What Can I Do To Drive Away - Analysis

A mind trying to outlaw its own senses

The poem’s central drama is a failed self-exorcism: the speaker wants to drive away remembrance, but his very language keeps re-summoning what he claims to reject. He starts with the blunt question, What can I do, and immediately answers himself with the evidence of the body: they have seen his brilliant Queen. The insistence that Touch has a memory makes the problem feel almost legalistic and physiological at once, as if love has lodged in the nervous system where willpower can’t reach. The poem reads like a man arguing a case against his own desire—and losing because his most persuasive witness is sensation itself.

The lost era of old liberty

To explain what has been taken from him, he imagines an earlier self who moved through the world lightly. Back then, every fair one could catch him only in half a snare—attraction existed, but it didn’t become captivity. Even poor or particolour’d things could launch his imagination: My muse had wings, and he could direct her Whither I bent her force. The key tension is already visible here: he calls that muse Unintellectual, yet divine, defending a kind of instinctive, non-rational soaring as his truest freedom. Love, by contrast, doesn’t feel like flight; it feels like being held.

Sea-bird freedom versus fluttering Love

The poem’s hinge comes when he asks what has happened to those wings. He compares himself to a sea-bird: What sea-bird is a philosopher while it moves over a sea that throes? The bird doesn’t overthink; it rides power. He, however, is thinking painfully, trying to reason his way back into instinct. That’s why the image of recovery is so physical and slightly humiliating: he wants Those moulted feathers back. The desire is not simply to be happy again, but to rise Above, above the reach of fluttering Love and make him cower lowly. Love is personified as something small and agitating—fluttering—yet still able to reach him unless he achieves an almost predatory altitude.

The rejected cure: wine, happiness, and vulgarism

His proposed remedies reveal how deeply he wants his suffering to be dignified. Shall I gulp wine? is answered not with prudence but contempt: it would be vulgarism, a heresy and schism in the canon law of love. Even his coping strategies must be aesthetic and faithful to some inner religion. But then the poem turns more honest and bleak: wine is only sweet to happy men. The speaker can’t borrow happiness from a bottle because his grief will simply recruit the drink into More dismal cares. He is trapped between wanting a grand, pure antidote and admitting that ordinary comforts don’t work on him.

The most hateful land as an interior climate

The most startling section is the sudden eruption of a whole landscape of disgust: a most hateful land, a Dungeoner, a monstrous region with dull rivers and sordid urns. Whether it is a literal place or a psychic one, it functions like an externalized depression: everything is deprived of music and fragrance—flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song—and even great unerring Nature seems wrong. The detail that the winds are zephyrless and instead carry scourging rods makes the atmosphere punitive, as if the world itself has become a disciplinarian. The contradiction sharpens here: he wants freedom from love, yet what replaces love is not neutrality but a hellish vacancy, a realm where beauty has been stripped of its usual consolations.

The return of the lady: light, prison, and blissful pain

Against that darkness he begs for some sunny spell, and the poem’s emotional weather flips: with the new dawning light / Steps forth my lady bright. Yet even in this apparent rescue, the language keeps the poem’s central tension intact. He wants to rest his soul on her dazzling breast and have his arms become tender gaolers around her waist—an embrace described as imprisonment, but lovingly. This is the poem admitting what it cannot resolve: liberty and captivity are braided. The erotic detail—warm breath that spreads a rapture in his hair—leads to the crystallizing oxymoron, the sweetness of the pain. Love hurts, but the hurt is part of the sweetness; freedom from it might be a colder kind of suffering.

The poem’s final surrender: Enough! and the chosen dream

The closing outburst—Enough! Enough!—sounds like self-command, but it is really capitulation to the only state he can bear: it is enough for me / To dream of thee. The speaker began by asking how to kill it and be free; he ends by accepting a lesser, inward form of possession. If he cannot regain the sea-bird’s thoughtless flight, he will at least keep an image: not liberty, not cure, but a private vision that preserves desire without demanding the world’s cooperation.

The hardest implication is that the poem treats forgetting as a kind of death. When the speaker imagines being beyond love’s reach, the alternative is that zephyrless country where even nature seems wrong. The poem quietly suggests that what he calls old liberty may be impossible now not because love is too strong, but because a loveless mind becomes that landscape—air without zephyrs, flowers without scent—and he cannot live there for long.