All Things Conspire - Analysis

Love as the first obstacle

The poem’s central claim is unnervingly strict: the very forces that seem meant to unite the lovers are what keep them apart. From the first line, the speaker doesn’t blame distance on circumstance or misunderstanding but on a whole universe arranged as resistance: All things conspire to hold her from the beloved. The shock is that the conspiracy includes what we would normally call the solution. Even my love, she says, becomes a barrier, because it would mask you and unname you. Love, in this logic, is not a clear lens but a covering. It turns the beloved into an idea, a role, a manageable story—until, as the speaker puts it, merely woman and man we live. The word merely makes plain the poem’s hunger: it wants something more absolute than social categories, more real than the ordinary arrangement of two people.

The “sound world” and why lovers look like rebels

The poem then widens its argument from the private to the communal. All men wear arms, the speaker observes, against the rebel, and the speaker startlingly agrees: they are wise. That is, the poem refuses the easy romance of lovers as harmless and society as simply oppressive. If lovers are rebels, it’s because they threaten the shared reality everyone else depends on—the sound world that is known and stable. Wright makes that stability almost physical: it can be eaten away. And what erodes it is not argument or violence but perception: lovers’ eyes. A look between two people becomes a solvent. The tone here is both intimate and austere: intimate in its focus on eyes and desire, austere in the way it treats love as a dangerous power that justifies defensive measures.

The poem’s core contradiction: desire that “unjoins”

The deepest tension arrives in the third movement, where the speaker admits the lovers themselves participate in the conspiracy: even you and I stand between them. The line feels like a confession of helplessness. They are not sovereign agents choosing closeness; they are ruled by something inside them: who still command us. That command both joins and separates: it still unjoin us. The verb is brutally precise—love doesn’t merely fail to unite; it actively performs disunion. Yet the same force also provides momentum, drive us forward, as if the lovers are being pushed along a track they didn’t lay, toward an endpoint they can’t avoid: till we die. The tone shifts here from sharp observation to fatalism. What began as a claim about obstacles becomes a claim about destiny: the lovers are propelled by the very thing that divides them.

A hinge into the afterlife: “Not till”

The poem turns on the phrase Not till, which functions like a gate swinging shut on the present. The speaker names what truly stands between the lovers: those fiery ghosts. The word ghosts suggests the past—memory, old selves, old loves, inherited fears—but fiery makes them active, burning, hard to appease. To be one, these ghosts must be laid, a verb that carries both burial and soothing. Only then shall we be one. The promise is not for now; it’s postponed to a future that feels posthumous. That postponement is crucial: the poem doesn’t romanticize waiting. It implies that ordinary life cannot contain the kind of unity the speaker imagines; the world as it is will always split love into two people who want, reach, miss, and reach again.

The “double blade” and a world used as stone

The closing lines sharpen the poem’s bleak beauty by turning love into a weapon. Until the ghosts are settled, they whet our double blade. The lovers are not two separate knives; they are a single blade with two edges—together, yet dangerous in two directions. To whet is to sharpen by friction, so the poem implies that the very resistance they meet—society’s arms, their own internal division, the ghosts—keeps their desire keen. The final image is starkly physical: the ghosts use the turning world for stone. The whole spinning earth becomes a whetstone, and the lovers’ suffering becomes the pressure that makes the edge. This is the poem’s hard-won insight: what keeps them from union also intensifies what they feel. The price of that intensity is that love becomes a lifelong sharpening, not a resting place.

The dangerous wish beneath the poem

If the speaker’s dream is to be one, the poem also quietly asks what must be destroyed to get there. The sound world of the stable and known is already being eaten away by lovers’ eyes; the ghosts are already using the world as stone. So the desire for perfect union is not innocent. It threatens the common world, and it threatens the lovers’ separate selves. The poem’s severity suggests a frightening possibility: perhaps the unity the speaker wants is possible only when nothing remains to resist it—when the ghosts are laid, when categories like woman and man are gone, when even the turning world has been spent in the sharpening.

A love poem that refuses comfort

What makes All Things Conspire so bracing is its refusal to treat love as either purely private bliss or purely social transgression. It insists on both at once: love is a vision that can unname the beloved, a rebellion that justifies arms, and an inner compulsion that can unjoin the lovers even as it drives them forward. The final effect is not despair but a kind of lucid dread: the speaker can see exactly how desire works, how it sharpens itself on the world, and how the dream of being one keeps receding into the only place where conspiracy ends—beyond the reach of life.