'Rapture' Poem Summaries

You

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• 1 (preceded by Shakespeare epigraph)

• first infatuation with mistress, beginning of affair

• similar to sonnet but not quite (3 quatrains + couplet but free verse)

• highly charged and erotic

• obsession, desire, physical passion, intrusion, invasion, disruption, intimacy, reluctance

• “Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head”;

  “There you are / […] like a gift, a touchable dream”

Hour

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• 7

• wanting more time to spend with lover, bliss of being in a new relationship while foreboding danger of its failure

• more traditional sonnet but doesn’t follow iambic pentameter

• allusions, love, temporality, wealth/treasure

• “love spins gold, gold, gold from straw”;

  “Love’s time’s beggar, but even a single hour, / […] makes love rich”

Rapture

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• 14

• persona’s thanatological & spiritual pondering broken up by lover’s kiss; transcendentality of love

• Shakespearean sonnet

• pondering

• love, desire, time, transcendence, spirituality

• “[…] while we stay trapped in time, / queued for death?”
  “we make with loss to assonance with bliss”

Elegy

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• 15

• depressive pondering about how no one will know of their affection through metaphor of grave

  • (likely because the affair was secret, likely because of attitudes to homosexuality and the fact she was married)

• deviates from traditional form of eulogy: love still alive, still time for moments with them to be made

• pensive, pondering, dark

• love, loss, mortality, transience of love, obsession, permanence

• “bone", “grave”, “skull”

  “love loved you best”

Betrothal

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• 19

• complete devotion and submission to a lover to the point of unhealthy obsession — so hyperbolic and extreme as to read as a criticism of such

• strict repetitive structure; 9 quatrains; repetition of refrain and anaphora — last line asking for marriage

• obsessive, maniacal, psychotic

• “I’ll dig my own grave / and lie down. Make me your own.”

  “I will be good, be good.”

• ‘The Devil’s Wife’ poem from ‘The World’s Wife’ collection: from POV of Myra Hindley, serial killer, reference to moors (“Moors murders”

Love

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• 24

• Nature being used to represent both the intensity of love in it transcending physicality while also evoking the impermanence of nature to remind of the eventual downfall of the relationship

• not a “true” sonnet: modern exploration of sonnet form; iambic but incomplete in 4th line of each quatrain that is completed in first line of next stanza: separated but united through love

• erotic, desperate, longing

• love, eroticism, nature, yearning, reverence

• “The evening sky / worships the ground”

  “towards me, / out of the season, out of light love reasons.”

  “[…] hearing the sea, crazy / for the shore,”

New Year

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• 30

• Time and physical distance set the lovers apart but the persona’s love for their partner perseveres

• strict rhythm, every stanza contained within itself

• at peace, reminiscing, longing

• love, obsession, light vs dark (motif throughout the collection of subverting typical associations of light and dark imagery), longing

• “Most far, most near”

  “your arms are darkness, holding me, / so I lean back”

Wintering

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• 32

• Beginning of the end of the relationship through the destructive cycle of love, pain, and loss within a relationship built on lies and deceit

• regular in meter and each stanza composed of half rhymes: something in the relationship is not quite right

  • each tercet composed of iambic pentameter → iambic dimeter → iambic pentameter

• sombre, annoyed, regretful

• love, grief, nature, time, pain, hope, suffering, cycle of destruction, perpetuity

• “We’ve done again / that trick we have of turning love to pain.”

  “The wind screams at the house, bitter, betrayed. / The sky is flayed. / the moon a fingernail, bitten and frayed.”

Answer

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• 34

• The speaker uses metaphors through all four elements to answer a question posed that they would love their partner regardless of anything

• rigid structure: all five sestets consist of same rhyme scheme an meter ending on spondee “yes, yes.” = speaker’s unending and unchanging love rather than fragile/impulsive

• reverent, passionate, devoted

• love, desire, passion, obsession, faithfulness, devotion

• “your grey hands pooling raindrops for the birds”

  “or if you were none of these, but really death, / the answer is yes, yes.”

Write

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• 37

• The speaker monologues as they urge someone (perhaps their lover or themselves) to write a series of accounts of their encounters with the natural world as it behaves as a lover or aggressor

• free verse, 2nd stanza protective/caring is shorter than other 2 as relationship falls into disrepair

• destructive → caring/gentle → aggressive

• exposure, dissolution, the end of one thing creating something new

• “water’s voice swearing its love love love in my ears / as I drowned in belief.”

  “the stars like a mob of light, / chanting a name, yours.”

  “pressing and pressing my bones / into the ground.”

Grief

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• 41

• The speaker realising the relationship is over and they can’t fix it. Reminiscing on how they were lucky to cherish their lover so much for the grief to feel so intense

• single, multi-clausal complex sentence, struggling sonnet

• resigned, desolate defeated,

• ruin, ending, loss

• “Grief, your gift, unwrapped, / my empty hand made heavy,”

  “learning, learning; understood.”

Ithaca

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• 42

• The speaker’s journey of rediscovering herself throughout the relationship and returning to her lover (and the memories of them) through the metaphor of Odysseus’s return to his homeland and wife in Ithaca after 20 years

• five unrhymed stanzas of irregular line length + enjambment = fluidity f thoughts drifting through water met with the hurdles of end stops; cyclical structure: closure, reclamation of self

• languid, pondering peaceful (until last stanza)

• belonging, journey, transformation, renewal, love, memory, closure, clarity

• “And when I returned, / I pulled off my stiff and salty sailor’s clothes, / slipped on the dress of the girl I was”

  “by the harm you could do with a word, / me as hero plainly absurd”

Epiphany

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• 48

• Describes the drastic and emotional ways in which the speaker’s life has changed due to the relationship as it focuses on the loss and aftermath of the love affair

• sonnet form but has indirect structure visually as the poem appears to be dissolving — it is fragmented/exploded like the relationship; sibilance and assonance is lyrical, whispering, hypnotic → longing, lingering desire

• intense, intimate urgent

• passion, obsession, desire, absence, revelation, intimacy

• “when only your, only thy warm skin / is my bed,”

  “when words, when words, are the cauls of the unsaid”

The Love Poem

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• 49

• Metatextual: the speaker tries to create an original love poem but everything has already been done before (crisis of identity and originality); poetry is the closest one can get to love without experiencing it themselves

• intertextual invasion, unconventional form yet pattern emerges from the confusion — 3 stanzas

• frustrated, in awe of love, introspective

• intertextuality, power of love, poetry/metatextuality, introspection

• “Till love exhausts itself, longs / for the sleep of words —”

  “or shrink to a phrase like an epitaph”

  “Till love is all in the mind — / […] or all in the pen / in the writer;s hand —”

Over

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• 52

• Speaker’s final acceptance of the end of the relationship and letting it go while gaining new hope

• 5 → 6 → 7 line stanzas: progression in speaker’s thinking; enjambment: making sense of things

• hopeful, reminiscent, accepting

• loss, renewal, hope, memory, closure, leap of faith, acceptance

• “No stars in this black sky, no moon to speak of, no name / or number to the hour”

  “What do I have / to help me, without spell of prayer”