Love has many different meanings to different people. For a five-year old, girl, love is marrying her daddy when she grows up. For a ten-year old child love may represent those feelings he or she has for their best friend. However, a teenager passing by their crush in the hallways and having sudden butterflies in their stomach, could also be a description of love. It doesn't matter how you look at it, love is truly undefined and kindles different emotions in every human being. But the question is, "What is sex, and what is sex without love?" Can one participate in such an emotional journey without loving their partner? This statement holds true, and is represented in Sharon Olds poem titled "Sex Without Love.".
First and foremost, the poem quite passionately reveals Olds disgust for casual sex. She captures the shameful act of lustful sex and seemingly animates it with her language structure. Her use of imagery not only creates a picture in the readers mind, but also grabs the audiences" attention. The author also makes comparisons through the use of similes. The subject of the poem is sex without love, and how people who have sex without love treat their bodies as separate from "truth." It seems that Olds is capturing a lustful scene without the intimacy and conveying to the reader a lesson about love.
The poem, "Sex Without Love," expresses the poet's attitude toward loveless sex as a cold and damaging act. Sharon Olds accomplishes this through her use of various poetic techniques which stimulate vivid images in the reader. Her opening words, "How do they do it, the ones who make love without love?", displays a negative tone as if the speaker was in disgust. However, Olds throws us off by referring to the two as "beautiful as dancers." When I read the next few lines of the poem, I thought that maybe my initial impression of the poem was misinterpreted. She continues by stating that the characters are, "gliding over each other as ice skaters," which represented a somewhat graceful and beautiful scene.
