John Freeman, an English poet and critic born in 1880, belonged to the loose circle of Georgian poets whose early twentieth-century work favored clear, musical lyricism and inward feeling over modernist experiment. “Perversities II” reflects that intimate mode. It addresses an absent beloved, but its real subject is the speaker’s divided self: a mind that can summon the beloved with almost perfect clarity, and a body that refuses to accept the substitute.
Already in the opening line, the body speaks against the mind’s solitude: “Yet when I am alone my eyes say, Come.” The word “Yet” signals an argument already in progress, as though solitude had been defended and the body is interrupting. The eyes and hands are not merely restless; they speak. “My hands cannot be still.” In the first surge of memory or imagination, the speaker’s senses “ache,” and “Cells, that were empty fill”—the body responds to thought as if the beloved were physically present, filling the speaker’s emptied frame. That filling shakes the “clay walls,” an image that renders the body as a fragile, earthen vessel, alive with tremor. Then “unimprisoned thought” breaks loose, and the poem’s syntax itself begins to run: “Runs and is glad and listens and doubts, and glooms / Because you are not here.” The rapid verbs mimic thought’s darting movement from joy to doubt to gloom.
The second stanza charts thought’s recovery. It “rises and is clear again / As sense is never clear”—a striking claim that thought can achieve a clarity the senses cannot. Yet that very clarity is shadowed: the eyes and arms “wait,” and the word “vain” quietly deflates the mind’s triumph. The speaker can be happy in thought, but only “though in vain.” The body’s waiting is not neutral; it is “Pained with such discontent.” In the final stanza, the refrain “Come” returns, now spoken by “arms and eyes” despite thought’s possession. The word “spite” is crucial: the body acts in spite of thought, not in harmony with it. The phrase “thought’s tranquil bosom” suggests a restful but bloodless embrace, and the speaker insists “it was not meant / My body should never wake / But on thought’s tranquil bosom rest content.” The word “content” is turned against itself, rhyming with “discontent” and “meant” to suggest that thought’s contentment is exactly what the body cannot accept.
The poem’s form reinforces this conflict. Its three six-line stanzas share an unusual ABCBCB rhyme scheme, with shorter lines—“My hands cannot be still,” “The clay walls shake”—interrupting longer pentameter lines. Those short lines feel like physical jolts within the smoother movement of meditation. The rhymes themselves pair restlessness with stillness: “still” chimes with “fill” and “will,” while “ache” answers “shake.” The word “Come” appears twice, both times at the end of the first line of a stanza but left without a rhyme within its stanza, as if the body’s demand cannot be fully absorbed into the poem’s pattern.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to resolve the quarrel it dramatizes. It does not simply say that the body is wrong or that thought is enough. Instead, it allows both truths to stand: thought can make the absent beloved vividly present, and the body still aches for actual touch. In an era often associated with elaborate poetic difficulty, Freeman’s directness—his plain words like “ache,” “empty,” “still,” “happy”—carries a disarming force. The result is a love poem less about the beloved than about the strange burden of having a mind that can travel and a body that cannot follow.