Adrienne Rich — The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message

A man in terror of impotence or infertility, not knowing the difference a man trying to tell something howling from the climacteric music of the entirely isolated soul yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego music without the ghost of another person in it, music trying to tell something the man does not want out, would keep if he could gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy where everything is silence and the beating of a bloody fist upon a splintered table