John Freeman’s “Perversities I” is a love poem that asks for the opposite of what love poems usually ask: it begs the beloved not to come closer. Freeman (1880–1929), an English poet and critic associated with the Georgian Poetry movement in the early twentieth century, often wrote lyrics with a quiet, meditative surface; this poem turns that stillness into something more unsettling. Its title promises perversity, and the poem delivers it not as scandal but as a deliberate reversal of ordinary desire. First the speaker invites the beloved—“Now come”—then insists that in her eyes “I shall not see you.” By the third stanza the invitation has collapsed completely: “No, do not come.”
The central idea is that physical presence paradoxically dissolves the person it promises. Holding someone “body to body” does not mean having them; the mind races off to “a wild hill” chasing “the thought of you.” When the beloved speaks, the speaker hears less of her “music,” not more. Touch, sight, and sound, usually the certainties of intimacy, become forms of forgetting. The repeated phrase “I shall forget you” is not exactly a threat; it is closer to a confession that the body alone cannot keep love alive. What the speaker wants to preserve is the imagined and remembered figure, one that can be met “where the wind hunts” or in “cool gray cloud.”
Freeman builds this argument through an uneven, breath-like rhythm. Short commands and fragments—“Speak, speak,” “Into my arms,” “No, do not come”—alternate with longer explanatory clauses. That push and pull mimics the speaker’s oscillation between wanting and refusing. The poem does not depend on a regular rhyme scheme; instead it circles back to a few charged words: “come,” “forget,” “thought,” “bind,” “nearer.” The repetition of “you” at the ends of many lines becomes almost incantatory, as if the beloved could be conjured by naming her. The central opposition is between “body” and “thought,” but the poem’s key verb is “bind.” Presence loosens; thought binds. The beloved’s coming, the speaker claims, would “Loosen, when my thought still would bind you.”
The imagery shifts from an intimate, indoor space of eyes, arms, and shoulders to an open, unsettled landscape. Nature is not simply a backdrop; it becomes the beloved dematerialized, spread into weather and shadow. The speaker finds her in the wind, in “cool gray cloud / Where the sun slips through,” and among trees that are “silenced, and darken in their branches.” These images are quiet and faint, almost dissolved, which is exactly the point. The remembered detail of “your warm shoulder” is physical and tender, yet it is immediately turned into a question: “Think, were you nearer then and dearer, / Or I more glad?” The implied answer is no. Memory, now that the moment has passed, feels richer than the original touch. Hence the poem’s most compressed paradox: “your body brings you / No nearer.”
What makes “Perversities I” significant is its refusal to sentimentalize love. The speaker may seem cruel or self-protective in asking the beloved to stay away, but the poem treats that request as a difficult kind of fidelity. It insists that intimacy is not always measured by nearness, that absence can be a way of keeping someone present in the imagination, and that sometimes the surest way to hold a person is not to touch them. The final line, “And do not come,” lands not as rejection but as a strange, painful act of love.