Just as a ballast or a heavy load is required to stabilize the movement of a ship, so too the mere appreciation of the woman’s physical charms, he realizes, will not suffice to stabilize love. He finds it has capsized the pinnacle of the ship, which represents the beloved’s body.
Such an imposition of views becomes evident to the narrator only after a while of him indulging in his fancies. It is the limitations of the other sex’s gaze, and that too, in very subjectivist and often unreciprocated nuances, which remain with her, and define her, only in absentia. It is much more sinister in implication than love affixing itself to her anatomical being. Once she is relegated to the stature of his beloved, and has to therefore be the externalized expression of his love, her “lip, eye and brow” all become symbolic (but, in continuity with much of Elizabethan love-poetry) objects of admiration for the desiring male gaze. Hence we find the abject categorization of various parts of her anatomy from the perspective of the male gaze. The image unfurling posits the soul as having parented the body, and the body, in resemblance to the soul, assume this incarnation, which also insinuates the possibility of the man’s love for the woman as being definable in solely, or predominantly physical terms. The male gaze presiding much of love poetry, and even here subjecting the female body to an objectification of silence, cannot think of love without being able to visualize it with such certainty. Without a physical incarnation of love in the woman’s body, it is impossible for the narrator to stumble upon anything but a “lovely, glorious nothing”. The angels, who were held as masculine figures in the contemporary times, could manifest only vis-à-vis the medium of air, which was also the purest of the four media of air, water, soil and fire. Love cannot originate in an abstruse, inexplicable fashion, and its codification, as such is possible only because it is mired to the flesh.
The note of reverence detected in the initial four lines is unmistakably Petrarchan, but it is invoked only to be derided. The beloved’s body provides a haven to the soul of love itself. Unlike the angels who manifest themselves with the concomitance of voice or light, love, as idealistic an enterprise it is does not derive its origins from the spirit. The poet ponders redolently upon the past when he was engrossed with a woman, the effect of whose remembrance has the same delicate effect on him as does the emergence of angels from air.
Markers of name and such become insignificant before the expression of love, which must manifest through the medium of the human body.
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