A dialogue in rhyming couplets, "Resolving Doubts" stages an argument about how much of a person can be kept safe from the world. The poem gives no names and no setting. There are only two speakers, SHE and HE, and the title promises that doubts will be resolved. Whether they are, and at what cost, is the real question the poem leaves us with.
The opening couplet states the problem with almost mathematical neatness: "If to demands of others I agree, / Then I will be another, but not me." Everything that follows is a test of that claim. SHE believes in a core self that survives only if it refuses to bend, and HE plays the sceptic, pressing at every weak point. His method is the "how will..." question, and it works like a series of chess moves. Each time she builds a defence, he finds an attack.
The imagery escalates in a way that rewards close attention. Her spirit first becomes a bird that deserts "its builded nest" for the "virgin cloudbank." Air is her refuge. HE answers in kind, giving the world's demands wings of their own, "raptors" that can follow her upward. So she changes element and goes down into the sea, where her spirit will "sink within it, and become a pearl." A pearl is a clever choice, since it is something precious formed by hiding, a lustrous thing grown inside a shell. HE promptly turns the image against her: the pursuers now "dive as glittering fishers dive," and a pearl, after all, is exactly what fishers go looking for. Her hiding place becomes the very thing that makes her desirable. The poem sees that the more valuable the inner self, the more it attracts those who want to take it.
SHE's answer is a change of strategy. Instead of fleeing to a new place, she abandons the idea of escape: "Venue shall make no difference to disguise, / Nor shall my center open to their eyes." The shift is from geography to performance. She will wear a mask, and the real self will sit behind it, unreachable. Notice that "disguise" and "center" do the heavy lifting here. A person can look compliant while remaining intact.
Then the poem's rhythm breaks. Until now each speaker gets exactly one couplet. HE's final speech runs to four lines, and the language turns physical and urgent: "But if by chance, by force, by God knows how, / You all unguarded should some night allow / Another there beside you in your bed." The triple "by chance, by force, by God knows how" rushes forward, almost stumbling, and the setting shrinks from sky and ocean to a bed. This is where abstract talk about "demands" becomes something harder to dodge. His blunt reply, "Body is body, and cannot lie dead," refuses the comfortable separation between inner and outer that SHE has relied on.
Her last couplet is the most unsettling in the poem. She repeats his phrase, "Body is body," granting the point, and then answers it: "but the heart stays true, / And should that happen, I will think him you." On the surface this sounds like loyalty, since she will remain faithful to HE even in someone else's arms. But look at what she is actually proposing. She will survive the intrusion by imagining a substitution, so her faithfulness depends on a mental trick. The self is protected by fantasy, and the "other" is erased even as he is present. It is hard to say whether this is triumph or defeat. She keeps her centre, yet she keeps it by withdrawing from the moment altogether.
The tidy, tightly closed couplets matter here. They give the argument the feel of a game with fixed rules, and they make the last exchange more striking: the form stays orderly while the content grows dark. What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses an easy answer. Her resolution answers every one of HE's objections, and still the title's promise of resolved doubts sounds faintly ironic.