Last Night by Sharon Olds

It's the morning after a night filled with intense physical intimacy. The speaker thinks about what transpired between the two individuals—the intensity of the experience, the oddness of it, and how everyday life picks up again as if nothing remarkable happened.

Olds writes in a confessional style that feels deeply personal, using a first-person voice throughout her work. While she has been cautious in interviews about claiming that every poem is strictly autobiographical, she embraces the 'I' in her poems more than some poets do. The boundary between the speaker and the poet is intentionally vague.

The Wellspring, published in 1996, explores themes of the body, desire, family history, and the passage of time throughout the collection.

Directness is both a political and artistic choice for Olds. She thinks that women's bodily experiences — including sexuality — deserve the same serious and precise attention that poetry has traditionally devoted to themes like war, nature, or grief. In her opinion, using euphemisms would be a form of dishonesty.

The poem doesn't draw a clear line between them. The speaker says 'love' but quickly adds that it was something so intense that 'love' alone doesn't quite capture it. Olds views desire and love as intertwined experiences, rather than opposing ones.

Like much of Olds's work, 'Last Night' is composed in free verse, lacking a regular rhyme scheme or fixed meter. The lines are lengthy and resemble prose, reflecting the natural flow of thought—associative, circling back, and building in intensity. This absence of formal structure echoes the subject matter: something that goes beyond ordinary limits.

It has indeed. Olds's open exploration of female sexuality has often been viewed as transgressive in certain contexts. The poem has been included in lists of challenged texts. However, it is also widely anthologized and taught because it addresses its topic with real literary depth.

It's quite telling. Olds keeps returning to the body as a source of insight, intimacy as a topic deserving of deep exploration, and the contrast between the depth of personal experience and the apathy of the public realm. 'Last Night' captures all three of these themes.