Wit & Attitude Quote by Karl Shapiro

A love lyric that refuses the polite boundaries between self and other, Shapiro’s line turns intimacy into a total overhaul of the inner clock. “My soul is now her day, my day her night” doesn’t just flatter a beloved; it declares a kind of annexation, where the speaker’s most private territory (“soul”) is scheduled by someone else’s light. The rhetoric works because it’s boldly asymmetrical. The soul becomes a public time zone - “her day” - while the speaker’s ordinary waking life (“my day”) is demoted to “her night,” something she sleeps through, forgets, or controls indirectly. It’s romance with an edge of dispossession.

The couplet’s music hinges on the chiasmus (my/her, day/night) that flips meaning back on itself, suggesting a relationship structured by reversal: closeness achieved through inversion, not harmony. That inversion lands hard in the plain, bodily cadence that follows: “So I lie down, and so I rise.” After the metaphysical toggling, Shapiro grounds the poem in routine, implying that obsession doesn’t only live in grand feeling; it colonizes the simplest acts. Sleep and waking become rituals performed under a foreign sun.

Contextually, Shapiro’s mid-century sensibility often treats lyric emotion with a modern, slightly wary clarity. The line reads like a private vow and a quiet warning: love as synchronization, yes, but also love as reprogramming - the self altered until even daylight no longer belongs to its owner.