Sex Without Love Analysis
A San Francisco native, Sharon Olds received her education at Stanford University. Her poems are both popular and controversial. In one of her many interviews she stated that in order to understand sex fully, maybe we need to be destroyed by it. Sex plays a significant role in Olds poems.
A controversial topic amongst poets, Olds wrote about e and how it changes an individual or a relationship. In an interview Olds stated that her aim in her poetry was to write the way she perceives. Easy to understand, never crossing in to her personal life.
Masterful in her use of extended metaphors and seducing the reader. “Sex without Love” is forward approach to the most personal of topics.
How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? …show more content…
Olds's use of the word "come" is suggestive of the act of ejaculation, and is repeated a fourth time in past tense form at the end of the sentence, "and not love the one who came there with them."
With the first use of metaphor Olds questions the motivation behind the act of sexual intercourse, she then reinforces this quandary of desire with the use of repetition and sexually explicit word choice. Olds comes to the conclusion that sex is self serving, then explains the logic of her deduction by another use of metaphor, comparing the lovers to "the true religious" with no pretense of love, just the submission to lust, the "ones who will not accept a false Messiah. The poem ends with one final metamorphic thrust; Olds uses "great runners" as she describes the very personal need to satisfy one's own sexual desire, telling the reader, "[Those who make love without love] do not mistake the lover for their own pleasure" Olds continues, "they know they are alone I with the road surface,the cold, the wind, I the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-1 vascular health-just factors, like the partner," showing the partner as nothing more than a tool in the quest for
A controversial topic amongst poets, Olds wrote about e and how it changes an individual or a relationship. In an interview Olds stated that her aim in her poetry was to write the way she perceives. Easy to understand, never crossing in to her personal life.
Masterful in her use of extended metaphors and seducing the reader. “Sex without Love” is forward approach to the most personal of topics.
How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? …show more content…
Olds's use of the word "come" is suggestive of the act of ejaculation, and is repeated a fourth time in past tense form at the end of the sentence, "and not love the one who came there with them."
With the first use of metaphor Olds questions the motivation behind the act of sexual intercourse, she then reinforces this quandary of desire with the use of repetition and sexually explicit word choice. Olds comes to the conclusion that sex is self serving, then explains the logic of her deduction by another use of metaphor, comparing the lovers to "the true religious" with no pretense of love, just the submission to lust, the "ones who will not accept a false Messiah. The poem ends with one final metamorphic thrust; Olds uses "great runners" as she describes the very personal need to satisfy one's own sexual desire, telling the reader, "[Those who make love without love] do not mistake the lover for their own pleasure" Olds continues, "they know they are alone I with the road surface,the cold, the wind, I the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-1 vascular health-just factors, like the partner," showing the partner as nothing more than a tool in the quest for