Would anyone like to take a shot at explaining what all the smirking about adolescence and juvenilia is about? Is it because the poem is about powerful feelings, painfully repressed? Are we supposed to stop having powerful feelings when we reach a certain age, or just stop writing about them? (Midlife crisis, anyone?) Or is it the mixed metaphors. I admit I have mixed feelings about mixed metaphors, they can seem easy, lazy...but in a poem about passion, for metaphors to come tumbling out one after another, maybe is good. This isn't a cautious poem, it makes its point emphatically, seemingly spontaneously, without holding back. Maybe it makes a fool of itself, a little bit, on purpose. Or maybe I'm the only one doing that.
Julie's note about the author's personal life makes me more sympathetic, but even before I'd read that I could sympathize, just being a former Catholic from puritanical Massachusetts.
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