The Ladys Third Song - Analysis

The speaker as rival and judge

This song speaks from inside a love triangle, but it refuses the usual posture of the abandoned lover. The speaker claims authority: she is not merely one of the beloveds but his daylight lady, the one who knows him in a sanctioned, public register. From that position she addresses the other woman directly: When you and my true lover meet. The possessive phrasing keeps tightening—my true lover, his daylight lady—as if naming were a way to hold a man who is, in practice, already slipping into music, feet, and touch.

Her central claim is stark: neither moral purity nor erotic surrender tells the whole truth. She warns the other woman not to speak no evil of the soul (as if spirituality could be used as a weapon), and not to think that body is the whole (as if appetite could be its own justification). The voice isn’t prudish; it’s corrective, and it comes from experience.

Body versus soul—and the darker knowledge

The poem’s most pointed twist is the confession, Know worse evil of the body. The speaker does not idealize embodiment; she has seen how the body can injure, cheapen, or possess. Yet she also refuses a clean split between body and soul, because her own knowing is bodily too: she knows through what love has done to her, through the body’s consequences, not through doctrine. That creates the poem’s core tension: she asks for restraint while sounding powerfully aroused by the very scene she imagines.

The detail he plays tunes between your feet is deliberately indecent and oddly childlike at once—music where touch should not be, pleasure disguised as art. The speaker’s warning against reducing life to the body is complicated by the fact that the body arrives here as music, as something structured and beautiful, not merely crude.

An ethics of starving love

Her proposed solution is not fidelity but a kind of ceremonial rationing: in honour split his love Till either neither have enough. The word honour is doing heavy work. It tries to make a compromise sound noble, even though what she is describing is an emotional austerity plan: keep him divided so no one is fully satisfied. The contradiction is almost brazen: she speaks the language of ethics while engineering deprivation.

And yet it’s not only spite. If the body can be worse evil, then not having enough might be her attempt to keep everyone—especially him—from tipping into a destructive excess. The poem suggests that moderation is not purity; it is damage control.

Jealous imagination turning into cosmic theater

The poem’s emotional turn comes when the speaker shifts from instruction to fantasy: That I may hear if we should kiss. She places herself as listener to their intimacy, as if jealousy has evolved into a kind of dark connoisseurship. The kiss would produce a contrapuntal serpent hiss: not a simple sound, but counterpoint—two lines at once. The image implies that their desire would be both coordinated and adversarial, harmony and threat braided together.

When the imagined touch intensifies—hand explore a thigh—the scale abruptly expands: All the labouring heavens sigh. This isn’t just erotic exaggeration. It makes their private act into something that strains the whole order of things, as if the cosmos itself is working, panting, under the weight of human appetite. The tone here is both thrilled and alarmed: desire is grand, even sacred in its power, but it also feels like a pressure on the world.

The poem’s cruel, tender question

If the speaker truly believes the body’s evil is worse, why does she imagine it so vividly—music at the feet, a thigh explored, heaven sighing? One answer the poem quietly offers is that knowledge doesn’t cancel longing; it sharpens it into something almost theological. Her insistence on splitting love in honour may be less a moral rule than an attempt to keep the serpent’s hiss from becoming a full, consuming song.