“My body was like a harp”

“My body was like a harp” is the narrator’s image for the physical intensity of his unspoken adoration. By making the girl’s words and gestures seem to play upon his body, the comparison turns attraction into an involuntary response: he feels before he can explain what he feels.

The Image and Its Context

The narrator has watched the girl leave her house morning after morning, keeping her figure in sight as their routes converge and separate. Though he has exchanged only a few casual words with her, her name acts on him like a summons. The harp image gathers this repeated, largely silent attention into a single figure: his body is an instrument, and her presence supplies the touch that makes it sound.

Bodily Feeling and Inarticulate Desire

The comparison follows the narrator’s admission that he does not know whether he will ever speak to her or how he could explain his confused adoration. Its importance lies in the gap between sensation and speech. The image gives that unspoken feeling a vivid form without resolving it into a declaration or a mutual relationship. Her words and gestures are imagined as fingers moving across strings; the response belongs to the narrator, whose body registers an intensity he cannot yet put into ordinary language.

Narrative Significance

The image also gathers the passage’s contrast between the narrator’s inner life and his surroundings. On the crowded Saturday streets, amid bargaining, curses, and street songs, he imagines carrying his chalice safely through a throng of foes; later, alone in the darkened drawing-room, he presses his palms together and murmurs of love. The harp extends this pattern of giving private feeling a heightened, almost devotional shape. It reveals the force of the narrator’s desire while preserving its uncertainty: he has not yet found a way to speak to the girl, and the image records his response rather than any knowledge of hers.