The Kiss - Analysis

Lips as a meeting-place, not just a body part

This poem treats a kiss as a whole language and a whole journey: a place where feeling becomes legible. The opening phrase, Lips’ language, sets the central claim: a kiss is communication that doesn’t need words, a kind of listening (lips’ ears) that happens through touch. The tone is lush and reverent, as if the speaker is translating an intimate act into sacred vocabulary without making it cold or clinical.

Notice how quickly the kiss stops being private and starts looking like a destination. The lovers aren’t simply two people; they are a pair of forces moving toward a single point, as if desire has geography and the mouth is its map.

Runaways and pilgrims: desire framed as exile

The lovers are called Two roving loves who have left home, and then immediately pilgrims. That’s a striking emotional contradiction: the kiss is both a homecoming (a confluence, a meeting) and something that requires leaving home in the first place. The poem implies that ordinary life is not spacious enough for this kind of closeness; to reach it, the lovers must become wanderers, even fugitives from the everyday.

By naming them pilgrims, the poem also makes the kiss feel devotional. It’s not just appetite; it has the gravity of a sacred trip, with the confluence of lips standing in for a holy river meeting.

Waves that rise only to break: the sweetness of self-erasure

One of the poem’s strongest images is the oceanic one: Two waves rise and then break and die on the lips. The language of death inside an erotic scene adds depth to the sweetness. The kiss is presented as a pleasure that includes surrender: each wave’s purpose is to collapse. That makes the union feel temporary and intense, a moment where separate selves rush up, crest, and vanish into each other.

The tension here is that love is governed by a law but expressed as wildness. The lovers are both obedient (moved by an inevitable force) and undone (they die into the contact).

At the body’s limits: where longing meets its boundary

The poem repeatedly brings desire right to an edge. The Two wild desires meet at last, but only at the body’s limits. That phrase admits something complicated: the kiss is a consummation and also a border. It is the closest possible contact, yet it also marks where the body ends and the other begins. The poem’s tenderness comes partly from this honesty: even in union, there is a line you cannot cross, only press against.

This makes the kiss feel like a negotiated miracle. The lovers reach each other not in an abstract soul-space but at the mouth, where breath, taste, and vulnerability are concentrated.

Calligraphy and garlands: making the moment into art

Midway through, the poem turns from pilgrimage and waves to art-making: Love’s writing in dainty letters, calligraphy on lips. The kiss becomes inscription, as if the lovers are leaving a text on each other’s bodies. This changes the tone from sweeping, elemental imagery to something fine-grained and deliberate. A kiss is not only overwhelming; it can be precise, layered, even carefully composed.

The line about Plucking flowers from two mouths and threading them into a chain later intensifies that idea. The kiss is momentary, but the speaker imagines it stored, strung, turned into a garland of memory. Pleasure wants an afterlife.

Red marriage-bed: a union that is both playful and grave

The closing image, the red marriage—bed, is the poem’s most daring blend of registers. The kiss is a marriage-bed, suggesting commitment and consummation, but it is also the bed of a pair of smiles, which keeps it light, bright, and human. Red carries multiple meanings at once: the literal color of lips; the heat of desire; maybe even the faint suggestion of danger or cost. The poem ends by insisting that joy is not separate from seriousness. A kiss can be a smile, and still feel like a rite.

And the repeating Two throughout matters emotionally: it keeps reminding us that this unity never fully erases duality. The poem celebrates fusion, but it also protects the fact that there are always two mouths, two hearts, two desires meeting right at the edge where each remains themselves.