Section xv captures one of the most raw moments of emotion and weakness that the speaker expresses for her lover:
Near the beginning of the section, the speaker again invokes religious imagery in a distinctly non-religious context by saying that “Fantasy dealt them out as gods,” indicating that the speaker views “Love” and those she is destined to love as transcendent and set apart from the banality of being “only human.” She further complicates this notion of her destined lover as beyond the physical world in the line: “Superhuman apparently.” Here, the large space between the two words embodies her initial resistance to the irrationality of viewing him as more than human, but despite this resistance, she still recognizes something exceptional about this one particular “weak eddy / Of […] drivelling humanity” (Loy 59). Against her better judgement, this experience with falling in love makes her more emotional and caring and less rational and cynical. Selinger remarks that “it was precisely the weakness and humanity of Joannes that appealed to the speaker. Marking the shift, Loy makes this the first time that love is a verb in the Love Songs. It is also the last” (Selinger 31). The speaker’s transcendent experience with feeling idealized love for the only time occurs very near the center of the piece, setting it up as the pivotal moment around which the entire poem revolves.
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