Tag: one-sided

I’VE got an arrow here;
Loving the hand that sent it,
I the dart revere.

Fell, they will say, in “skirmish”!
Vanquished, my soul will know,
By but a simple arrow
Sped by an archer’s bow.

Emily Dickinson

Easy allusions to Cupid aside, the thing that strikes me first about this poem is the action: somebody has shot an arrow, right? So why is the person who shot it relegated to only one line?

In the first stanza, the speaker has an arrow, she loves the hand that sent it, and she reveres the dart. In the second stanza, she imagines that other people will say that she has died in battle; her soul will be vanquished.

That’s a lot of time to spend on somebody who received Cupid’s arrow, and very little time spent on Cupid himself. Who shot this arrow? Why? We have to imagine that the narrator is responsive, because she’s already imagining falling (actually, literally) for the person who shot it. But she tells us nothing at all about this person.

If this doesn’t scream one-sided-romance, I don’t know what does. I’m imagining the narrator peeking out a window, furiously scribbling, “You don’t know what you do to me!” And, of course, Cupid has no idea. The speaker doesn’t tell us that he took careful aim, or that he even hit his target.