Friends with Benefits

Friends with Benefits from Filmofilia.com

On my third blog for my English 102 class, we had to choose one of six poems, analyze and identify all the categories we have covered during the previous classes. I decided to write an entry about Sharon Olds' "Sex Without Love," which was written in 1984.

Sharon Olds, the speaker of the poem, provides a personal interpretation and understanding about sex without love by asking and responding her own question “How do they do it, the ones who make love without sex?”. The poem of twenty four lines has an ironic tone and is intended to those who do not believe in love.

In this poem the author seems to dislike the idea of having sex without love. Throughout the poem, Olds uses metaphors to compare beautiful situations of life with the act of having sex without love; however this is an act that cannot be compared with beauty. In her first lines, olds compares sex without love with two ice skaters dancing over the ice; the dancers are just performing an act to entertain the public and the ice suggests that having sex without love represents cold and something dispassionate. From lines 6-8, olds uses metaphors to compare sex without love with the joy and love that is felt by parent when having a baby; however these parents would give the baby away because of the absence of love. Then, from lines 13-17, Olds uses religion as a metaphor to point out that sex is an act of love not an act of pleasure and how people lie to themselves to satisfy their physical needs.

Some keywords are:

1.       The ones who make love without love- refers to whom the poem is intended to.

2.       Beautiful as dancers- refers to the couple having sex.

3.       Faces read a steak- refers to their body expressions.

4.       Wet as the children at birth- indicates body response.

5.       Love the priest instead of the god- indicates hypocrisy.

6.       Mistake the lover for their own pleasure- refers to a mind driven by pleasure, his own pleasure.

7.       They are like great runners- Compares this act with loveless sex as a physical and mental need.

8.       Single body alone in the universe- refers to a physical need satisfied but an empty soul.

The poem “Sex Without Love” is a straight forward and honest personal interpretation about a topic that is controversial in every society. In contrast, the poem “Porphyria’s Lover” by Robert Browning is a narrative story of a dramatic event in which a man commits a homicide as an act of love.

Sharon Olds from Poetry.org