Shall I Contrast Thee

Rupi Kaur is often derided as simplistic, patronizing, schlocky and narcissistic. I do not want to debate the character of the writer herself, but I firmly believe all art can be separated from its creator. If we amputate Rupi Kaur’s works from her Instagram captions, we are free to impart our own discovered meaning to the page, just as with any poem. One of the few defining characteristics of Kaur’s poetry is line breaks, so I’m going to assume each one is intentionally placed. Kaur’s poetry also comes with little doodles attached to each piece — in the spirit of post-structuralism we will consider these part of the text. With these stylistic elements in place, let’s examine our first stanza:

i do not need the kind of love
that is draining
i want someone
who energizes me

The surface level reading of this poem, as with all of Kaur’s poems, is incredibly simple. It posits the existence of a love that drains, and contrasts it with a person who energizes. But in between the lines is a slightly more nuanced statement of autistic despair. To wit:

“i do not need the kind of love”

is set off on its own line. When reading Kaur, I always first try to consider each line as a complete thought by itself. This often reveals esoteric meaning that would be obscured by ignoring the line breaks, as many do. “Kind” is, along with “kin”, a derivative of the Old English “cynde” — a term which can refer to shared family, type, or gender. We read this line, then, as “i do not need the kin of love”. Not only love, but all related emotions are rejected by the speaker. Perhaps all emotion entirely. Moving on.

“that is draining”

“Kind of love that is draining”, “The kin of love is draining”, “The kin of love is being drained” — referents may be intentionally ambiguous here. The separation between this line and the previous is reinforced by the stressed syllables that would be jammed against each other were they conjoined — “love” vs. “that”. In our surface reading, “draining” implies emotional exhaustion. Here, emotions themselves are the source of exhaustion — are self-exhausting. “Kin of love” is either draining or being drained. Why not both? Expressing love (as a noun) through love (as a verb) leading to an absence of the former to support the latter. Kaur paints a despondent picture of human relations. Finite resources place an ultimate limit on our ability to love others, and, at least for the speaker, love is not a replenishing well. If she were to love someone, it would only deplete her of love so much faster. We are not given to understand exactly why her emotions are limited in this way, but we can empathize with the painful paradox of being miserly with love only to not lose it entirely.

“i want someone”

A simple statement of desire. Despite her emotional dysfunction, the speaker still longs for connection. Something human inside her still wants to be with other humans. Loneliness is its own prison. The syllabic structure here mimics the previous line — they are two sides of the same coin. The desire for companionship is part of the paradox tearing her apart.

“who energizes me”

Without punctuation we are again faced with ambiguity. “I want someone who energizes me” is available to us, and indeed present in the surface level reading. This might be someone who restores the speaker’s emotional reserves, but more likely it is someone who simply provides the companionship she lacks. She may make peace with not feeling love, as long as she has a supporting figure in her life. But with a question mark this also becomes a continuation of the despair expressed in the previous lines. “Who energizes me?” Other people draw strength from love. In an ideal relationship, love not only empowers both members of the relationship, but also strengthens their bond. It creates a feedback loop of energy which both people draw from. But being unable to restore her capacity for love in the way that others do, the speaker is prevented from accessing this privilege. She is cursed in a way that limits her not just as a partner, but as an individual. This makes her bargaining more poignant. A person who at least energizes her may be the next best thing.

The image in this poem is a lily being visited by dragonflies. Their symbiotic relationship mirrors the idealized love the speaker longs for.

don’t mistake
salt for sugar
if he wants to
be with you
he will
it’s that simple

This poem is considerably more complex. We begin with “don’t mistake” — a fragment that makes little sense on its own, so once again we turn to history. “Mistake” comes from the Germanic “mis” meaning “bad” or “wrong”, and the Old Norse “taka” — to grasp, or lay hold of. Interpreted a bit more literally, we might say this line is “do not lay hold of the wrong thing”.

It’s important to do the work of separating the first line from the second, because the second line now freed adds much complexity of tone to the work. “Salt for sugar” in conjunction with line 1 tells us not to mistake the two substances with each other. A casual glance might only reveal white powder, but the difference should be obvious even to the eye upon closer examination. Alone, line 2 presents a simple exchange — salt for sugar. Some of the first for some of the second.

At this point we should take care to include the drawing in our reading. A salt shaker and a sugar spoon pour two mounds of white powder onto an implied tabletop. The two substances come from different sources, which is our first clue as to the nature of this work. The second is from the shape of the two mounds — the comparison is unavoidable. Indeed, images of fertility and feminine beauty pervade Kaur’s work. We may assume the impression made by this image is not accidental.

These first two lines establish the context of the poem: barter. Barter is a generative process — two or more people contribute to the process from themselves, and the result is something greater than the sum of its parts. A barter process is spiritually similar to conception in this way. Indeed, capitalism, the evolution/degradation of barter, is often described as the Thanatic impulse overpowering the Erotic. Barter is the erotic element at play, an idea reinforced by Kaur’s imagery. “Salt for sugar” is meant as a prototypical example of this kind of exchange.

“if he wants to”

Of course, barter is predicated on the consensual involvement of both parties, otherwise it’s simply piracy. On another level, these three lines are almost saccharine domestic advice. “Do not lay hold of the wrong thing — exchange salt for sugar, if he desires you to.”

Much has been made of the impact of toxic masculinity in heterosexual relationships. One underexamined facet of this is how often women encourage patriarchal tendencies in their partners. Upon hearing his heart has gone soft, Lady Macbeth tells her husband:

What beast was t, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man; (1.7.49)

Kaur encourages women to indulge softer tendencies in their partners. Substituting sugar for salt is the example she uses — sweet foods in many cultures are considered effeminate. On the other hand, the direction of the exchange is ambiguous — perhaps she is removing sugar, and using salt instead. Either way, the point is the same — to contradict “his” wishes would be “to take wrongly”.

“If he wants to be with you, he will,” is the surface reading. In the domestic reading, it might be better seen as “if you indulge his desires, be with you he will.”

If this poem were simply about how to be a good housewife, it would not be worth writing. Kaur’s clue lies once again in her implicit reference to fertility. Under this light, we realize that “to meet his desires” is tied to conception via the metaphor of barter, and then “be with you he will” becomes a more pragmatic statement.

This poem appears on the surface to be a reassurance to women in doubt about their relationships. One level deeper, and it becomes advice about how to keep a relationship. A level deeper still, and that advice becomes much stronger than simply baking a pie. Our speaker from the previous poem, not having love to offer, might still find entrapment via childbirth an adequate way to secure a partner’s support.

This poem marks a departure, both for Kaur and for us. We won’t go as strictly line by line through this one, since it’s longer. For Kaur, the voice has changed — both of the previous pieces can be read as a woman voicing her inner thoughts, but this one is unmistakably addressing someone. Has our speaker changed? In the surface level reading, perhaps, but for our close reading we will treat it as if the speaker is unchanged — still a woman with emotional dysregulation. In this case we must identify the person she is addressing. Returning again to our metatextual context, the most prominent figure in Kaur’s works besides the speaker herself is the speaker’s partner, either real or hypothetical. As we will see, the true meaning may lie somewhere in the middle of these two possibilities.

Let’s start with the assumption that our speaker has the same dysfunction as the speaker in the first poem, and see how far that takes us. Almost immediately, we’re struck by a stark word choice — the pronoun “they”. In this reading, “they” would be how the speaker refers to herself. Having secured her partner, possibly even having given birth, she remains so distanced from her femininity that she unconsciously desexes herself in the abstract. Her partner (assuming she is addressing her partner) is with a “they” in her mind.

One piece of evidence in favor of this selection of characters is how the addressee is “soft and tender” — reflecting the ambiguous masculinity of the partner figure in the second poem above.

“they have the potential to be” is an awkward line simply in syllables, and demands we stop to consider it no matter how we read. With how isolated the speaker is, and how she feels divorced from her gender identity, it’s possible she feels only partially formed. The awkward, stumbling rhythm of this line mirrors the awkward, unrealized potential of the person it refers to.

It’s easy to look at Kaur and see an empty hole — vacuous feelgood girlboss motivational posters schlepped out to sell cosmetics through. This might be her intent, but it’s not her only message. If we peel away our preconceptions, we find a narrative not of a strong, independent woman, but a sad and brittle shell of a human being. The figure depicted in these poems is an isolated woman struggling to form even the most fundamental human connection with another person, compromising herself over and over in an attempt to breach her loneliness. Equipped with this reading, we re-emerge into the greater context of Kaur herself, and find that perhaps it is not such a great leap we have taken after all. I’ve framed this project as diverging significantly from Kaur’s original message, but does the figure we’ve unearthed really sound that different from the figure Kaur intended for us to picture? Is not the Instagram girlboss a solitary figure, an almost autistically emotionless facade? Does she not form relationships out of material convenience, rather than feelings of love? And isn’t she willing to compromise her personal values for the material security other people can provide?

I lied at the beginning — I have not separated Kaur’s poetry from Kaur at all. She has crept back in, as she must, being fundamentally reflected in her own writing. One mark of a good poet is that the character of the poet appears in the words they write — their personality and history reflected in verse, an open book that requires no secondary literature to give the readers a feeling that we really know this person. By this measure, I argue Kaur is a good poet.

These poems were curated by student essays from Stanford and UMich. Kudos to those writers, who took this project more seriously than I did.