/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.10427321]

Desire

It doesn't speak and it isn't schooled,
like a small foetal animal with wettened fur.
It is the blind instinct for life unruled,
visceral frankincense and animal myrrh.
It is what babies bring to kings,
an eyes-shut, ears-shut medicine of the heart
that smells and touches endings and beginnings
without the details of time's experienced part-
fit-into-part-fit-into-part. Like a paw,
it is blunt; like a pet who knows you
and nudges your knee with its snout—but more raw
and blinder and younger and more divine, too,
than the tamed wild—it's the drive for what is real,
deeper than the brain's detail: the drive to feel.

I get most of what this poem is saying, but what about this line:

>It is what babies bring to kings

?

What is the relation of this line to the theme of desire? Is it something like:

>Babies are completely ruled by their own desires; they don’t have any logical reasoning and any education, and when they want something they want something. They will cry for milk, they will cry for attention and warmth, they will cry to force their mothers (the source of their pleasures) into giving them everything they desire. So, what babies bring to kings is actually something Kings never loosed since the time they were babies: this blind force that makes them want things and do whatever they need to do to obtain them. They only learned how to be functional in a society, how to muzzle and curb their desires when they need to, but this ancient force, this baby-philosophy has never left their flesh.

What do you guys think?

[Anonymous No.10427744]

>>10427321

If we are seeking help for poetry interpretation, can someone help me with this one - what the fuck does this sonnet mean?

Unholy Sonnet 2, by Mark Jarman

Which is the one, which of the imps inside
Unglues itself from the yin-yang embrace
Of its good twin or its bad twin and plays
The angel advocate, the devil's guide?
Which blob of conscience, like a germicide,
Catches and kills the impulse when it strays?
Which impulse with light playing on its face,
Its fright mask, leads to the dark outside?

All of them shapeless feelings given form
By words which they in turn give substance to.
As particle and wave make light, they swarm
Together with their names. And we do, too,
Praying that God knows each of us and cares
About the things we speak of in our prayers.