Exactly how steamy is this poem?
PG
Today, this poem would skate by with a G, but back in Donne's time, folks were more in tune with the sexual innuendo going on here. In line 21, the speaker uses a metaphor to compare himself and his lover to a pair of candles: "We're tapers too, and at our own cost die." While this would barely rate a blip on today's sex radar, seventeenth-century readers would know that a nickname for an orgasm was "the little death." So, these two candles are doing a little bit more than just dying—if you catch Donne's drift.