Lust Not Love In the poem “Sex without Love” the poet Sharon Olds expresses the pure disgust she has for people who have sex without love. She feels that in the heat of the moment it might satisfy their need for love but in the end they just become unhappy once again that they haven’t found that one person to love. Sharon Olds expresses her feelings in her poems by using expressive and unique writing symbols. The first symbol she uses is
“How do they do it, the ones who make love/ without love? Beautiful as dancers/ Gliding over each other like Ice Skaters/ over the ice, fingers hooked/ inside each others bodies, faces”.
These parts of the poem first starts off where the poet is astonished by the fact people have a strictly physical relationship without any kind of true love. Just the sexual and lustful relationship they express for each other in the heat of the moment where lies the only passion the two have for one another. Another part of the poem, where the poets makes the heat of the moment a little more intense is when she recites, “give them away. How do they come to the/ come to the come to the God come to the”. This represents the two people have come to the climax of the lustful relationship. Where it leads to the end of their loveless relationship for each other and to their loneliness. This leads Mrs. Olds to her next statement,
“Priest instead of the God. They do not/ mistake the lover for their own pleasure, / they are like great runners: they know they are alone/ with the road surface, the cold, the wind, / the fit of thin shoes, their over-all-cardio-/ vascular health—just facts, like the partner/ in the bed, and not the truth, which is the/ single body alone in the universe/ against it’s own best time.”
This part of the poem brings that person one step closer to knowing it was a meaningless fling in the heat of the moment. Just one step closer to being alone once again with no one to love who will love you back. Sharon Olds expresses this poem with very different and eccentric yet understandable symbols. Making her point quite clear that she does not agree with what these people are doing. What’s the point in having a relationship where that person doesn’t truly love you and is possibly only there for one thing? What I think Mrs. Olds is really getting at in her poem is she wants people to save themselves for there one and only true love not for just some fling that people have going on.