What Would I Give To See His Face - Analysis

Desire That Won’t Fit Inside a Price

The poem’s central claim is that the speaker’s longing to see his face is so intense it breaks the ordinary logic of exchange: she tries to pay, keeps raising the bid, and still finds nothing is enough. The opening sounds simple—What would I give—but it quickly cracks: she offers my life and then immediately realizes that is not enough! The exclamation marks don’t just heighten feeling; they show the mind discovering, in real time, that this desire isn’t measurable. What follows is not calm devotion but a frantic, almost comic escalation: the speaker invents a whole economy to solve a problem that refuses to be solved.

The First Bid: Life, Then the Beloved Bird

The poem’s first pivot is psychological: Stop just a minute is the sound of someone interrupting her own grand gesture, as if love requires a more careful calculation than martyrdom. Then comes the wonderfully odd next offer: my biggest Bobolink! A bobolink is a bright songbird—so the speaker tries to translate longing into something vivid, living, and sweet-voiced, not merely abstract sacrifice. But the line That makes two reduces the miracle of affection to arithmetic: Him and Life become items on a tally sheet. The tension is already sharp: the speaker is both mocking and obeying the marketplace idea that devotion can be totaled.

June Put on the Table Like Currency

When the speaker says You know who June is and then declares I’d give her, the poem jolts into a new scale. June becomes a personified season, a concentrated form of ripeness and sweetness, offered up like collateral. The gifts get extravagantly specific: Roses a day from Zanzibar, Lily tubes, Bees by the furlong, and Straits of Blue. These aren’t random prettinesses; they’re units of abundance measured like commodities—roses by the day, bees by distance, blue by geographic passage. Even the gorgeous image Navies of Butterflies makes beauty militarized and countable, as if splendor must be organized into fleets to match the scale of wanting.

How Nature Turns Into Property

The middle section intensifies the poem’s odd comedy by making the speaker sound like a magnate: shares in Primrose Banks, Daffodil Dowries, Dominions broad as Dew. Flowers become finance; dew becomes territory. Even the bees turn into treasure hunters carrying Bags of Doublons from firmamental seas, and the speaker imports Purple from Peru like a luxury dye. The imagination is lavish, but it’s also revealingly transactional: she turns the natural world into inventory because she believes the face she wants might require a fortune of marvels. The contradiction deepens here: her love feels sacred, yet she keeps describing it in the language of acquisition.

Shylock Enters: Love as a Legal Threat

The poem’s most startling turn comes with Shylock? Say! Suddenly the exchange isn’t playful; it’s litigious. Shylock invokes the hard, punitive side of contracts—payment exacted, mercy withheld. The speaker demands: Sign me the Bond! and I vow to pay, as if she must force the universe (or fate, or the beloved, or God) into a binding deal. This is where tone darkens under the sparkle: the speaker’s delight in abundance becomes anxiety about access. If she can make it legal, maybe she can make it real. But the very presence of Shylock hints that love’s bargain may be cruel by nature: wanting exposes you to terms you didn’t choose.

One Hour of a “Sovereign’s” Face

After all the kingdoms of flowers and fleets of butterflies, what she asks for is strikingly small: One hour of her Sovereign’s face. The gender slip—moving from his face to her Sovereign—adds to the sense that this longing is bigger than a single romance; the desired face becomes royalty itself, an authority before which the speaker is a subject. The phrase Ecstatic Contract! captures the poem’s core paradox: ecstasy and paperwork welded together. And the closing flare—Niggard Grace!—casts the giver as stingy, not because the reward is small, but because the speaker’s appetite has grown boundless. Grace, by definition, cannot be earned; calling it niggardly is the cry of someone trying to buy what can only be bestowed.

A Hard Question Hidden in the Bargain

If the speaker can offer my life and still call it not enough, what is she really asking the beloved face to do—save her, crown her, prove something? The poem’s buying spree may be less about generosity than about control: if she can name the price down to Roses a day and Bags of Doublons, she can avoid the helplessness of simply waiting. But the last line, My Kingdom’s worth of Bliss!, suggests the trap: the more she appraises the joy, the more it looks like a kingdom that can be lost.