Invariably attention focuses in the first stanza on "Pig Cupid," usually taken to be an ominous phallic figure who threatens the "I" of the second and following stanzas. It is further noted that the first two stanzas both peter out in images of "mucous-membrane" and "a trickle of saliva," so that in the latter part of the poem the speaker retreats into a self-protective "virginity" to strengthen her sense of selfhood. Such a reading is plausible enough, yet is troubling in that it relies on a rather conventional aesthetic and moral framework. What struck the first readers of this poem was the provocation of the graphic sexual imagery; Loy is not only forcing sexuality upon the reader but quite literally sex in the gutter. The barely euphemistic suggestions of sperm "sown in mucous-membrane" and of oral sex and an orgasm that dies off in a "trickle of saliva" force upon the reader the physical fact of sexóthat sex is, after all, a bit messy. This is a direct challenge to Victorian morality and punctures the saccharine euphemism of Eros imaged as a mischievous chubby cherub with bow and arrows. The "erotic garbage," undoubtedly the "rubbish heap of tradition" mentioned in the "Feminist Manifesto" (269), appears to be the junk pile of romantic language and clichÈó"Cupid," "rosy," "'Once upon a time,"' "sown wild oats"ónow useless for the speaker's purposes.

The first song moves from the extreme collage-like structure of the first stanza to an apparent recuperation of balance in the last. This can and usually has been read as a necessary and positive retreat from the threat of male predatoriness and dissatisfying sexual experience to a protective "virginity" (Kouidis 72, 78; Burke, "Getting Spliced" 109). Yet the pivotal line, "These are suspect places," suggests conventionally moralistic overtones that are strengthened by the following imperative: "I must live. . . / Virginal." Indeed, the "I" insists she must live cut-off from "the bellows / Of Experience" and instead busy herself "Trimming subliminal flicker" of erotic desire. Aside from the fact that Loy frequently repudiated the Victorian fear of sex and the body, the pervasive ironies of the Songs must make us wary of too readily accepting such a reading. Indeed, the relative syntactical conventionality of the last stanza, which comes close to being a proper quatrain, might suggest not so much a positive stabilizing of the speaking self as a timid fall back into conventionality. Are we to read this stanza as the rhetoric of sincerity, or is it precisely this demure lyrical "I" that is to be critically examined? The "I" seems to have backed off in shame from the ecstasy of orgasm and internalized the patriarchal law of female self-denial. In fact, as so often in the Songs, we cannot be certain, but then this very uncertainty indicates that the "I" cannot be entirely trusted. If we recognize the second stanza as describing a visionary experience, however momentary, then the overtly broken or truncated syntax of the first line suggests the straining beyond the given conventions of language toward new articulations. Just as modernist paintings bring to consciousness in the viewer the formalist qualities of the work, thus freeing or forcing her to actively and self-consciously engage with the space the work offers or constructs, so Loy's Songs with their radical constructivism and destabilizing ironies compel the reader to engage with complexities that short-circuit centered representational interpretations.

Having said this I do not want to cancel out the reading of the last stanza as expressing the need to pull back into a protective subjectivity since there certainly is this underlying current running through the Songs. If Loy is intent on purging the sense of "the impurity of sex," nonetheless she also is acutely aware that sexual desire endangers her efforts to achieve non-dependenceóPig Cupid is a real threat. Yet I want to urge that we not impose stability and closure on this song, and to argue that Loy persistently leaves readers on their own. This perhaps is indicated formally by the hanging and split last phrase, "Coloured glass," which has been interpreted in a number of different ways. Yet what seems most obvious is its curious undecidability: is it in apposition with "Experience"? Is it related to the lantern? Is it more debris in the pile of "erotic garbage"? Or, as some have suggested, a metaphor for the various songs of the sequence? (Kouidis 63, 78; Burke, "Getting Spliced" 109-10). A number of commentators have pointed out the suggestion of a kaleidoscope, which in turn suggests a regressive view of the world or, on the other hand, a radical reorientation of perspective to new possibilities. The image never reappears in the Songs, and there seems no means of deciding definitively how we are to translate it. . . .

In her struggle to acquire eyes that see beyond the given structures of heterosexual love, Loy finds it difficult to shake off the sense that the definition of the self is forever entrapped within the "Spawn of Fantasies," which at bottom is "the desire to be loved" (271). Song XIII is an elaborate enactment of such difficulties. The song opens with the sharing of lovers' intimacies, even playfully suggesting that the secret is an announcement of pregnancy: "Something taking shape." However, quite obviously this "Something" is a new consciousness or awareness, "A new dimension" which, as the following stanzas make clear, separates rather than brings the lovers together. The second and third stanzas suggest a fundamental dichotomy between male and female modes of knowing: in the case of the male lover it is located in the rational, mastering eye, whereas for the speaker it is in the ear, resonating through the body. However, if this knowledge is positive in the sense that it is clarifying and demystifying, Loy characteristically puts such knowledge into question by suggesting this "new dimension" is also a "new illusion"óstill trapped within essentialist gender dichotomies. Even a demystifying awareness is recognized as imposing its own mystifications, which in this case rule out any possibilities of moving beyond a skepticism that becomes outright cynicism:

Let us be very jealous 

Very suspicious 

Very conservative 

Very cruel 

Or we might make an end of the jostling of aspirations 

Disorb inviolate egos

 Here the gravitational force that keeps their egos orbiting around each other are only the most negative feelings or acts of the relationship, which leads into the bleakly mocking final stanza:

Oh that's right 

Keep away from me Please give me a push 

Don't let me understand you Don't realise me 

Or we might tumble together 

Depersonalized 

Identical 

Into the terrific Nirvana 

Me youóyouóme

 

Although the possibility of "the terrific Nirvana," the "welding" of the lovers in a cosmic orgasm, is perhaps desired by the speaker as an expanded sense of self or "entrance to Infinity" (281), the ironic hyperbole by which it is named cancels any such possibility and transforms the desire into an image of "depersonalized" oblivion. The singer of the songs finds herself desiring the dissolution of the ego into a larger sense of self; however, she is also acutely aware that this leaves her vulnerable such that dissolution of the ego turns out to be subordination to the lover. In fact, there is no possibility within the songs of such letting go on the part of the speaker precisely because of this acute self-consciousness that always turns back upon the ego and never allows it to let down its guard of bristling ironies. 

Song V is highly suggestive in that it seems to turn outward to narrative possibilities tangential to the love relationship that is presumably the central thread of the sequence:

Midnight empties the street

Of all but us

Three

I am undecided which way back

                To the left a boy

--One wing has been washed in the rain

    The other will never be clean any more--

Pulling door-bells to remind

Those that are snug

                To the right a haloed ascetic

                Threading houses

Probes wounds for souls

--The poor can't wash in hot water--

And I don't know which turning to take

Since you got home to yourself--first

 

The final lines seem to tie this poem back into the speakers relationship with "you"--yet perhaps not. Is the "I" looking for the lover who has abandoned her, or does she simply feel lost and uncertain which way to go next? The lover has withdrawn from the "I" and "got home," presumably retreated into himself, but the hanging placement of the terminal word suggests that the "I" is actually berating herself for not having "first" done the same herself. If we read it this way so that the speaker comes to the recognition that she has allowed herself to become dependent on the lover for a sense of direction or even to be lulled into the desire for stability ("home"), then the curious characters that appear in the central part of this song are quite suggestive. These two males might be taken as possible new or alternative lovers to compensate for the speaker's abandonment. However, what is more striking about these figures is that they anticipate the angelic bums so central in Loy's later poetry of the 30s and 40s but by no means characteristic of her early work, with the possible exception of the devastating "Der Blinde Junge." written probably half a dozen or so years later. These figures seem to open up an entirely different direction as the speaker is jolted out of the egotism of romantic love, with its entanglements in the narcissism of sexuality and the need to be desired by and to orbit around a single other. These fallen angels represent alternative streets, other relationships with men in which compassion rather than Eros is foremost, and in this sense they seem prophetic of Loy's later life and work. Integral to this compassion is her recognition of class differences--"The poor can't wash in hot water"--also clearly evident in such early works as "At the Door of the House" and "Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots": the recognition that romantic love is a luxury for the privileged, although literature and popular culture would have us believe otherwise: "Love -- -- -- the pre-eminent literateur" (XXXIV). (122-23)

[. . . .]

Linguistically speaking, the Love Songs are Loy's most audacious assault on the language and genre of the romantic lyric that would define and fix heterosexual relations. In this assault she not only manages to ironically dismantle the genre's sentimentality, its privileging of emotional dependency, but transforms it into a tentative exploration of new possibilities of relations between the sexes.