The Princess Part IV - Analysis

Progress meets a sudden undertow

This section of The Princess stages a clash between a forward-driving political faith and the stubborn, bodily force of feeling. Ida begins in the language of modern explanation—nebulous star, hypothesis—as if even sunset should submit to theory. But the scene keeps undoing her certainty: the descent from lean and wrinkled precipices into ambrosial gloom, the tent shining no bigger than a glow-worm, and the sudden blissful palpitations when she leans on the disguised narrator. The poem’s central claim is that Ida’s project of emancipation cannot simply amputate the past, love, and grief; the very world of the poem keeps reintroducing them as sensation, memory, and accident.

Luxury as a test: fruit, wine, and a “fragrant flame”

Inside the tent, the mood turns from precarious climbing to rich ease: broidered down, a tripod flame, Fruit, blossom, viand, amber wine, and gold. It’s not mere decoration; it’s a pressure chamber. Ida asks for song so that minutes fledged with music will pass lightly—yet the first song summons the heaviest thing imaginable: time that cannot be recovered. The comfort of the pavilion becomes the setting for discomfort of another sort, suggesting that even a controlled, self-made women’s world cannot fully regulate what art will call up.

“Tears, idle tears”: nostalgia that feels like revelation

The maid’s lyric doesn’t argue; it floods. The refrain the days that are no more turns ordinary sights into unbearable triggers: happy Autumn-fields create tears, not because they are sad, but because they are happy in a way that throws loss into relief. The images keep sharpening the paradox: the days are So sad, so fresh; the first beam on a sail is Fresh, but it brings friends up like shades from an underworld; the last beam reddening over a sinking ship carries all we love below the verge. By the final stanza, desire and bereavement fuse—remembered kisses after death, kisses feigned on lips for others—until memory becomes Death in Life. The tone is not dainty melancholy; it is near-visionary, and the poem underlines that by making the song’s tear fall as an erring pearl into the singer’s bosom.

Ida’s rebuttal: wool in the ears, ice-thrones in the stream

Ida answers with disdain, calling the lyric fancies hatched in silken-folded idleness, and she proposes a brutal discipline: cram our ears with wool and pass the mouldered lodges of the past untouched. Her vision is historical and impersonal: power collapses like glittering bergs of ice that molten become a cloud; iron laws are discovered golden; ruined religions are cancelled Babels overgrown by rough kex and wild figtree. Even her hope is predatory and aerial—Hope, a poising eagle—burning above an unrisen morrow. The tension here is sharp: Ida wants liberation, yet her chosen method resembles a kind of self-violence, a refusal to be moved by what is fatal to men—and, the poem quietly implies, fatal because it is true.

A love-song that cannot survive the room

When Ida demands a song of promise, the narrator offers the swallow lyric—tender, yearning, and intensely directional: flying South, dark and true North, the wish to be taken in and laid on a beloved’s bosom. But the performance is doomed by context: his voice Rang false, the women stare and laugh, and Ida mocks him as Bulbul amid roses of Gulistan, then demotes him to marsh-divers and meadow-crake, harsh birds for a harsh world. Her anger is not only ideological; it is personal—she recalls a maid of honour who went blind for a serenader and died. Song, she insists, must be Used to great ends—freedom, force, growth of spirit—not junketing and love. Yet her fury exposes another contradiction: she condemns sentimental tyranny in men, but her own rhetoric is tyrannical too, dreaming of women as sphered wills who owe to none, as if dependency itself—not exploitation—were the enemy.

Farce breaks into violence, then into rescue

Cyril’s careless tavern-catch detonates the fragile ceremony. The women scatter as flies / A troop of snowy doves, the narrator hears hooves like a knell, and Ida—blind with rage—misses the plank and falls. The poem’s emotional logic turns physical: argument becomes current, ideology becomes drowning. The rescue is described in terms of burden and destiny: he carries the weight of all the hopes in one arm, fights the flood, and finally clings to a half-disrooted tree with dark locks in the wave. Whatever masks he wears—he is woman-vested—his action is unmistakably protective. The scene complicates the book’s gendered contest: the man saves the woman who despises men, and the poem refuses to let that be a simple moral victory. The narrator himself feels a kind of shame and cannot face her opening eyes.

Judith, Holofernes, and the courtroom of women

Back in the palace, the women’s regime looks both majestic and frightening. Florian hides underneath / The head of Holofernes beneath a Judith—an image that frames the place as a space where men may be symbolically beheaded. Ida appears with hair damp from the river, a jewel burning like mystic fire, flanked by eight daughters of the plough who are stronger than men and likened to Druid rock. The politics of the college harden into policing: Melissa is tried, a lily-shining child lies exposed, and Blanche delivers her long, hungry speech about rivalry, power, and public good. Even when Ida dismisses Blanche coldly—Your oath is broken—the dismissal feels less like justice than like the snap of authority. The poem’s tension becomes institutional: liberation has built its own court, its own punishments, its own spectacle of shame.

Two fathers’ letters: the old world seizes the new

The sealed dispatches yoke Ida’s experiment back to dynastic reality. Her father is a hostage; the narrator’s father threatens invasion unless the prince is returned and Ida give him your hand. The language is nakedly patriarchal—women might kick against their Lords—and it exposes what Ida has been trying to outrun. When the narrator kneels and offers Ida her father’s letter, she catches it and flings it Unopened. That gesture is crucial: she refuses not only the content but the very premise that her life can be addressed and decided by men’s correspondence. Yet the refusal also traps her; by not reading, she forfeits knowledge that might help her act freely.

Beacon-tower Ida: courage, contempt, and the cost of purity

Ida’s finest moment is also her most severe. She stills the chaos and declares, am not I your Head?, boasting she can meet male thunderbolts and blaming Six thousand years of fear for women’s timidity. But her contempt spills outward: she threatens dissenters with dismissal into a life of household stuff, turnspits, laughing-stocks of Time. The poem does not ask us to sneer at her courage; it asks us to notice what that courage is defending itself against. Immediately after, she turns on the prince with bitter thanks for saving her life, calling him a barbarian, and rejects the precontract as bondage: Your bride, your bondslave! In other words, the poem lets Ida articulate a hard truth—marriage as coercion—while also showing how her absolutism makes gratitude impossible and compromise feel like surrender of the self.

A sharp question the poem won’t let go

When Ida says we must cram our ears with wool, is she protecting women from a fatal sweetness—or protecting herself from the one kind of knowledge her system can’t metabolize: the knowledge carried in a single erring pearl of a tear? The poem keeps staging moments when feeling arrives uninvited—palpitations on the descent, the river accident, the child’s bitter bleating—as if to ask whether any revolution can stay human while refusing the claims of grief and love.

After the gates: ghostliness, then stubborn daylight

Expelled, the narrator experiences a brief metaphysical vertigo: the night’s events had and had not been, and all things were and were not. That ghostliness fits a world where roles are unstable—men in women’s clothes, women with guards stronger than men, earnest reform beside farcical disguise. But the episode ends not in collapse, but in endurance: he compares mischance to the Norway sun that sets into sunrise. The poem’s closing note is not triumph; it is persistence. Even after humiliation, rejection, and doubt, the speaker’s desire—personal and political, tangled together—keeps moving, as if the future Ida invokes is not reachable by denial of the past, but only by carrying its ache forward.