Coitus - Analysis

Spring as a pagan body

Pound’s central move is to make spring feel less like a season than a religious-emotional event: the world doesn’t merely bloom, it performs desire. The opening image—gilded phaloi of the crocuses—turns flowers into shining sexual emblems, thrusting into spring air as if the atmosphere itself were a receptive body. The tone is audacious and celebratory, pushing past polite nature description into a kind of frank hymn to fertility.

Naught of dead gods: refusing the museum version of myth

The speaker insists there is naught of dead gods here, and that refusal matters: the poem isn’t interested in mythology as an antique collection. Instead, it offers a procession of festival—myth as something lived, moving, and communal. There’s a tension built into that claim, though: the poem has to name the old gods (and their artists) in order to declare them not-dead. The denial becomes a kind of summoning.

Giulio Romano and the aesthetic of excess

Invoking Giulio Romano shifts the scene into art-history territory, as if the spring spectacle were a fresco come alive. Saying the procession is Fit for your spirit to dwell in suggests that certain sensibilities—Romano’s taste for opulent bodies and crowded celebrations—are at home in this moment. Nature becomes a gallery of erotic grandeur, and the human tradition of representing sex and feast is not separate from the crocuses but continuous with them.

Dione arrives: desire as visitation

When the poem turns to Dione, it sharpens into direct address: your nights are upon us. The plural nights makes desire feel recurring and enveloping, more weather than choice. This is also where the mood begins to darken slightly. The earlier brightness of gilded and spring air gives way to an approaching atmosphere—less parade in daylight, more intimacy pressing in.

Dew and restlessness: the festival’s afterimage

The ending miniatures—The dew is upon the leaf, The night about us is restless—quiet the poem without calming it. Dew suggests tenderness and immediacy, something you can touch, but it’s also transient: it will vanish with morning. And the final line’s restless night reframes coitus not as simple fulfillment but as agitation that keeps moving through the dark. The poem’s key contradiction settles here: it exalts fertility as festival, yet it ends with a sleeplessness that implies desire doesn’t conclude so neatly.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If there are truly naught of dead gods, why does the poem need night to make them present? The crocuses can thrust in daylight, but Dione arrives as nights, and the last word is restless—as though the price of this revived, bodily divinity is that it unsettles the human world it enters.