Lloyd Addison's speaker can barely finish a sentence before he starts it again. "O what a woman / what a beautiful woman! / a beautiful woman": the opening lines circle back on themselves like someone too dazzled to move on, and that stammering delight drives the whole poem. For most of its length it looks like a simple song of praise, one compliment piled on another. Near the end it turns out to be making an argument, which is that her beauty rests on more than her appearance.
The title promises "triplets," and the poem treats the number loosely. Only two stanzas are literally three lines long, and the others stretch to four or five. Threes keep surfacing anyway. The opening exclamation comes in three variations, and the catalogue of her body moves through hair, cheeks and lips in three beats: "See in her hair... See on her cheeks... And on her lips." The "2" in the title suggests the poem belongs to a sequence, but it reads fine alone.
There is no regular meter and no fixed end-rhyme, yet sound does a great deal of work. "Loud sunlight" and "proud lovelight" rhyme twice over, one pair stacked on the other, so the lines ring like a shout. Then the third line drops to "the pink kiss," with no rhyme and no echo, and the volume falls with it. Elsewhere the music is softer. In "eyes of bayou sea bathing / serene in green April dreaming," the long *e* sounds and the repeated *-ing* endings make the line drift like water. When her voice is described as "softly shifting to caressing consent," the hissing *s* sounds lower the poem to a murmur. The refrains, the exclamations and the repeated "O" give the poem the feel of something spoken aloud, a chant more than a written description.
The vocabulary is where the speaker's excitement shows most. Ordinary words keep fusing into new ones: "knee-flurried," "lightfeet," "girllike," "milkmoon," and especially "sunlightning," which welds sunlight to lightning, so that her face both glows and strikes. It reads as though normal adjectives ran out and the speaker had to build new ones. The imagery also moves through time. April, May and the sunflower give her the freshness of spring, and the "bayou sea" eyes suggest a warm, watery landscape. Light travels across the whole day: sunlight in her hair, lovelight on her cheeks, a voice like "lullaby midnight," and finally a moon on her forehead. She seems to hold a full cycle of day and night.
The moon is where the poem turns. Until then the praise is sensory: hair, cheeks, lips, feet, voice. Then comes "a milkmoon crescent, / the radiant crescent of reason / upheld by her honor-bound heartbeat." Moonlight is cool and steady, and here it stands for thinking. The line puts it on her forehead, in plain view, as visible as her cheeks. Underneath it sits the heartbeat, which does the holding up, and the heartbeat is "honor-bound." Reason, in other words, rests on a moral core. The next stanza turns the earlier chant into an explanation: "and that makes her a beauty / that's what makes her a beauty." The refrain is no longer just excitement, because it now has a reason behind it. The last lines also swap nouns, from "O what a woman" to "O what a beauty," as if the quality has finally become the person.
The poem is worth reading for that shift. It begins with the old habit of listing a loved one's features, but it will not leave beauty at the surface. Intellect and integrity are set among the sunlight and the kisses as equals. We only ever hear the speaker, never the woman herself, so she remains a figure seen and praised from outside. Even so, the poem's logic is clear: what he finally celebrates is a mind and a conscience, and the glow of her face comes second.