Summary Of Last Night By Sharon Olds

Love and lust can go in different directions. Sometimes love can be mistaken when lust is actually taking place. This situation normally happens when there is sexual activity taking place when it’s just for pleasure, and not for bringing two people closer together. “Last Night” by Sharon Olds gives a good example in this kind of situation. The imagery in this poem sets a bold meaning of this poem. The meaning of this poem is that if a person commits in any kind of sexual activity it will not always be love. The narrator talks about certain memories that she encounters. She compares them to her feelings that she had while doing sexual intercourse when the next morning followed. Then she realized that it was not love at all when it turned out to be lust. The emotion and imagery in this poem gives very good comparisons about love and lust. In the beginning, the poem starts off with the word “love” written as a question, “Love? It was more

The narrator gives off the emotion of regretting what she had done the night before, and comparing her memories in a very descriptive way. Olds starts to describe how she does not know herself in the middle of the poem. She uses words like twisting and turning describing as she is intoxicated. Her memory is giving off how she was feeling that night. It’s almost like she is describing a tornado in comparison with her memories. Olds describes it like this: “like something twisting and/ twisting out of a chrysalis /enormous…”(lines 6-8). The description gives the imagery as if she is dizzy, and everything is twisting around her. Another line in the poem seems to be describing how she is fighting back and forth with her memories, “Like madness, the way they writhe away/ and do not leave, back, back/ away, back” (lines 10-12). These lines connect the poem with emotion because the narrator wants the reader to see what she was experiencing throughout her