No Second Troy

“No Second Troy” builds on a number of tensions between the speaker and his unnamed female love interest. The key tension that this analysis investigates is that between the speaker’s passive questioning and the unnamed woman’s active mind and beauty. The speaker’s inability to engage with his love interest except through metaphors demonstrates his larger inability to engage with reality. Meanwhile, the metaphors that the speaker uses to distance himself from his love interest portray her as a supreme motivational force who both acts and compels action in others. This tension, rather than showing the two lovers either in balance or as complementary to one another, points toward the two’s essential incompatibility.

The speaker’s reliance on questions and literary metaphors underlines his disconnection from the world that his love interest inhabits. The speaker finds himself preoccupied with unresolved questions and is unable to assert himself in the world. The poem’s form, grammatically, consists entirely of questions (See: Literary Devices). The speaker’s preoccupation with questions like “[w]hat could have made her peaceful” (Line 6) demonstrate his willingness to ponder an abstract, potential lover rather than the one actually before him. Instead of focusing on the love interest’s real qualities, the speaker directs his interrogations toward imagined versions of her.