This is not one of her best, or even one of her better poems, but it makes an interesting point. Although it does not do to see the past through too rosy a glow, to ignore or forget its own particular pains & difficulties, I am one of those who has never been able to see liberation as consisting mainly in sexual freedom (or licence)
It is also instructive to remember the confusions which the different euphemisms used in different ages can cause. I remember how startled I was as a teenager to read in a novel by, perhaps, Jane Austen, a sentence like Mr Darcy had been making love to Jane in the garden because to make love had only one meaning for us teenagers in those days
You make love & you live together now
Where we were shy & made love by degrees.
By kiss & invitation we learnt how
Our love was growing. You know few of these
.
Tokens & little gifts, the gaze of eye
To eye, the hand shared with another hand.
You know of few frustrations, seldom cry
With passions stress, yet do you understand
.
The little questions that would mean so much,
The surging hope to be asked to dance?
You take the whole of love. We lived by touch
.
And doubt & by the purpose of chance
And yet I think our slow ways carried much
That you have missed - the guess, the wish, the glance
