capacity for compassion: “Come to comfort when you grieve.” Here, Bynner masterfully balances love’s inscrutability with its responsiveness. Love is not indifferent, but its movements cannot be controlled or anticipated. The closing couplet of the stanza—“Ask of me to stay or go, / Will I once obey you? No!”—delivers its refusal with a rhythmic finality that feels less like rejection and more like natural law. The exclamation “No!” is not cruel; it is the wind saying it cannot be still, the tide declining to halt. In this, Bynner aligns love with the rhythms of the cosmos rather than the desires of the ego.

The poem’s penultimate stanza synthesizes its central paradoxes with breathtaking concision: “I am nowhere, somewhere near. / I am no one, someone dear, / I am cruel, I am kind, / I am all there is to find…” Each line pairs opposites in a structure that recalls both Eastern dialectics and Western metaphysical poetry. The tension between absence and presence, anonymity and intimacy, cruelty and kindness, echoes the contradictory testimonies of lovers across centuries—love as both wound and balm, exile and home. What distinguishes Bynner’s treatment is its lack of resolution. The poem does not seek to reconcile these binaries but to hold them in dynamic suspension. This technique generates profound emotional resonance: the reader recognizes in these lines the lived complexity of love, which rarely conforms to neat moral or emotional categories. The phrase “I am all there is to find” is particularly striking. It suggests that love is not one experience among many but the ultimate horizon of human seeking—a totalizing yet elusive presence that encompasses all dualities.

The final lines return to the opening question, now transformed by the journey of the poem: “What am I and where and who? / I am heaven. I am you.” The circular structure enacts a kind of hermeneutic spiral; we return to the same query, but now imbued with revelation. The answer is twofold, and profoundly relational. First, love is “heaven”—a transcendent realm, a state of grace, the divine made immanent. This aligns with mystical traditions from Dante to St. Teresa of Ávila, for whom love was the conduit to the infinite. But Bynner immediately grounds this transcendence in the human: “I am you.” The collapse of subject and object here is startling in its intimacy. Love is not merely something one possesses or receives; it is the other, and through the other, the self is reconstituted. This formulation resonates with Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” philosophy, where genuine encounter dissolves the barrier between self and other, creating a unity that is neither fusion nor separation but presence. In Bynner’s hands, love becomes the mirror in which the self recognizes its own reflection—not as narcissism, but as communion.

Comparatively, Romance shares affinities with the metaphysical poets, particularly John Donne, whose love poems often fuse spiritual and erotic longing in paradoxical conceits. Yet where Donne’s dialectic is frequently theological and argumentative, Bynner’s is more meditative, less concerned with proving a point than with evoking a state of being. Similarly, while Emily Dickinson also explored love’s elusiveness and autonomy, her tone tends toward compression and irony; Bynner’s is expansive and lyrical, even incantatory. His voice carries the cadence of a mythic utterance, as though the poem itself were a spell to conjure love into presence—even as it insists on love’s refusal to be conjured.

Philosophically, the poem engages with the limits of language and knowledge. By repeatedly asserting what love cannot do—explain, advise, obey—Bynner gestures toward the apophatic tradition, which defines the divine by what it is not. Love, in this view, is known only through negation, through the stripping away of expectations and demands. This aligns with a broader twentieth-century disillusionment with rationalism, a sensibility that found expression in modernist fragmentation but also in quieter, more lyrical resistances like Bynner’s. Yet unlike the despair of Eliot’s wasteland or the alienation in much modernist verse, Romance offers a kind of serene acceptance. The poem does not mourn love’s inscrutability; it celebrates it as a form of freedom—for love and for the lover.

Emotionally, the poem achieves a rare balance between intimacy and distance. It does not seek to comfort through promises of constancy but through the affirmation of mystery. In a cultural moment saturated with narratives of romantic possession—where love is often measured by duration, fidelity, or utility—Bynner’s vision feels refreshingly radical. To love, in his terms, is to relinquish the desire to control, to define, to historicize. It is to dwell in the “somewhere near” of presence without demanding guarantees. This stance requires a kind of courage, a willingness to be unsettled, and the poem honors that courage by refusing easy resolution.

Moreover, the poem’s emotional impact is amplified by its strategic use of natural imagery not as mere ornament but as ontological analogues. The willow, the star, the hawk, the robin—these are not symbols in the allegorical sense but kin to love in their self-sufficient being. In invoking them, Bynner situates love within a larger ecology of existence, suggesting that to understand love is to attune oneself to the rhythms of the natural world. This ecological sensibility, though implicit, resonates with contemporary concerns about interconnectedness and the limits of human dominion. Love, like nature, thrives not through mastery but through participation.

In conclusion, Romance stands as a quietly revolutionary lyric that reimagines love not as a possession or a narrative but as a mode of being that defies categorization. Through its rhetorical questions, paradoxical declarations, and natural metaphors, the poem constructs a vision of love that is at once transcendent and immediate, autonomous and deeply relational. It refuses the sentimental, the didactic, and the possessive, offering instead a path of wonder and surrender. In doing so, Bynner achieves what all great poetry aspires to: he makes the ineffable palpable, not by explaining it, but by inviting us to dwell within its mystery. And in the end, when love reveals itself as both “heaven” and “you,” we are left not with answers but with a profound recognition—that the search for love is, in truth, the search for ourselves, reflected in the shifting, luminous face of the other.

Philip Bourke Marston’s “The First Kiss” concentrates an immense emotional and imaginative drama into the suspended interval after an intimate encounter. Rather than narrating courtship, conflict, or union in a conventional sequence, the poem begins after the lover has gone. Its central figure sits alone, physically altered and mentally absorbed by what has just occurred. The lyric’s achievement lies in its ability to make aftermath feel more intense than action: the kiss itself is recalled rather than directly witnessed, yet its force saturates the woman’s body, consciousness, landscape, and expectations of the future. Marston presents erotic awakening not as a merely private sensation but as an event that transforms the felt nature of time. The present is charged by memory, and memory becomes prophecy. A touch that has ended continues to happen within the imagination, producing a state in which desire, wonder, shame, spiritual exaltation, and uncertainty coexist.

The poem belongs recognizably to the culture of later Victorian poetry, a period in which idealized love and strict public conventions of sexual propriety existed alongside strikingly sensuous literary expression. Victorian readers inherited traditions of Romantic lyricism, Christian devotional language, Shakespearean love poetry, medieval romance, and the aesthetic intensity associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. Marston draws on these traditions, but he does so with unusual compression and directness. His scene is not explicitly medieval, mythological, or allegorical. It is a summer evening in an emotionally heightened but plausible world: a woman has been kissed by her lover and is left in an almost stunned condition of happiness. Yet the poem’s language lifts that situation above ordinary realism. The beloved does not simply remember a kiss; she experiences it as a sacred seal, an awakening of capacities she had not known existed, and an intimation of a future that she can feel without fully comprehending.

This combination of bodily specificity and spiritual language reveals a characteristic Victorian tension. Desire had to be negotiated through codes of modesty, reticence, and moral seriousness, especially when the desiring subject was a woman. Marston’s poem does not evade erotic feeling, but neither does it name the kiss in crudely literal terms. Instead, it gives desire a vocabulary of atmosphere, color, touch, religious wonder, and inward reverie. The woman’s “loos­ened zone,” disordered hair, flushed neck, and “delicious shame” indicate that the encounter has disturbed the outward signs of composure. Such details are sensuous precisely because they remain suggestive. The poem allows its reader to perceive the emotional and physical consequences of contact while leaving the actual encounter veiled by recollection. This poetic indirection is not simply prudishness. It creates an atmosphere in which desire seems to exceed representation, as though the beloved’s experience is too fresh, too inward, and too profound to be entirely spoken.

Marston’s own life lends additional resonance to this extraordinary attention to sensation. Blind from early childhood, he developed a poetic imagination often marked by touch, sound, atmosphere, emotional inflection, and intensely apprehended inner states. It would be reductive to treat his blindness as a simple explanation for every image in his work, especially in a poem so visually lush. Nevertheless, “The First Kiss” is notably tactile. The remembered lover catches the woman “by her hands,” calls her name, and “sealed” her body. These are actions of contact and recognition. The poem’s sensuality depends less upon detailed visual portraiture than on a body’s awareness of being touched, named, enveloped, and changed. Marston, whose life was also afflicted by repeated bereavements and ill health, often wrote with a particular awareness of emotional fragility. In this context, the poem’s devotion to a moment of joy becomes especially moving. The lyric does not turn grief into its overt subject, but its rapture carries the intensity of something precious, precarious, and perhaps impossible to hold permanently.

The opening image establishes the poem’s dramatic situation with remarkable economy. “She sat where he had left her all alone”: the phrase immediately divides the scene into presence and absence. He has departed, but he has not ceased to occupy the space. Indeed, his absence is the condition of his overwhelming presence in her mind. The simple verb “sat,” repeated soon afterward, makes the woman appear still, almost immobilized by feeling. Yet beneath this physical stillness, the poem stages vibrant inner activity. Her head is bent back, her eyes are “through love on flame,” and her body bears visible traces of emotional disturbance. She is not passive in the sense of being empty or inert. She is full of recollection, sensation, and imaginative anticipation. The repeated return to her seated posture makes her resemble a figure in a painting, but a painting whose subject has an urgent, unsettled consciousness.

The poem’s visual composition has strong affinities with Pre-Raphaelite art and verse, particularly in its attention to hair, color, twilight, natural enclosure, and the expressive female figure. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetry and painting frequently present women as embodiments of erotic mystery, suspended in richly symbolic settings. Marston shares this aesthetic inheritance, yet his poem differs in emphasis. Rossetti often builds elaborate symbolic worlds around the beloved, giving her an almost icon-like distance. In “The First Kiss,” by contrast, the woman’s experience is psychologically immediate. The hair is disordered not merely because it is aesthetically beautiful but because it records the encounter’s effect. The flushed neck is not a decorative feature but a sign of embarrassment, pleasure, and awakening. Marston’s beloved is idealized, certainly, but she is also given a moment of inward becoming. The poem traces the first tremulous recognition that desire has altered the self.

One of the lyric’s most memorable phrases, “most delicious shame,” captures this complex mixture of feeling. The adjective “delicious” converts shame from a purely punitive emotion into an ingredient of pleasure. The phrase does not mean that the woman is simply ashamed in a moral or social sense; rather, it suggests an exquisite self-consciousness. She feels exposed to herself. A boundary has been crossed, and the very awareness of transgression—or of vulnerability—heightens the sweetness of what has happened. Such a formulation is deeply shaped by nineteenth-century codes of femininity, in which modesty was often presented as a defining feminine virtue. Yet Marston does not use shame to condemn the beloved or restore conventional restraint. He treats it as one of the emotional textures of desire. The blush becomes evidence that body and consciousness are participating together in a newly awakened passion.

The word “zone,” meaning a girdle or belt, is similarly charged. In classical, biblical, and poetic diction, the girdle can signify chastity, control, maidenly decorum, or bodily enclosure. Its loosening therefore suggests relaxation, disorder, and a movement away from guardedness. Marston does not insist upon a literal interpretation; the detail is evocative rather than explanatory. Still, the image unmistakably contributes to the poem’s erotic atmosphere. The woman’s clothing, hair, and posture reveal an experience that has unsettled social presentation. Importantly, this disturbance is described through soft and beautiful language rather than through violence or degradation. The lyric aestheticizes disarray, presenting it as the visible form of inward rapture. At the same time, a modern reader may notice that the poem’s vocabulary of possession is not uncomplicated. When the lover “sealed her body as her soul his own,” the phrase combines spiritual union with an assertion of ownership. It reflects a tradition in which romantic fulfillment was frequently imagined through masculine claim and feminine surrender.

That language of possession deserves careful attention because it is central to both the poem’s power and its historical limitations. “Sealed” is a resonant verb. A seal may confirm a covenant, protect a letter, close an enclosure, authenticate an identity, or mark something as belonging to someone. In Christian ritual and devotional writing, sealing can suggest consecration and the indwelling of grace. In erotic poetry, it can evoke the imprint left by a kiss. Marston fuses these meanings so that the lover’s action appears simultaneously physical, spiritual, permanent, and proprietary. The phrase “her body as her soul” makes a striking claim for the unity of the woman’s embodied and spiritual life. Her body is not dismissed as inferior to her soul; both are involved in love’s transformation. Yet the final words, “his own,” place that transformation within a possessive grammar. The poem’s emotional sympathy lies with the woman’s ecstasy, but its language also bears the imprint of a culture that often imagined female desire through male possession.

Still, the poem does not represent the beloved as devoid of agency. She actively remakes the encounter in thought: “to herself made tender moan,” and “as yet again in thought her lover came.” The lover’s return happens in her mind, through her own recollective power. The phrase “as yet again” beautifully collapses the distinction between the original event and its mental recurrence. Memory is not a pale copy; it is a renewed visitation. The beloved re-experiences the grasp of hands, the calling of her name, and the kiss’s consecrating force. Her moan is private, but it is also a form of expression: an involuntary utterance in which feeling becomes sound. In this sense, the poem’s scene of solitude is not empty. She creates an inward drama in which desire continues to unfold. The absent lover has left, but she has discovered the sustaining and dangerous power of imagination.

The movement from the enclosed human figure to the surrounding June twilight broadens the lyric’s emotional field. “The June, moon-stricken twilight, warm, and fair” does not merely provide decorative scenery. Nature seems to close around the woman as if it were a responsive presence. June conventionally suggests fullness, flowering, ripeness, and the threshold of summer’s abundance. Twilight is itself a threshold state, situated between day and night, visibility and obscurity, public life and privacy. The moon, with its longstanding associations with change, secrecy, femininity, and desire, strikes the landscape into enchantment. “Moon-stricken” is an especially vivid compound: the night seems touched, wounded, or overwhelmed by lunar radiance, just as the beloved herself has been struck by love. The natural setting becomes an external equivalent for her altered consciousness. Everything is warm, muted, suspended, and charged with beauty.

The “voiceless trees” intensify this hush. Trees are often imagined in poetry as whispering, sighing, or speaking through wind and leaves. Here their voicelessness is significant. The world does not intrude upon the woman’s experience with commentary or judgment. It holds silence around her. That silence may be protective, preserving the intimacy of the moment; it may also be almost ceremonial, as though the natural world has become a sanctuary. The phrase encourages readers to listen to what cannot be said. Desire, especially in the poem’s social context, is surrounded by silences: the silence of decorum, the silence of private longing, the silence following an encounter that exceeds ordinary speech. Marston transforms that silence into a positive aesthetic condition. The trees do not accuse or warn. They stand as witnesses to a moment that language can approach only through image and suggestion.

The religious vocabulary of the latter movement is crucial to the poem’s understanding of love. The beloved is “full of the wonder of triumphant prayer.” Prayer ordinarily suggests humility, petition, gratitude, dependence, or communion with the divine. “Triumphant” gives it a more ecstatic quality, implying a prayer that has been answered or a soul lifted beyond doubt. Marston does not explicitly identify erotic love with religious faith, and the phrase retains an ambiguity that gives it force. The beloved may feel gratitude for an emotional fulfillment that seems almost miraculous; she may experience the kiss as a revelation whose intensity resembles devotion; or she may be caught in a state where human love temporarily takes on the emotional authority of religion. Victorian poetry often explored this borderland between sacred and erotic language. Christina Rossetti frequently insists on distinctions between earthly and divine love, whereas poets such as Swinburne and Rossetti often make sensuality seem liturgical or sacramental. Marston’s poem inhabits this charged tradition while remaining notably gentle in tone.

What is “triumphant” is not conquest over another person, despite the possessive wording earlier in the poem. It is the triumph of new feeling over emotional limitation. The woman has entered a state of consciousness in which the world appears enlarged. This enlargement is expressed through “unimagined ecstasies,” a phrase that emphasizes both future possibility and the inadequacy of past imagination. Before the kiss, she could not imagine these ecstasies; afterward, she senses that they exist. Love therefore becomes epistemological as well as emotional: it gives knowledge of what had been unknown. Yet this is a distinctive kind of knowledge, neither rational nor fully articulate. “Which must be hers, she knows, yet knows not why” places certainty and mystery side by side. She knows that further happiness is possible, perhaps inevitable, but she cannot explain the grounds of her certainty. Her body, imagination, and intuition know before analysis can catch up.

This paradox of knowing and not knowing is one of the poem’s deepest philosophical gestures. Love is represented as a form of revelation, but not a revelation that yields a system of clear propositions. It gives an intimation rather than a doctrine. In Platonic accounts of eros, desire can lead the soul toward beauty and toward a recognition of truths beyond immediate possession. Marston’s beloved likewise finds that an earthly encounter points beyond itself. However, his poem does not leave the body behind in pursuit of an abstract ideal. The revelation begins in a blush, a remembered handclasp, disordered hair, and a kiss. The spiritual dimension emerges from embodied life rather than replacing it. This is why the poem feels so alive: its aspiration toward transcendence is rooted in the sensuous particulars of a single summer evening.

The final image of prophecy completes the poem’s temporal design. A prophecy is not simply a wish. It is a word, sign, or vision that carries the authority of future fulfillment. The kiss becomes such a sign. It promises further “ecstasies,” but it also gives the woman a new way of reading her own life. She sees the future not as blank duration but as something already trembling within the present. This is an especially apt account of first love or first physical intimacy, whose importance often lies not only in what happened but in what it makes imaginable. The first kiss changes the horizon of expectation. It can feel like a threshold across which the self steps into a larger, more perilous, more joyous world. Marston’s final emphasis on feeling rather than declaration is essential: she “feels” the prophecy. The future is apprehended somatically, emotionally, almost mystically.

At the same time, prophecy introduces an undertone of uncertainty. Prophecies can be fulfilled, delayed, misunderstood, or tragically disappointed. The poem’s atmosphere is radiant, but it does not tell readers what will become of this love. The man has already left the woman alone, and the poem remains with her rather than following him. This choice gives the lyric its subtle poignancy. Her anticipations may prove true, but they remain anticipations. Her certainty is beautiful precisely because it is untested. Marston does not ironize her hope, nor does he interrupt her reverie with a moral lesson. Nevertheless, the poem’s concentration upon a moment after departure quietly reminds us that love depends on absence as well as presence. The kiss survives through memory; its future meaning is still unknown.

In this respect, “The First Kiss” can be compared to the broader lyric tradition of the afterimage, in which an event is made permanent through recollection even as its physical reality disappears. Keats’s poetry often suspends figures at the brink of fulfillment, fascinated by desire’s capacity to preserve itself through incompletion. Tennyson’s love lyrics and dramatic monologues frequently explore memory as an environment in which feeling is renewed and altered. Marston’s poem shares this Victorian and Romantic fascination with emotional duration, but it offers a more concentrated scene. Nothing need happen externally because everything is happening internally. The beloved’s recollection makes the past active; the landscape mirrors the recollection; the anticipated future rises from it. The lyric is a miniature study in how consciousness turns a fleeting contact into a whole imaginative world.

The poem’s musical syntax contributes greatly to its emotional effect. Its clauses flow through repeated conjunctions—“and” appearing again and again—so that perception seems to accumulate without pause. Hair, flushed neck, loosened girdle, moan, memory, grasped hands, spoken name, and sealing kiss are joined in a sequence that mimics breathless recollection. Rather than arranging experience into detached observations, Marston allows one sensation to lead into another. This grammatical movement conveys the beloved’s absorption: she has not stepped back to classify what she feels. She is inside the momentum of it. The later phrases, too, expand through apposition and qualification, allowing twilight, prayer, ecstasy, knowledge, and prophecy to gather into a single swelling emotional atmosphere. The poem’s verbal texture enacts the very condition it describes, a consciousness overflowing the limits of simple statement.

“The First Kiss” remains compelling because it treats an apparently familiar romantic subject with seriousness, delicacy, and intense imaginative care. Marston understands that a kiss may be at once physical and symbolic, reassuring and destabilizing, private and cosmically significant. His woman is surrounded by a world transformed by feeling, but the transformation does not erase her confusion. She is ashamed and delighted, alone and accompanied by memory, knowing and not knowing, bodily awakened and spiritually enlarged. These oppositions are not resolved because they are the substance of the experience. The poem’s emotional resonance comes from its faith that love can disclose unsuspected possibilities while leaving the lover vulnerable before their mystery. In the warm, moonlit silence of its closing vision, Marston captures the exhilarating moment when desire first seems to promise not merely pleasure, but a new future for the soul.