When First We Faced
When First We Faced - meaning Summary
Newness Shaded by Past
Larkin's poem observes a first intimate encounter shaded by prior lives and loves. The speakers acknowledge gratitude and excitement but also the impossibility of erasing decades that shaped the other person. One cannot reclaim or repurpose a partner's past; attempts to remake the world to fit a new union are both tender and invasive. The closing lines accept love's desire to reshape reality while recognizing the real pain and limits of that impulse.
Read Complete AnalysesWhen first we faced, and touching showed How well we knew the early moves, Behind the moonlight and the frost, The excitement and the gratitude, There stood how much our meeting owed To other meetings, other loves. The decades of a different life That opened past your inch-close eyes Belonged to others, lavished, lost; Nor could I hold you hard enough To call my years of hunger-strife Back for your mouth to colonise. Admitted: and the pain is real. But when did love not try to change The world back to itself--no cost, No past, no people else at all-- Only what meeting made us feel, So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?
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