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women’s poetry of the two world wars 

entirely to the growth of invasion’,^18 andher poem ‘Parturition’ (1914) is a startling
evocation of childbirth as prolonged, bitter struggle. The link continued into the
First World War. Loy told the writer Neith Boyce in August 1914 that she planned
to ‘go to Milan and get a child by [Marinetti] before he goes to war—she says
there is nothing else...to do in war-time’.^19 In ‘Songs to Joannes’ the theme of
conception seems to recur obliquely in Song XIII which begins:

Come to me There is something

I have got to tell you and I can’t tell

Something taking shape

Something that has a new name

A new dimension^20

As usual, the precise subject of the dialogue is obscure. A suggestion of the speaker’s
pregnancy—that ‘Something taking shape’—could equally be a sense of the rebirth
of a sexual relationship. Yet, as the song goes on, the speaker seems intent upon
breaching the entrenched positions and egotism that have seemed to define their
interactions. ‘Let us be very jealous’, she says sarcastically,

Very suspicious

Very conservative

Very cruel

Or we might make an end of the jostling of aspirations

Disorb inviolate egos

Where two or three are welded together

They shall become god

Whilst ‘welded’ is a tough Loyan verb that harks back to the debunking sexual
discourse of the first song, the mention of ‘three’ is a striking innovation in a text
that has been remorselessly dualistic. Is there a tentative sense of the confrontational
discourse of ‘inviolate egos’ being ‘disorbed’ by productive sex? Nothing comes of it.
Seven dashes indicate the lover’s silence or his physical denial of the possibility, and
the song ends in bitter, one-sided argument that restores the sequence’s dominant
dualism.
The sexual war that the songs dramatize and narrate reaches its climax in the
next four poems of the sequence. Songs XIV—XVI are short lyrics defined by
simultaneous regret and equivocal surviving passion. In XIV, for example, the
speaker brings ‘the nascent virginity of|—Myself’ to the man. ‘No love or the
other thing’, she notes laconically,

Only the impact of lighted bodies

Knocking sparks off each other

In chaos^21

(^18) Loy, quoted in Burke,Becoming Modern, 115. (^19) Neith Boyce, quoted ibid. 174.
(^20) Loy, ‘Songs to Joannes’, 57. (^21) Ibid. 58–9.