pain

Preanalysis assumption: I have once thought that the “pain” symbol would be most important to establish an early phase in her sexual experience that was fraught with great physical suffering. I assumed then that this suffering was due to a gross maladjustment in size of the two lovers’ genitalia; that, as concerns the vagina, the poem: “you’re right the way is narrow”, (234) stated a painful physical fact, and that the sizable number of penis symbols which refer to gross bulk, and also to its paindealing propensities, indicate that the lover’s genital was of abnormally big size. I have since learned, in the MastersJohnson book, that vaginas, almost without exception; have an inbuilt capacity for expansion which can easily accommodate any penis, even if it be of most abnormally big size (as indeed they must have that capacity in order to be able to give birth to a child). The poems, indeed, bear out that the inequality cannot have been a fundamental one, since it adjusted itself in a relatively short time. It was probably due to psychological causes: difficulties in changing from the young woman’s clitoral habits to the intravaginal experience of the heterosexual act, and also a perhaps more than ordinary proneness to frigidity a strange phenomenon in the sexual sphere inasmuch, as it can afflict even persons that are innately, possessed of excessively virile sexual natures. Therefore I have come back to an uncommitted attitude towards this “pain” symbol. I should not be surprised if it is used deceptively every now and then for is it not a fact that many of her most poignant outer poems are built on structures of secret meanings that are sardonic, sarcastic, witty, sometimes even in a degree wanton? So it can be expected that the “pain” symbol is occasionally used deceptively in like manner also.