Rethink.

This was writ­ten a while ago, and is an inter­pre­ta­tion I’m still very uncer­tain of. These are just notes.

A Vir­ginal
Ezra Pound

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser bright­ness,
For my sur­round­ing air hath a new light­ness;
Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly
And left me cloaked as with a gauze of æther;
As with sweet leaves; as with sub­tle clear­ness.
Oh, I have picked up magic in her near­ness
To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.
No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,
Soft as spring wind that’s come from birchen bow­ers.
Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches,
As winter’s wound with her sleight hand she staunches,
Hath of the trees a like­ness of the savour:
As white as their bark, so white this lady’s hours.

Com­men­tary:

A vir­ginal was a small key­board instru­ment played by young girls in the 16th & 17th cen­turies. Con­sider that, as well as this being a Petrar­chan son­net, and also that our nar­ra­tor used the word “sheath.” All of those fac­tors con­spired to remind this reader of some swash­buck­ling type dude wear­ing tights and bright col­ors and hav­ing a sword, which he would use, of course, when his oppo­nent broke into open laugh­ter at his get-up.

I didn’t think of all those “roman­tic” Renais­sance asso­ci­a­tions the first time I read this poem, though. There seems to be a rather dark sex­u­al­ity at work here instead.

The word “vir­ginal” has some­thing to do with being a vir­gin, with purity and inno­cence. If we take “sheath” not to be part of a sword metaphor, but rather the human sheath, the skin, then what our nar­ra­tor has is the glow that is ema­nat­ing from his skin, or maybe his facial expres­sion, at that moment. The “light­ness” of the air he breathes, he claims, has caused that. It could be that the nar­ra­tor is a guy in love, and that’s it. Peo­ple do feel and look dif­fer­ent when they’re in love.

But I feel like I’m describ­ing a per­son after inter­course as I write this stuff. At the same time, I’m pretty sure his nar­ra­tor didn’t have sex­ual inter­course with the girl who has bound him with her “slight arms,” the “magic” in her “near­ness,” and the image of spring she evokes.

Actu­ally, I know he didn’t have sex with her. “To sheath me half in half the things that sheathe her” is our first clue: there is no unity of the cou­ple phys­i­cally, even in metaphor here. He’s picked up “magic” in her “near­ness,” that’s all, and hence only “half” of him is sheathed.

Sec­ondly, our nar­ra­tor is scream­ing at some­one — prob­a­bly another woman — to go away. How exactly has the vir­gin girl bound him that he can­not be in the pres­ence of another? She is white like a birch tree, and he sees her “spring­ness” staunch­ing win­ter — he finds her a spring that actively stops cold­ness. It is her white­ness which con­nects her with win­ter, though, not just the birches. Her hours being white is the part that creeps me out the most; her del­i­cate­ness and white com­plex­ion sug­gest that she is about to die, that the color of life has drained from her, and that this death is some­thing he loves her for.

After all, her “death” is the loss of her vir­gin­ity. What is cre­at­ing the ten­sion in the narrator’s voice through­out the poem is that he is bound to love some­thing pure, but his own love is some­thing less than pure: he’s not going to let her stay pure. She is the “spring” to his win­ter, after all, and the only way he can tran­scend his cold­ness is by resid­ing within that spring. So far, all he’s get­ting, by his own account, is a whiff of the air — we can per­haps see that green­ery and sweet leaves seem to be things that fla­vor the air, and noth­ing more.

• Notes on Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (288)
• Notes on Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feath­ers…” (254)
• Some Per­sonal Notes re: Shake­speare, Son­net 18
• Mate­ri­al­ism and Nihilism’s Con­se­quen­tial Union: Notes on Kay Ryan’s “Noth­ing Ventured”
• Notes On Frost’s “Hyla Brook”

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