Death of Desire is a five-part poem from Danil Rudoy’s collection Love Is Poetry that dismantles the romantic myth of the suffering poet and converts despair into a cold, ironic liberation. Across its compact stanzas, the poem moves from mock-elegy for “true poets” through obscene demystification of lust and ends on the startling transformation promised by its title. This essay examines the structure, imagery, voice, and philosophical arc of Death of Desire, and situates it within Rudoy’s wider poetics of self-interrogation.
Form, voice, and structure in Death of Desire
Death of Desire unfolds in five numbered sections that read as linked monologues, each tightening the poem’s argument about art, appetite, and disillusion. The opening section adopts an elegiac register only to undercut it through grotesque imagery and blunt causality. The poem uses regular rhyme and punchy rhythmic units to keep the tone musical yet abrasive, which supports its critique of sentimental postures about pain and genius. The date range, “2013, May 16th 2019”, hints at a long compositional process and suggests that the speaker’s stance on desire has been tested over several years of revision and lived experience.
Cracks broke into sculptures,
True poets are dead.
Where are all those vultures
That had to be fed?
Go fetch them with others
And finish the feast:
Depression that smothers
Is also a beast.
This opening stanza stages the poem’s method. The first line turns decay into art, then immediately announces that “true poets are dead,” collapsing the familiar link between anguish and authenticity. Vultures and feasting recast depression as carrion rather than sacred wound; the imperative “Go fetch them” treats both birds and artists as expendable. The final couplet fuses clinical diagnosis with monster image, suggesting that clinging to depressive glamour feeds a creature that devours the speaker and any audience that romanticizes it.
In short:
- Stanza I frames depression as spectacle and waste instead of creative fuel.
- Stanza II attacks the illusion of mystical inspiration through the metaphor of “magical droplets”.
- Stanza III shifts from abstract discouragement to direct confrontation with desire and bodies.
- Stanza IV exposes the life of a poet as a circular ride between conviction and feeling.
- Stanza V declares the programmatic “death” of desire and names “romance” as a new configuration of attachment.
Demystifying desire and the poet’s role
The second and third sections intensify the poem’s assault on inherited scripts about inspiration and erotic interest. Where the opening tackles the cult of depressive genius, the next stanzas dismantle the idea that desire is mysterious or ennobling. The voice oscillates between mock-therapeutic address and brutal punchlines, which forces the reader to question any comforting interpretation of longing, creativity, or taste.
You are grimacing? Stop. Let us
Face that which it seems.
The magical droplets
Do not fuel your daydreams.
They are hard to arrange and,
As always, quite sparse:
Too still for a legend,
Too stiff for a farce.
Here the speaker addresses an implied listener who resists the dismantling of myth. “Magical droplets” evokes inspiration, rare orgasm, or any cherished flash of intensity. The stanza argues that such moments arrive rarely and do little to validate a grand narrative. The final couplet is lethal: the experience fails as legend and as farce, trapped in a limbo where it lacks both nobility and comic release.
No matter how stunning,
No matter how stunned:
The best of the cunning
Is only a cunt.
This quatrain from the third section marks a deliberate escalation in bluntness. The repetition of “No matter” empties outward criteria of beauty or emotional effect, and the rhyme on “stunning” and “stunned” hints at the mutual daze of seducer and seduced. The final line introduces a taboo word to rip through polite abstraction. Rather than glorify women, lovers, or muses, the poem reduces the game of seduction to anatomy and crude strategy. In context, this reads as a refusal to allow any aesthetic halo to attach to erotic pursuit.
The fourth section shifts from analysis of desire’s objects to the status of the poet who narrates all this. The speaker acknowledges the reader’s discomfort (“Did I hear some choking?”) and declares that the “life of a poet” is a ride on a wheel between knowledge and feeling. That wheel image captures the sense of repetition: the poet knows certain patterns are destructive yet continues to circle through them. The poem thereby folds its own rhetorical aggression into the cycle it describes, hinting that demolition of myth can itself become a pose.
Resolution and quasi resolution in the final section
The final stanza completes the explicit arc promised by the title. After diagnosing depression, puncturing mystical inspiration, degrading erotic chase, and ironizing the poet’s vocation, the speaker announces fatigue with sorrow and turns toward a new stance. The promised “death of desire” opens a space for another type of relation, named “romance,” which carries a more mutual and less obsessive energy.
Enough of the sorrow,
Epiphanies are
Highways to tomorrow,
But where is the car?
I will end this quagmire
By watching askance
The death of desire,
The birth of romance.
The stanza begins with rejection of endless lament and skepticism about “epiphanies.” They promise transit (“highways to tomorrow”) yet lack the vehicle that would translate insight into movement. The question “where is the car?” exposes the gap between revelation and change. The decisive line is “I will end this quagmire / By watching askance,” which defines the method: the speaker steps sideways, adopts a slant gaze, and allows desire to die under observation rather than through heroic struggle. This distance enables “the birth of romance,” a relationship mode freed from compulsive need and self-dramatization.
In isolation, the closing couplet could sound sentimental. In context, it carries the weight of all prior mockery. Romance arises only after dismantling the prestige of suffering, the mystique of inspiration, and the theatre of conquest. The poem thus frames healthy connection as something that appears once the ego’s appetite has been publicly stripped of glamour.
Key themes and techniques in Death of Desire
Depression and performance
The images of vultures and feasts in the first stanza suggest an audience that devours the spectacle of the unhappy poet, while “Depression that smothers / Is also a beast” hints that such attention feeds the condition. Throughout the poem, the speaker refuses to allow sadness to function as currency that buys respect or affection. This approach aligns with Rudoy’s broader critique of aestheticized suffering in Love Is Poetry, where several texts target the temptation to convert pain into identity.
Obscenity as clarification
The use of the word “cunt” in the third section arrives after a build up of abstract talk about demons, touch, and stunning appearances. By collapsing these into a single vulgar term, the speaker exposes how much of the mythology around attraction depends on disguising raw impulse. The rhyme scheme surrounding this moment keeps the stanza formally tight, which intensifies the contrast between crafted shape and brutal content.
Second person address and complicity
Sections II and IV rely on direct address. “You are grimacing? Stop. Let us / Face that which it seems” acknowledges a listener who recoils from the dismantling of comfort. Later, “Did I hear some choking?” implies that the listener cannot easily swallow the critique. This repeated “you” can be read as a literal addressee, a projection of the poet’s past self, or the reader. In every case, the rhetorical strategy turns analysis into an uncomfortable conversation rather than a distant lecture.
Time, revision, and the dated signature
The signature line “2013, May 16th 2019” marks a span of six years between initial conception and final revision. That interval mirrors the poem’s thematic journey from immersion in sorrow and desire toward ironic detachment. It also signals to attentive readers that Death of Desire is part of a long-term inquiry into how to live as an artist without glamorizing damage. In the context of the collection, this date range helps map the evolution of Rudoy’s aesthetic from youthful rage to more calibrated disillusion.
Connections and reading context
Death of Desire gains additional nuance when read alongside other works in Love Is Poetry, where similar tensions between desire, performance, and self-awareness recur. The poem also invites explicit comparison with Dylan Thomas’s villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night. The contrast between those stances becomes sharper in the dedicated comparison essay at Do not go gentle into that good night vs Death of Desire, which traces how each poem handles rage, resignation, and agency. Where Thomas urges fierce resistance against death, Rudoy’s text argues for the deliberate death of a specific inner force.
Frequently asked questions
What is Death of Desire about in one sentence?
Death of Desire shows a speaker who dismantles the myths of suffering, inspiration, and erotic chase, then chooses to let compulsive longing die so that a less theatrical form of romance can appear. This focus on deliberate disengagement sets it apart from poems that celebrate passion as an end in itself. Readers drawn to that anti-romantic stance will find further context in the broader Love Is Poetry collection page.
Why does the poem use explicit language?
The explicit insult in the third section is a calculated literary device rather than casual vulgarity. It strips away the ornamental language usually attached to desire and exposes the transactional core of some relationships. Because the rest of the poem employs careful rhyme and controlled rhythm, the contrast frames the obscene line as a diagnostic tool that cuts through pretense.
How does the five-part structure shape the poem’s meaning?
Each numbered section enacts a stage in the speaker’s reasoning. The first attacks the cult of depressive poetry, the second punctures the glamour of inspiration, the third confronts desire with obscenity, the fourth comments on the poet’s own cycle, and the fifth announces a new stance. This staged movement turns the poem into a miniature argument rather than a static mood piece.
How should I read Death of Desire alongside the rest of Love Is Poetry?
Within the book, Death of Desire works as a hinge between early, more flamboyant explorations of desire and later texts that lean into irony and philosophical distance. Reading it together with surrounding poems highlights recurring motifs like urban solitude, self-mockery, and the pressure to perform intensity.
Speakable Summary: Death of Desire by Danil Rudoy dismantles the glamour of suffering and erotic chase through five sharp sections that end with the speaker choosing distance over compulsion. The poem’s final promise of “the birth of romance” arises only after desire has been stripped of its mythic aura.