If I Were Tickled By The Rub Of Love - Analysis

The conditional promise: if love could truly tickle, fear would vanish

The poem begins by staking a desperate, almost superstitious bargain: if the speaker could be properly tickled by the rub of love, he would become fearless. That repeated conditional is not coy; it sounds like someone trying to talk himself into immunity. The speaker imagines a body so fully sparked by desire and fertility that it can stare down the classic threats that haunt human life: the apple and the flood (temptation and catastrophe), the bad blood of spring (renewal that brings its own violence), then later the gallows, the axe, and the crossed sticks of war. Love, in this vision, isn’t romance so much as raw biological ignition: the red tickle as the cattle calve and the body scratched into laughter, dragged into breath.

But even here, the language keeps snagging on damage. The girl is rooking (thieving, predatory), she stole me for her side, and the speaker’s own self is a fragile thing: my bandaged string. The wish to be tickled already implies numbness; the poem’s first tension is that the speaker longs for a sensation he can’t reliably feel.

Sex decided by matter: say the cells, say the fingers

Twice the poem asks, Shall it be male or female? and twice the question is answered not by a soul, or a lover, but by body-parts: first the cells, then the fingers. That shift matters because it makes creation feel automatic, impersonal, even bureaucratic. The cells drop the plum like fire from the flesh, an image that turns pregnancy into a bright, violent falling. Later, the fingers chalk the walls with greet girls and their men, reducing the grand drama of sexuality to a scrawled diagram, a public scribble.

In these stanzas, love is presented as a force that recruits the whole body into its labor. There’s hatching hair, winging bone that sprouted in the heels, and the itch of man upon the baby’s thigh—a deliberately uncomfortable line where tenderness and violation brush too close. The poem refuses to make erotic energy pure. It keeps insisting that lust, birth, and bodily growth are mixed with the uneasy, the animal, the socially taboo. That’s why the claim I would not fear keeps sounding like whistling in the dark: the speaker is trying to enlist sex as protection while also showing how messy and morally unstable that protection would be.

The fantasy of invulnerability falters: love does not erase age or decay

Midway through, the poem admits what the earlier bargain tries to deny: the lovers’ rub wipes away not crow’s-foot and cannot unlock sick old manhood on fallen jaws. Even at its most intimate, desire doesn’t do the one miracle the speaker wants from it: it cannot cancel time. The stanza’s chill is startling. Instead of being warmed into bravery, the speaker imagines being left cold as butter for the flies, a grotesquely domestic image where the human body becomes kitchen-soft and insect-bound. Even the sea is not cleansing; it is the sea of scums, able to drown him while breaking dead on the sweethearts’ toes. Love stands on the shore while death arrives as waste.

This is a tonal turn: the earlier stanzas are feverish, crowded with hatching, sprouting, scratching, reheated nerves. Here the energy collapses into spoiled stillness. The poem’s key contradiction comes into focus: love is invoked as the cure for fear, but love is also the scene where aging and extinction become undeniable.

This world is half the devil’s: the speaker watches life get eaten from inside

When the poem says, This world is half the devil’s and my own, it stops bargaining and starts confessing. The tone turns bleaker and more observant, as if the speaker has stepped back from the fantasy of erotic salvation into the daily fact of corrosion. Even the girl’s allure is chemical and smoky: the drug that’s smoking in a girl, curling around the bud that forks her eye. Desire is described as an intoxicant, but also as a haze that distorts.

The speaker then ties himself to old age with a blunt anatomical metaphor: An old man’s shank one-marrowed with my bone. He can’t pretend he is separate from what awaits him; he is already sharing marrow with the future corpse. The sea, earlier a sea of scums, now offers herrings smelling—life as stink, nourishment already halfway to rot. And the most chilling image is intimate and small: the worm beneath my nail wearing the quick away. Death is not a distant gallows; it is under the fingernail, eating the living tissue where sensation happens.

The real rub: nothing can raise the midnight of a chuckle

The poem then names what it has been circling: And that’s the rub. The phrase suggests both irritation (something chafing the skin) and the catch in an argument. The catch is that even the most primal erotic creature—the knobbly ape swinging along his sex from damp love-darkness and the nurse’s twist—cannot produce the true effect the speaker longs for: it Can never raise the midnight of a chuckle. That line makes laughter into a kind of resurrection, a midnight rising, and then denies it to sex, to beauty, even to the triad of lover, mother, lovers. Not even in six feet of burial does the rubbing dust yield the right kind of sensation.

So the poem’s deeper claim becomes sharper: sex can be intense, generative, even ecstatic, but it is not the opposite of death. It is one of death’s routes, one of the ways the species continues while each individual is worn down. The speaker’s hunger to be tickled is, in part, a hunger to feel alive enough to laugh in the face of extinction. The poem answers that hunger with an almost brutal honesty: the body’s rub is not the tickle you want.

Love’s mouth, Christ’s thorn: the poem asks what kind of pain counts as meaning

In the final stanza, the speaker presses the question to its nerve: And what’s the rub? Is it Death’s feather on the nerve—something light but unbearable because it touches sensitivity itself? Is it the beloved’s mouth, the thistle in the kiss, where tenderness is prickly, punishing? The strange, intimate blasphemy of My Jack of Christ born thorny on the tree fuses sexual slang with crucifixion imagery, as if the speaker can’t separate erotic wounding from sacred suffering. Even language gets bodily: My wordy wounds are printed with your hair, suggesting that what he writes is scarred by the lover’s physical trace.

The closing declaration, I would be tickled by the rub that is: / Man be my metaphor, is not a neat solution; it is an admission of the only available tool. If the body’s rub cannot truly tickle—cannot grant fearless laughter—then the speaker turns to metaphor: the human as the figure through which meaning is rubbed into existence. He doesn’t escape death; he tries to translate it, to make the irritation of mortality into something that can be borne, spoken, and perhaps—if not laughed at—at least held in the mouth without going silent.