Summary

“The Ecstasy” begins with the image of two lovers, “one another’s best” (4), sitting by each other near a violet on “A pregnant bank” (2). They are tightly holding hands and locking eyes, interactions that mark the extent of their unity so far. Their interlocked hands are “all the means to make us one” (10) and their shared gaze “Was all our propagation” (12). In the midst of this pastoral scene, the unnamed speaker — the male in the pair —reveals that their souls, “to advance their state” (15), have exited their bodies and hang between them in the air, much in the way that fate “suspends uncertain victory” in the air between two warring armies. While their souls “negotiate there” (17), their bodies “like sepulchral statues lay” (18), unmoving and unspeaking, “all the day” (20).

But though the lovers’ bodies lay in silence, their souls are in conversation. They use “soul...