the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
In the first stanza, the narrator wants to describe this “somewhere” he has never travelled to, which is “beyond any experience”, which suggests maybe a dream or an abstract experience. He then says “your eyes have their silence”, bringing another person into the poem, and also hints at a love poem through this, as the eyes are usually a connotation of love, as ‘one can look into ones soul through the eyes’ or so it is said. In the next line, the narrator makes it clear that the person he is talking to is a woman, through the words “in your most frail gesture”. The “things which enclose [him]” and “which he cannot touch because they are too near” are the woman’s feelings of love towards the man, as one cannot touch it, but yet it is close to heart. After reading the first stanza, one can assume the narrator is going to travel through his emotions, taking an abstract journey through time and space.
In the second stanza, the narrator describes his love for the woman, as it is able to “unclose” the narrator easily, even though he has closed himself “as fingers”. He suggests that he has perhaps had a bad experience with love or with another woman in the past, and that being the reason of him closing himself. Now though, he is embracing these new emotions, describing his emotions to that of a rose opening up in spring (the rose is a symbol of love). The narrator personifies spring as a person opening up the rose, possibly describing the woman as this beautiful season. As spring is the season where the flowers start blooming, he might be hinting that she is the new beginning for him, after a time of coldness; winter.
In the third stanza, the speaker is describing his undying love towards the woman, that if it were her wish to close him, he would do so, but “beautifully”. Here, he describes death as beautiful, which shows his love for the woman, that he would willingly die for her. He describes death; as if it were part of a life cycle, like of a flower, hence the last line, “the snow carefully everywhere descending" which is depicting the rose wilting in winter. Since a rose will again bloom in spring, its death is not sad, as it will return. This description of death makes the poem more emotional, and shows the narrator’s undying love.
In the fourth stanza, the narrator is describing the woman’s beauty, how "nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals / the power of your intense fragility." He then says that the “the power of your intense fragility: whose texture/compels me with the color of its countries” which describes the woman. He describes the woman’s fragilities as countries, which mean that they are larger than life, that she occupies an entire world of her own in his mind. Her beauty though, can “[render] death and forever with each breathing” which links to the last stanza, with the description of death, and her power of it.
In the fifth and last stanza, the narrator is describing how unsure he is about the woman’s powers over him. He does not know "what it is about you that closes / and opens.", but he understands that the voice in her “eyes is deeper than all roses”, which is a description of her soul, and how it is more significant than himself, in his own eyes. He then describes her as having all powerful, through the line “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”. This suggests that nothing could have opened him before (he described himself as a rose), not even the rain, which came after the winter’s snow. Then comes this woman, who manages to open him up to the world and her. The concluding line of this poem declares his undying love for this special woman, who has managed such an impossible feat.
