Afternoon Song - Analysis

Worshiping the woman the poem calls a witch

The poem’s central claim is that desire is not merely pleasure for this speaker; it is a kind of religion that requires surrender to a power he knows is dangerous. From the first address—Sorceress with Siren's eyes—the beloved is framed as supernatural and morally skewed, marked by mischievous eyebrows and an evil or wicked slant depending on the translation. Yet the speaker does not try to correct or rescue her. He escalates her un-angelic aura into something he can kneel before: I worship you as priests for idols. The word idol matters because it makes the devotion explicitly improper—faith knowingly misdirected—and that chosen misdirection becomes the erotic charge.

The tone is rapt, incantatory, and a little self-humiliating: he calls his passion fell or terrible, but also madcap and ineffable, as if language fails in the face of what he’s consenting to. The beloved is not described as a person with ordinary traits; she is an atmosphere the speaker breathes and a force that acts on him.

Perfume, incense, and the body turned into a temple

One of the poem’s most insistent image-chains turns the beloved’s body into a sacred site. Her hair is scented with desert and forest, so she carries whole landscapes as perfume—wild places that suggest both temptation and exile. Then the poem tightens that wilderness into ritual: Perfume lingers about your flesh / Like incense around a censer. The comparison does double work. It elevates her into something worship-worthy, and it also makes the speaker’s desire feel like ceremony—repeated, practiced, almost compulsory.

Even when he praises her, the praise is shaded toward darkness: she charms like the evening, Tenebrous, dusky, all Night. That’s not the clean radiance of sainthood; it’s the thick allure of twilight, where vision is softened and judgment blurs. The speaker’s devotion, in other words, is not an ascent into purity; it’s a chosen descent into a scented, dim-lit sacredness.

The contradiction that drives the poem: harm that “enlivens”

The strongest tension is that the beloved’s power is both restorative and wounding, and the speaker insists on both without resolving them. Her touch can make the dead live again, a startling claim that makes erotic skill sound like necromancy. Yet the same mouth that resurrects also bites: she lavishes bites and ... kisses to satisfy a mysterious passion or lust. The poem keeps pairing sweetness with predation: throbbing prey is not a lover’s phrase; it’s a hunter’s. The speaker does not protest being hunted—he eroticizes the loss of control.

The clearest turn comes when the violence becomes explicit: You tear me open with derisive or mocking laughter. Then, immediately, she looks at his heart with eyes as soft as moonlight. This pivot from ripping to tenderness is not an apology; it’s part of the beloved’s technique, and part of what binds him. The poem suggests a psychology addicted to alternation—pain as proof of intensity, gentleness as the reward that makes the pain feel worth it.

Submission staged at the feet

The speaker’s surrender becomes almost ceremonial at the end: Under your satin slippers, under your ... silken feet, he places all my happiness, my genius and destiny. Feet are a classical locus of devotion and abasement, and the repeated under makes the posture unmistakable. He is not simply in love; he is placing his creative power and future beneath her weight. That is why the earlier religious language doesn’t feel like metaphor—it feels like the poem’s actual ethics: she is the altar, and he is offering up the best of himself.

Heat in Siberia: what her power does to his inner climate

The final image gives the relationship its emotional geography. His soul is brought to life by her clear light and color, described as an Explosion of heat in his dark Siberia. Siberia evokes deep cold, distance, and punishment; it makes the speaker’s baseline self feel like a frozen exile. Against that, she is tropic heat, an almost violent weather event. The poem’s romance is not calm companionship; it is climate change. She does not merely warm him—she detonates warmth inside him, which helps explain why he accepts the costs. In the logic of the poem, to lose her would not mean returning to ordinary loneliness; it would mean returning to permafrost.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If he lays down my genius under her feet, what does he keep that is truly his? The poem sounds triumphant about being enlivened, but it also hints that his life-force is outsourced—dependent on a figure who can just as easily tear him and laugh. The love song’s sweetness, finally, is inseparable from its chosen captivity.