Remembrance - Analysis

Desire as a force that rearranges the mind

This poem treats intimacy as something both tender and overwhelming: a lover’s touch begins as playful, even gentle, but quickly becomes a pressure that scrambles the speaker’s capacity to think. The opening images linger on contact and closeness—“Your hands easy weight,” a “smile at the slope” of the cheek—yet the speaker describes the experience as a kind of mental takeover, culminating in the startling line “mystery rapes my reason.” The central claim the poem makes is that desire can feel like an invasion of the self even when it arrives through affection.

“Teasing the bees”: pleasure that also stings

The lover’s hands are “teasing the bees hived in my hair,” an image that mixes sweetness with threat. A hive implies both home and danger; bees make honey, but they also sting. By placing the hive “in my hair,” the poem turns the speaker’s body into a site of busy, buzzing life—sensuality that is vivid, restless, hard to quiet. That energy continues in the lover’s presence “glowing, spouting readiness,” where desire is almost physical light and motion, a force that rises and spills rather than politely asks.

The troubling apex: “mystery” and the theft of reason

The poem’s most jarring tension sits in its language of power. The lover “press[es] above me,” a positional detail that emphasizes physical dominance, and the speaker’s rational control gives way: “mystery rapes my reason.” The word “mystery” matters here; what overtakes the speaker isn’t only the partner, but the unknown inside passion itself—the part that cannot be explained or managed. The line suggests a split: the speaker wants the closeness, yet experiences its intensity as coercive toward the mind. Pleasure is not portrayed as calm agreement between equals, but as something that can eclipse judgment and agency.

The hinge: withdrawal becomes the condition for possession

The poem pivots sharply at “When you have withdrawn,” moving from the moment of being physically “above” to the aftermath, when the lover removes “your self and the magic.” The tone shifts from breathless immediacy to a more controlled, even strategic voice. Only after the lover leaves does the speaker find a way to “greedily consume / your presence.” That paradox is the poem’s engine: in the moment of contact, the speaker is overwhelmed; in absence, the speaker can finally take charge. The repetition “then, only then” sounds like a hard-won rule learned from experience.

What lingers: scent, body, and a private appetite

After withdrawal, the poem narrows to a single, intimate trace: “only the smell of your love / lingers between my breasts.” Love becomes scent, and scent becomes a kind of possession the speaker can keep. The location “between my breasts” is not abstract; it is bodily and specific, suggesting that memory is stored in the skin, not just the mind. The speaker’s “greedily consume” is therefore less about literal touch than about reclamation: the lover’s absence gives the speaker the space to turn sensation into something owned internally, something revisitable without being overtaken.

If the presence “rapes” reason, what does it mean that the speaker calls the lingering scent “your love”? The poem refuses to cleanly separate tenderness from violation-like overwhelm; it keeps them in the same breath. That refusal makes the ending feel both satisfying and haunted: the speaker achieves control through remembrance, but the memory she consumes is born from a moment when control disappeared.