the reflection is a magnet,
some hypnotist’s pendulum.
As I strong-arm towards the water
fingers melt into the liquid:
my reflection sloughs like skin.
Legs no longer balanced,
my bodies shift and move together -
different no more.
Can I help but be drawn to the unreal?
A body so bewitching
my devotion is consuming.
These eyes, still unmarred -
can I be blessed enough to own them.
Analysis:
My poem draws upon the Book IV scene lines 455-467 in which Eve, from Paradise Lost by John Milton falls in love with her own reflection. In this scene, Eve is fixated in her attraction to her own body to the point where she becomes absorbed in vain desire. My poem draws upon this ideal, and extends it by depicting Eve literally reaching for and becoming so strongly drawn to her own body to the extent where her bodies (both the reflection and the actual) are no longer different beings. Eve describes herself in Paradise Lost as “look[ing] into the cleer / Smooth Lake, that to [her] seemd another Skie,” a moment in which she both looks down as her first act after having been created (in opposition to Adam, who looks up towards the sky), and simultaneously connects that lake and what dwells beneath it to the sky. In other words, she showcases the ability to synthesize the heavens above with the hell below, and the inability to differentiate fully between the two. I strive to analyze this concept in my poem as I discuss how Eve’s “reflection sloughs like skin / …[her] bodies shift and move together -/ different no more.” Here, I use a physical depiction of Eve’s reflection that, via simile, is described in a manner more akin to how a tangible body, covered with skin and muscle, would act, while that self-same physical body instead becomes more attuned to her reflection, as her “fingers melt into the liquid.”
In this way, I draw on Eve’s canonical confusion and synthesization to illustrate how her initial - and later - ignorance of God and the righteous path become literally embodied within her as a physical creature. In the end, Eve questions whether she can “be blessed enough to own” her reflections’ alluring eyes (a representation of the enticing nature of the body as a whole). In Paradise Lost, Eve is tempted enough by the fairness of the fruit that she consumes it; here, her attraction to her own visage causes her to simultaneously consume and be consumed - and subsumed - by her reflection, which I describe as more ‘real’ than Eve herself, questioning whether the concept of Eve’s physical body as the consummate Eve is even valid. Here, the usage of a period rather than a question mark at the end of her query about whether she is indeed blessed indicates that Eve has agency: she questions something that she herself knows the answer to. Direct, powerful diction such as “strong-arm” also contributes to my interpretation of Eve as a character with agency, even if she does not want to admit it as stylized in my poem. In my interpretation of the poem, Eve loses a part of her Miltonian innocence; my Eve is far more aware of the vanity that she is allowing to dictate her actions. However, she also gains a great deal of agency, as, in my version, she is also conscious that she is being drawn toward her own body, and giving in to that impulse is not something out of her control. In doing so, I was able to reflect on the possibility that a character can give in willingly to an impulse, simultaneously exerting free will and allowing that free will to be overtaken. Eve’s impulses are her, and she is her impulses: they are one and the same, and she is able to be both an agent and a victim at the same time without those two terms becoming mutually contradictory or exclusive.