Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims’ "Seizure" is an intense meditation on the overwhelming nature of love, drawing upon religious, artistic, and physical imagery to depict an all-consuming passion. The poem’s title itself suggests both a violent, involuntary experience and a state of rapture, a fitting duality for a piece that oscillates between exhilaration and torment. Through a combination of classical allusion, religious resonance, and physical extremity, Nims crafts a sonnet that portrays love as something ecstatic and devastating, something that seizes the speaker in a way that defies rationality or control.

The poem’s epigraph, "Bernini in Winter," is an immediate clue to its underlying theme. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the Baroque sculptor and architect, is famous for works that fuse movement, emotion, and spiritual transcendence—perhaps most notably in The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, in which the saint, in a moment of divine rapture, is pierced by an angel’s arrow, her expression one of both pain and bliss. By invoking Bernini, Nims signals that the poem will explore love as an experience of both bodily extremity and spiritual intensity.

The first quatrain sets the scene in winter, with "Snowfall at Christmas" creating a festive yet disorienting backdrop. The description of windows as "gala with three-ring glories from above, / Their merry-go-rounds and ferris-wheels of snow" casts the world as a kind of carnival, a place of spectacle and whirling chaos. This suggests not only the visual beauty of snowfall but also a kind of dizziness, an uncontrollable spinning that mirrors the speaker’s emotional state. The phrase "I whirl off on vertigoes of love" confirms this connection—love is not a gentle experience here but rather something that destabilizes, sending the speaker into a kind of headlong, vertiginous descent.

The second quatrain shifts from external imagery to internal sensation, describing love’s effects on the body with increasing intensity: "Breath caught, lip bitten, and wit dispossessed, / Joy like angina closing on the heart." These lines convey a love that is both euphoric and physically painful, equating romantic passion with the symptoms of a heart attack ("angina"). The paradox of "Joy like angina" encapsulates the poem’s central tension: love is an exalted state, but it is also a form of suffering. The phrase "wit dispossessed" further emphasizes the loss of reason—love overtakes the mind as well as the body, rendering the speaker incapable of rational thought.

The sestet moves from describing the effects of love to questioning how one might respond to such an overwhelming force. The speaker asks, "A monstrous love! How hurl me to your breast / Or reach you even? With hand or any part?" Here, love is not a passive feeling but something monstrous, something so immense that even the act of embracing the beloved seems impossible. The phrasing suggests a frustration, an unbridgeable gap between desire and fulfillment. The word "monstrous" also echoes the epigraph’s reference to Bernini, recalling the fusion of agony and ecstasy in his sculptures.

The poem then poses a series of rhetorical questions, each suggesting a different way of coping with this overpowering love. The first, "How quench a worse-than-blood-does ravening lust? / By strewing in town the promos of your praise?" presents a stark image of desire as something consuming ("worse-than-blood-does ravening lust" evokes a bestial hunger, something primal and insatiable). The idea of countering this desire by publicly proclaiming the beloved’s virtues ("strewing in town the promos of your praise") is almost comically inadequate, as though externalizing love could diminish its intensity.

The next question offers another possible response: "Hunched haggard in desert caves?" This evokes the imagery of hermits and ascetics withdrawing from the world to escape temptation, suggesting that love is a force so strong it might drive one to seek solitude in order to master it. The religious undertone continues in "With sermon's dust / In rack of pews choked upon holy days?" Here, the image of "sermon's dust" and "choked upon holy days" suggests an attempt to sublimate passion through religious devotion, as if piety might cleanse or counteract erotic longing. Yet the phrasing—particularly "choked upon holy days"—implies that this strategy is suffocating rather than redemptive.

The final couplet offers a resolution, or at least an acceptance: "Or rapt, in lassitude, no thought but you, / Endure the seizure as loved women do?" The speaker suggests surrender as the only possible course—rather than fighting love, suppressing it, or attempting to rationalize it, one must simply "endure the seizure." The reference to "loved women" is striking, implying a traditionally feminine role of passive endurance, as if the only way to survive such love is to submit to it completely. This aligns with the Bernini reference—just as Saint Teresa in Bernini’s sculpture succumbs to divine ecstasy, the speaker acknowledges that love must be suffered as much as it is enjoyed.

Structurally, the poem follows the Shakespearean sonnet form, with three quatrains leading to a concluding couplet. However, the volta (or shift in argument) occurs somewhat earlier, in the second quatrain, where the physical symptoms of love give way to existential questioning. This accelerates the poem’s movement, mirroring the intensity of the emotions described. The final couplet, instead of providing a traditional resolution, leaves the reader with an open-ended acceptance of love’s power—less a conclusion than a surrender.

Ultimately, "Seizure" presents love not as a gentle or romanticized ideal but as an experience of near-mystical intensity, a force that seizes the speaker in a way that defies control. Through its fusion of Bernini’s religious ecstasy, bodily extremity, and existential questioning, the poem captures the paradox of passion: love is both exhilarating and tormenting, a divine madness that can neither be resisted nor rationalized.

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