What Will You Say Tonight Poor Solitary Soul - Analysis

A heart that wants instructions

The poem begins with a self-interrogation that already sounds like a plea: What will you say tonight to the woman whose divine glance has revived a heart once so withered. The speaker isn’t simply asking what words to choose; he’s asking what kind of person he can be in her presence. The repeated address to the self—poor solitary soul, my heart—makes the devotion feel less like confident love than like a rescue attempt. Someone has looked at him, and that look has given him back a sense of worth; now he needs a script adequate to the miracle.

The central claim the poem presses is that this woman has become more than a beloved: she is a governing principle. The speaker’s longing isn’t for mutual intimacy so much as for a new law to live under—something clean, bright, and absolute enough to banish the earlier withering.

Praise as pride, submission as sweetness

The next movement answers the opening question with a collective vow: We shall try our pride in singing her praises. It’s a revealing phrase: pride is not surrendered but put to work, redirected into worship. The poem intensifies this by making obedience feel like pleasure: There is nothing sweeter than to do her bidding. That sweetness is one of the poem’s key tensions. The speaker insists on submission—almost slavery—to the kindest, dearest, the fairest, yet he frames it as liberation from his own sourness and isolation. The tone slides from anxious to fervent, as if certainty can be manufactured through declaration.

Even the erotic is purified into reverence: Her spiritual flesh carries the fragrance of Angels. The phrase holds a contradiction inside it—flesh made spiritual—suggesting the speaker wants desire without the mess of ordinary wanting. He tries to keep the beloved both bodily and untouchable, perfume rather than sweat, radiance rather than heat.

Clothed with light: the beloved as atmosphere

Her power is described less as companionship than as environmental transformation: when she looks upon us we are clothed with light. The glance becomes a garment, a public sign that the speaker has been remade. This is not just private romance; it’s a kind of consecration. The beloved is imagined as a source that radiates outward, turning the speaker into someone who can be seen differently—perhaps even by himself.

But the language also hints at dependence. If his light is something he must be clothed in by her, then he has none of his own. The poem’s devotion carries a quiet fear: without her gaze, the old withered heart returns.

Night, street, multitude: obsession that follows everywhere

The poem widens its setting to prove that this figure is inescapable: in the darkness of night, in solitude, and also in the city street among the multitude. Those pairings matter—solitude and crowd are usually opposites, yet her image colonizes both. In the most private darkness and the most public brightness, the speaker sees the same apparition: Her image in the air dances like a torch flame. A torch suggests guidance and vigilance, but also flicker, instability, and the possibility of being mesmerized by a single moving point of light.

Calling her presence an image that dances makes the adoration feel less like real relation and more like haunting. The beloved is everywhere, but precisely as a phantom—something the mind projects and cannot stop projecting.

The voice that commands: Beauty as tyrant-savior

The final turn is the most unsettling: the image speaks. Its message is not tenderness but authority: I am fair, I command, and the command is exclusivity—for your love of me you love only Beauty. Here the woman becomes an emblem that demands the speaker stop loving actual, flawed particulars and instead worship an ideal. The speaker calls her guardian Angel, Muse, and Madonna, stacking sacred and artistic roles until she is less a person than a total institution: protection, inspiration, holiness.

This is the poem’s deepest contradiction: the beloved’s kindness is praised, yet the closing voice issues orders; the speaker craves rescue, yet accepts a kind of tyranny. The comfort offered—light, guidance, angelic fragrance—comes with a price: the narrowing of love into a single sanctioned object, Beauty itself.

A sharp question the poem leaves behind

If the woman is most powerful as a phantom and a speaking principle—torch, angel, Madonna—what happens to her humanity? The poem’s devotion is so total that it risks erasing the very person who first gave the saving divine glance, replacing her with an idol that can command anything and never answer back.