I Will Wade Out - Analysis

A vow to cross from sensation into transformation

The poem reads like a spoken spell: the speaker keeps saying I will, as if desire becomes real by being declared. But what the speaker wants is not simply pleasure or escape. The central claim the poem seems to make is that the body can be a doorway into a larger, almost cosmic aliveness—and that stepping through requires both surrender and boldness. From the start, the speaker moves outward on purpose, wade out into an element that is at once ocean, heat, and garden: thighs steeped in burning flowers. It’s a deliberately impossible mixture, and that impossibility matters; the poem isn’t aiming for realistic description so much as a new climate of feeling, where senses and symbols fuse.

“Burning flowers” and the hunger to ingest light

The first images insist on intensity and appetite. Flowers usually suggest softness, but here they burn; the thighs are not merely touched but steeped, like something soaking in heat and color. Then the speaker goes further: I will take the sun in my mouth. That line is startling because it turns light into something edible, intimate, and dangerous. Taking the sun into the mouth suggests not just wanting warmth but wanting to consume radiance, to bring the outside world inside the body. Even the air is not neutral: it’s ripe, like fruit. This is a sensual landscape, but it keeps leaning toward the mythic—as if ordinary erotic experience is being described in the vocabulary of creation stories.

Closed eyes, chosen collision: aliveness meets darkness

A key turn happens around Alive and with closed eyes. The poem’s energy doesn’t come from careful seeing; it comes from trusting the body’s momentum. The speaker chooses to leap, then to dash against darkness. That collision introduces one of the poem’s central tensions: the speaker pursues ecstasy while aiming directly at what should negate it. Darkness isn’t merely night; it’s a resisting force, something you can strike. Yet the darkness is also strangely intimate, located in the sleeping curves of my body. The obstacle is not only outside; it’s within the self, curled up and dormant. The poem suggests that what blocks aliveness might be interior—sleeping, not dead—and therefore capable of being awakened.

“Smooth mastery” versus “chasteness”: the poem’s erotic contradiction

When the speaker says Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery, the poem becomes explicitly bodily, even sexual, but it refuses to settle into a single emotional register. Those fingers carry mastery, a word of control, skill, and power. And yet they enter with chasteness of sea-girls, an image of innocence or purity. The poem holds these two ideas together—command and chasteness—without resolving them, as if the speaker is chasing an experience that is both overwhelming and clean, both surrender and sanctity. The sea-girls (half real, half mythic) add to the sense that this is not a private scene only, but a ritualized encounter where sexuality and something like holiness are braided together.

The question that cracks the spell: “complete the mystery”

After so many declarations, the poem suddenly asks: Will i complete the mystery of my flesh. That question matters because it admits uncertainty at the heart of all this willpower. The body is called a mystery, not a known instrument. And to complete it suggests the speaker fears being unfinished—fragmented, or still locked out of full embodiment. The tension sharpens here: the speaker wants mastery, but what they seek is not fully controllable. The poem’s earlier confidence begins to look like a necessary performance, a way to approach something that can’t be forced.

A resurrection of appetite: flowers, moon-silver, and teeth

The ending widens time and deepens the stakes: I will rise After a thousand years. This isn’t just a climax; it’s a rebirth, as if the leap into darkness required a long submersion or a symbolic death. When the speaker returns, they come back doing something strangely delicate: lipping flowers. Lips brush petals; desire becomes gentle again after the earlier burning. But the final image turns sharp: set my teeth in the silver of the moon. Teeth are not only sensual; they bite, mark, claim. The moon’s silver is cold compared to the sun, so the poem ends by shifting from solar consumption to lunar biting—suggesting that the speaker’s hunger now reaches even the distant, untouchable parts of the sky.

A sharper implication: is “mastery” the last illusion?

If the speaker truly dash[es] against darkness and returns After a thousand years, then what is left of the self that wanted smooth mastery? The poem tempts us to read the ending as triumph, but the bite into moon-silver can also feel desperate—proof that appetite never ends, that even a completed mystery produces another. The poem’s final brilliance is that it makes transcendence feel physical, and makes physical desire feel infinite, as if neither can finally satisfy without renewing the hunger that created them.