My Voice
My Voice - meaning Summary
Pleasure Turned to Lament
The speaker recalls a shared life of intense pleasure with a beloved, but now finds those joys exhausted and replaced by sorrow and physical decline. Nautical and ruinous images convey finality and loss. Despite the speaker’s deep emotional cost, the beloved seems to have regarded their shared life only as beautiful sound or fleeting entertainment, suggesting a gap between lived suffering and aesthetic or detached appreciation.
Read Complete AnalysesWithin this restless, hurried, modern world We took our hearts' full pleasure--You and I, And now the white sails of our ship are furled, And spent the lading of our argosy. Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan, For very weeping is my gladness fled, Sorrow hath paled my lip's vermilion, And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed. But all this crowded life has been to thee No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell Of viols, or the music of the sea That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.
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