Wanting

The theme of wanting is introduced in the title of the poem, as the narrator questions whether she truly desires the poem's “thou.” In the second stanza, the narrator states, “we must love / what we're given,” where love can be seen as another aspect of want; that is, one comes to want whatever one is given. This theme is pursued further in the third stanza, where the wanting of a particular something develops into a kind of “partition between us and what.” This partition could be likened to a form of protection between a person and the outside world or between a person and his or her inner conflicts. This wanting, this expecting to find “solutions” in this partition, makes one feel eminently protected. The object of one's wanting might be compared to a drug, which might provide a false sense of satisfaction. In fact, three lines of...