Love & Passion Quote by Donald Justice

The seduction here is total erasure dressed up as domestic calm. Justice starts with a plain wish - "If he could sleep on it" - and immediately turns sleep into a problem of certainty, not comfort. The bed isn’t just a bed; it’s a staged disappearance. White sheets become a medium for vanishing, a blankness so complete it promises relief from having to be a self for a few hours. The phrase "disappear into the white" is both tender and alarming: it’s the image of rest, but it also flirts with the aesthetics of death, or at least with the desire to stop registering.

The simile "Like a man diving" adds velocity and risk. Diving is chosen, deliberate; you don’t drift into water, you commit. That matters because the poem’s subtext is not simple fatigue but the yearning for an off-switch that life won’t grant. The obstacle isn’t noise or guilt; it’s light - not metaphorical "enlightenment" in the inspirational sense, but exposure. Justice’s light is invasive, a moral and psychological glare that follows you even into the place designed for surrender.

Then comes the masterstroke: "The light that reaches / To the bottom". Suddenly the bed is an ocean, and the self is something sunk, something that wants depth for protection. But this light penetrates. In mid-century American poetry, Justice is often read as a craftsman of restraint; here that restraint sharpens the dread. The poem refuses melodrama while quietly admitting the modern terror that nothing - not even sleep - is private anymore.