Consider - Analysis

A plea for consent that is also a self-portrait

The poem’s central move is a request: the speaker asks the woman to consider his body—not as an object he owns, but as something whose history and longing might persuade her. The opening address, consider O / woman this / my body, sounds ceremonial, almost like an invocation, yet it immediately narrows into physical vulnerability: this body has lain / with empty arms. What he wants is not simply sex but recognition: approve these / firm unsated / eyes. Approval here carries the pressure of consent and judgment at once. He is presenting evidence—his arms, his eyes, his endurance through the night—as if desire must be justified by what it has already survived.

There’s a key tension embedded in that posture: the speaker is bold enough to command attention, yet he frames himself as deprived, waiting, unfinished. The body is declared, but it’s also a body that has been left alone on giddy hills, a phrase that makes loneliness feel dizzying rather than calm.

Empty arms on giddy hills: longing as a landscape

When the body is described as having lain somewhere, the poem makes longing into a physical position—reclining, exposed, unheld. The empty arms aren’t only a sign of absence; they are the shape of a future embrace that hasn’t happened yet. The hills are giddy, which turns the setting into a physiological state: desire makes the world unsteady. Even before the poem becomes explicitly cosmic, it treats the speaker’s inner condition as something that spills into geography.

This matters because it prepares the reader for the poem’s larger strategy: he will “prove” his readiness for love by showing how vast his attention already is. The longing doesn’t shrink him; it makes him look outward, upward, until the night sky becomes a kind of testimonial.

The night as spectacle: a world performing for his unsated eyes

The speaker’s firm unsated / eyes have beheld what he calls night’s speechless carnival. The oxymoron is telling: a carnival is noise and crowd, but this one is speechless. The poem suggests an ecstasy beyond language—exactly the territory erotic desire often claims, where words fail and sensation takes over. The sky becomes an artwork, the painting / of the dark / with meteors, as if the universe is busy making a display while the speaker waits.

And the agency in this sky-scene is playful: meteors come from playful / immortal hands. That phrase both heightens and destabilizes the mood. On one hand, it lifts the night into something tenderly intentional, almost flirtatious. On the other, it reminds us the speaker is dealing with forces too big to bargain with: immortality, fate, time. His desire wants to be personal, but the poem keeps placing it inside an impersonal cosmos that tosses stars like confetti.

Bursting stars, unsated eyes: pleasure that cannot be kept

The imagery intensifies into the bursting and wafted stars, a language of release and dispersal. The night’s spectacle resembles orgasmic overflow—beautiful, sudden, and ungraspable. That connects back to the speaker’s unsated condition: he can watch a thousand luminous “bursts” and still be left wanting something specific, human, immediate. The contradiction sharpens: he has access to grandeur but not to the woman he addresses; he can witness cosmic “ecstasy” but remains physically incomplete.

Even the word wafted carries this paradox. It suggests softness and drift, but also distance—things that waft are already leaving. The poem’s pleasure is constantly in motion, streaming, bursting, scattering. The speaker’s desire, meanwhile, is fixed on one person. His fidelity to the woman is what makes the sky feel like both consolation and torment.

The turn into the future: memory as a second, slower ecstasy

The poem’s hinge arrives with the parenthetical prophecy: (in time to come you shall / remember). Suddenly the speaker is not only asking for approval now; he is imagining how this night will live later inside her. The tone shifts from immediate pleading to an almost fated certainty—you shall—as if the speaker wants to guarantee his place in her future mind even if he cannot guarantee her present assent.

What she will remember is not simply tenderness but night amazing / ecstasies that move slowly. That adverb repeats, and it matters: the poem slows down on purpose, turning the instant of desire into something that ripens after the fact. The strange phrase in the glutted / heart complicates the earlier unsated eyes. The speaker is unsated now, but he imagines a later fullness—almost an overfullness—in her: a heart glutted with feeling. Desire in this poem doesn’t resolve cleanly; it flips between hunger and excess, as if satisfaction is just another form of overwhelm.

Flowerterrible: love remembered as sweetness with teeth

The memory he predicts is not purely lovely. He calls them heart fleet / flowerterrible / memories. The invented compound flowerterrible is the poem’s most revealing emotional truth: what blooms is also what hurts. A flower suggests fragrance and softness, but terrible brings dread, cost, and aftermath. The poem implies that if the night becomes real between them, its beauty will also be dangerous—dangerous in how it changes her, returns to her, and won’t stay politely in the past.

Those memories shall / rise,slowly / return to red elected lips. The lips are elected: chosen, singled out, set apart as the site where speech and kissing meet. Yet the earlier carnival was speechless. So the poem stages another tension: the experience is beyond language, but it will keep coming back to the mouth—the place where language would ordinarily try to explain. What returns is therefore both sensual (red lips) and inarticulate (visions that don’t scale into words).

Scaleless visions: the cost of wanting something infinite in a body

The final phrase, scaleless visions, lands like a verdict. Something scaleless can’t be measured, can’t be mapped, can’t be made proportional. That’s the poem’s deepest claim: the speaker’s bodily desire is entangled with the unmeasurable. He asks the woman to consider my body, yet he keeps proving that this body is the meeting place of emptiness and cosmic excess, of empty arms and immortal hands, of unsated looking and glutted remembering.

If there’s a daring implication inside the poem’s logic, it’s this: the speaker doesn’t merely want to be loved; he wants to become a permanent weather-system in her inner life. When he says she will remember, when he imagines memories rising back to her lips, he’s asking for more than a night—he’s asking to be the kind of experience that returns without permission, slowly, insistently, like the stars themselves.