Imitated From Catullus To Ellen - Analysis

Desire That Refuses to End

The poem’s central claim is blunt and ecstatic: the speaker’s desire is not something that can be satisfied, only repeated. From the first outcry—Oh! might I kiss those eyes of fire—the speaker imagines intimacy not as a single act but as a state he wants to live inside. Even an impossible quantity—A million kisses—would barely touch it; the point of the exaggeration is not arithmetic but appetite, the insistence that longing keeps reappearing the moment it is fed.

Heat at the Center: Eyes of fire and steep my lips

The beloved’s eyes of fire give the desire a dangerous brightness: the attraction is both illuminating and consuming, as if the speaker is drawn to something that could burn him. When he says he would steep my lips in bliss, the kiss becomes less a touch than a soaking—an immersion that suggests he wants to dissolve into pleasure rather than merely taste it. The tone here is rapt and a little feverish: love as heat, as appetite, as something that cannot cool down.

The Tension: Bliss Without Satiety

The poem’s most revealing contradiction sits in the line Nor then my soul should sated be. Kissing is described as bliss, yet bliss does not bring rest. The speaker wants both fulfillment and continuation: he imagines dwell an age on every kiss, as if each one could be endless, and yet he immediately demands the next—Still would I kiss and cling to thee. That word Still keeps resetting the desire, turning satisfaction into fuel rather than a stopping point.

Counting Toward the Uncountable

The poem toys with numbers only to throw them away. The yellow harvest’s countless seed is an image of abundance you cannot reasonably count, and it’s offered as the only comparison big enough for the speaker’s obsession. Yet the speaker doesn’t really want measurement; he wants infinity disguised as a love lyric. The repetition of kiss—kiss, and kiss for ever—makes the language itself enact what it claims: the poem keeps returning to the same act because that act is the whole argument.

To part would be a vain endeavor: Love as Compulsion

Near the end, the fantasy hardens into something like necessity. To part would be a vain endeavor suggests separation isn’t merely sad; it’s almost impossible, as if their mouths are magnetized. The closing question—Could I desist?—pretends, briefly, that stopping might be a choice, but the answer arrives as a stammered vow: ah! never never! The ending turns the poem from celebration to compulsion, leaving a final, unsettling edge: the speaker’s devotion is tender, but it is also a refusal to imagine any boundary where desire must end.