You are very very far from dumb or rude, and literary appreciation is of course notoriously subjective. I’m grateful you led me to a new poem!

And I do think there’s a human tendency to gain pleasure from emotional suffering: that whole turn up the torch songs, get drunk and howl along thing that people do, after they’ve been dumped or they think their lover is off with someone else.

Some people enjoy that pleasure more and take it further than others. People who enjoy some kind of pleasure more and take it further than average get called kinky.

So I think that image illustrates one kind of emotional masochism.

I definitely wasn’t applying the poem to you, personally. That’d be stupid, as well as presumptuous and a bunch of other dumb and rude things.

I meant it as something interesting that you might enjoy from “outside” the emotions he expresses, in the same way that it’s not a set of things that I’d be likely to feel or say about a woman, but I also appreciate the poem from “outside” the poet’s emotional world.

That is, sexualised appreciation of a woman who gives both pain and pleasure is not my kink either, but I do think that kink is going on. In a terribly civilised way, of course.

Thank you for the reference! It definitely doesn’t do anything for my kink, but it’s certainly clever. I actually don’t see it as masochistic at all, but perhaps that’s because I don’t know anybody who actually wants to be murdered or gutted. I guess I see it more as commenting on the love-hate extremes of the effects of lust (er, I mean, love)?

He sees her in various Dommelike guises, as a cruel Venus who devises pains and pleasures for him. But also as a gentle “milky-thighed” woman who consoles him.

Some critics say that Marvell is parodying the masochistic vein that runs through a lot of love-poetry. Maybe. I think it’s more likely that he’s writing it more intensely because it’s what he feels.

Anyway, the poem’s on-line in various places. It’s very much from a male point of view, and I suppose male-submissive, so I recommend it for the writing, and not necessarily because it expresses things that you feel. (I’m “outside” that poem too, as a non-masochist, and I still like it very much.)

Thank you! It always makes me happy when the last-minute additions work well! And I love Ursula Le Guin too. Delighted to find another admirer.