Non-English languages retain some of the associations with overbearing personal control they had in Sons and Lovers; Hermione even uses Italian to cajole her (male) cat: "'Vieni--vieni qua' [Come--come here], Hermione was saying, in her strange caressive, protective voice, as if she were always the elder, the mother superior" (299).

From this point of view, Levertov's sometimes precious attributions--"my clear caressive sight, my poet's sight" ("Advent 1966")--or her implicit claim of access to the authentic--opening a poem with her own annunciation, "The authentic!" ("Matins")--must have been anathema.

Eating and imbibing, for instance, imbue "Songs to Joannes"; as already noted, Loy refers to "laughing honey," and "the milk of the Moon." (41) But in her later work, Loy begins to replace discussions of consummation with an emphasis on consumption, a process arguably foreshadowed in poem twenty-nine of "Songs." Here Loy begins with an apostrophe to "Evolution," and then goes on to contemplate the future development of male and female, advising her muse to: Give them some way of braying brassily For caressive calling Or to homophonous hiccoughs Transpose the laugh Let them suppose that tears Are snowdrops or molasses Or anything Than human insufficiencies Begging dorsal vertebrae.