Not from This Anger
Not from This Anger - meaning Summary
Fractured Desire and Refusal
The poem presents a speaker confronting the aftermath of refusal and thwarted desire. Anger and anticlimax recur as physical and natural images—hunger, seas, a sinking sky—that register loss and frustrated intimacy. Repeated phrases link personal anguish to cyclical exchanges of lovers and the mirror’s reflection, suggesting distance, inability to consummate connection, and a transformation of refusal into burning longing rather than resolution.
Read Complete AnalysesNot from this anger, anticlimax after Refusal struck her loin and the lame flower Bent like a beast to lap the singular floods In a land strapped by hunger Shall she receive a bellyful of weeds And bear those tendril hands I touch across The agonized, two seas. Behind my head a square of sky sags over The circular smile tossed from lover to lover And the golden ball spins out of the skies; Not from this anger after Refusal struck like a bell under water Shall her smile breed that mouth, behind the mirror, That burns along my eyes.
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