Lines 1—2

The opening lines of "A Thirst Against" establish the poem's central dilemma. It identifies the human desire for an orderly and intelligible world, characterizing that desire with a metaphor so familiar that readers might not even notice the poet is using figurative language. To say that people "hunger" for something is a reference to the basic need for food, as if the need for order were just as necessary to human existence.

The use of the word "hunger" allows Gregg to use hunger's parallel, thirst, to connect the two lines while introducing the concept of opposite desires. She does not identify whether the opposite of order here is chaos or nature (which would be the opposite of imposed order) or intuition, but instead she indicates it with the truncated phrase "a thirst against," leaving readers to stop and put together the pieces of her fragmented sentence...