Five short lines, no punctuation, and one of the oldest euphemisms in English as a title. "Carnal knowledge" comes from a tradition in which "to know" someone means to sleep with them, so the phrase promises that the body can teach us something. The poem then gives us an odd answer to that promise. What the speaker comes to know is not the other person but their own mind, and only as an unfinished version of itself.
The first stanza is nearly bare. "In bed" gives a place and nothing else: no names, no "you," no mention of pleasure. Then comes "desirous to perform / we perform." The word "desirous" is stiff and slightly old-fashioned, the language of formal letters rather than of passion. What the couple desires is not each other but *to perform*, and the verb "perform" carries two meanings at once. It can mean carrying out an act, like a task or a duty, and it can mean acting for an audience. The second meaning suggests self-consciousness, as if even in bed someone is watching, perhaps the lovers themselves. The repetition of "perform" across the line break leaves almost no gap between wanting and doing, and it flattens the moment. The wish is granted so smoothly that it stops sounding like desire and starts sounding like a script being followed.
The stanza break works like a cut in a film. "Entering a book" carries the physical vocabulary of the first stanza into a different activity, since "entering" is exactly the kind of verb the title has prepared us for. Grammatically, the opening participle hangs there for a moment, and we might still be in the bedroom. Then the line turns toward reading, and the pronoun changes from "we" to "I." The couple has dissolved into one solitary person. The book, instead of showing the speaker another world, turns into a mirror: "I read a rough draft of my mind."
That last phrase carries most of the poem's meaning. A rough draft is something provisional, full of false starts, meant to be revised, so the mind is shown as a text still being written and not as a finished self. It also quietly echoes the first stanza, because a draft is to a finished work what a rehearsal is to a performance. Read this way, the lovers' performance may itself be a rough draft, and so may the knowledge that comes from it. The word "rough" also brings a bodily texture back into a bookish image, as if the carnal had followed the speaker into the library.
The poem's form supports this reading. There is no rhyme in the usual sense, but "perform" is repeated at the start of the second line and the end of the third, which is the plainest echo a poem can make. The lines stretch as they go: two syllables, then five, then three, then five, and finally the eight syllables of "I read a rough draft of my mind." That last line is the longest, and its stressed monosyllables ("rough," "draft," "mind") slow the reader down, so the poem ends on weight rather than speed. The absence of capitals and full stops lets the lines drift into one another like thought, and it makes the poem itself look like a rough draft. The tense of "read" is also left open. It could be present or past, and if we hear it as past, pronounced "red," it faintly rhymes with "bed" and links the two stanzas. The poem never tells us which to choose.
The poem is significant because it does so much in so little space. It takes a grand claim, that intimacy brings knowledge, and undercuts it with a wry observation: when we try hardest to be close, we may simply be watching ourselves. The poem does not say whether that is a disappointment or a discovery. Reading oneself in a rough draft can be humbling, but it can also be hopeful, since a draft can still be improved. The poem ends by leaving that choice to the reader.