words by J.A.G. Mabbutt
Desire often confuses and erases all reason, hounding the sensible into senselessness and, in doing so, unravelling their perception of reality. Sometimes, desire can be pieced together by authentic feelings, an alchemical process of genuine love being taken hostage by obsession. But it can also be hoisted together by insecurities and the most ravenous of emotions that leave the desirer as ruined as the desired. Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poem 'Love and Sleep' is plagued by the issue of desire, a poem rife with intentions of love but sidetracked by intimate sexual confusions. Whereas the poem does invite interest through its delicate wording and at times sensuous imagery, Swinburne’s speaker muses on the intersection between desire and longing, probing the human condition from the perspective of an enamoured sleeper who is approached by their female lover and under close observation. Swinburne’s poem triangulates a messy, indelicate world of tension and coy, almost sinister anxiety, and it is because of these reasons that the poem is still relevant today. The fine line of desire and its risk of infringement on morality has often found itself entrenched in the current cultural climate, as the pendulum-like attitudes of society swing to and fro between both Dionysian and more traditional views on desire and sex. But more so, we are beginning to see not only more inclusive assessments of these risky themes, but more explicit and erotic animations of them in all areas of the arts.
Luca Guadagnino’s cinematography has never shied away from these themes, nor has it toed the line when exposing audiences to unseen worlds of intimacy and desire. His cinematic output over the last twenty years has boasted a fair few favourites of mine, and it is because of his unapologetic approach to showcasing the intricacies of desire and longing, in the discomfort of environments that make such feelings tragic to express, that I still revisit his works today. Whether it is the sincere, yet devastating love story shown in Call Me By Your Name or the cannibalistic road romance attended to in Bones And All, Guadagnino’s cinema is fearless in its intentions of fabricating beauty in the most difficult of conditions.
Guadagnino’s 2024 film Queer, an adaptation of William Burroughs’ 1985 novella, is still, in my eyes, the most ambitious of his films, and because of its ambitions, his most sublime. Like Swinburne’s poem, the film is punctuated by alarmingly close-quarters moments of intense desire and longing, and funnily enough, these moments, as in the poem, exist in the confines of a bedroom. However, unlike the poem, Guadagnino’s film ventures into the topic of queer desire, unlocking how societal taboos and queer identification can prohibit these desires from materialising, maximising longing and the tension that arises from this. Throughout the film, the protagonist, American expatriate William Lee (Daniel Craig), finds himself unsuccessfully chasing his desire to find intimacy and love from another man. However, in the intoxicating exoticism of 1950s Mexico City, Lee’s drunken and desperate pursuits of other queer men narrow after meeting the younger, more silent Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). At the crossroads of their relationship, Lee’s infatuation and longing for a meaningful relationship with Allerton are complex and fraught with troubling outcomes for Lee. Yes, both men have sex numerous times in the film, and often find themselves connected at the hip throughout, yet, for Lee, his longing for something more profound disables his ability to be happy and content. To Lee, Allerton becomes more of an idea, or a symbol to be desired, and because of this, Lee’s navigation of their relationship warps beyond his control.
The starkest of images offered up by the film arrives at its close. And without a doubt, this imagery, this scene, invites the same attention as Swinburne’s poem. After the decoupling of Allerton from Lee’s life, where it is revealed that Allerton hasn’t been heard of or seen by anyone from Mexico City, we find Lee cast adrift, in a similar state to how he was at the beginning of the film. His desire to be loved, his longing to be intimate in more than just a sexual sense, continues as he becomes a barfly endlessly circuiting the same bars and bordellos, in pursuit of a sexual dalliance, or more truthfully, someone to love. This cyclical return to Mexico City and Lee’s habitual existence helps Guadagnino hammer home Lee’s sadness and desperation. As an audience, we become, like Lee, trapped in a Sisyphean loop that incarcerates us to witness a man who, despite all of his problems, is deeply in need of love. The film, like a torture rack, promises Lee a glimmer of hope, and because of his sincerity, we, too, want Lee to find happiness, but in the most sinister of ways, the film agonisingly removes this hope and instead returns Lee to his struggle and longing.
In the final sequence of the film, we are shown Lee’s dreams. Why? Because, as Freud and Jung would have us believe, dreams exist as windows into our deepest unconscious fears and desires. Throughout the procession of Lee’s visions and fantasies, the audience is shown Lee accidentally shooting Allerton in the head, cradling his body, watching it vanish, and then, in his old age, alone on a bed, before he is cradled by Allerton. Lee’s killing of Allerton isn’t without reason, because , it is suggested that Lee is responsible for shooting his wife, like William Burroughs himself. In revisiting this historical act, and making Allerton the victim, Guadagnino immerses us within Lee’s trauma and guilt, whilst also bordering the intimacy of love, alongside the intimacy of killing. For Lee, his dream of cradling a dead Allerton and being responsible for this, evidences his shame that he was responsible for derailing what they might have had. In addition, the imagery of a dead Allerton, in Lee’s arms, recognises Lee’s desire to care for Allerton in a defensive and loving posture. In becoming a martyr to Lee’s desires, Allerton shares the role of being a victim of the violence of Lee’s imagination, and also a damsel-like figure for Lee to protect. His vanishing furthers this because, for Lee, Allerton has truly vanished from his life; the idea of him is dead and detached from both Lee’s material vicinity and his fantasy.
In Swinburne’s poem, similar images can be located. In the opening stanza, the speaker envisions his love through a ghastly, almost sickly series of descriptions. By being introduced as “asleep,” the speaker is presented in a position of weakness and vulnerability, just like Allerton in Lee’s dream. Perhaps, like Lee, the poem’s speaker positions his lover in this position to express how his desire is to be empowered by the weakness of the one they long for. Being asleep, like death, is a state of being powerless, and therefore, because of this, the speaker’s observation of his lover invites us to question their authority or intentions. Usage of the adjectives “pale” and “bare” further highlights the pleasure experienced by the speaker through the perceived weakness of his lover. Here, in this first stanza, the building sexual tension and eroticism arrive because of the speaker’s role as the desirer in this situation. Desire, for the poem’s speaker and for Lee, buds out from their need to be more powerful than those they desire and long for. One might argue that such desire is predatory and concerning, but ultimately, its origins can be rooted more in Lee and the speaker’s desire to be wanted and required in a position of responsibility. However, this responsibility exists in connection with acts of violence. Lee dreams of accidentally killing Allerton, and the speaker even fantasizes about biting his lover’s “bare throat.” Why? Do both these men enrich their desires and fantasies with the dual role of being the one who causes harm, and in the same breath, the protector or intimate caregiver? This duality confuses both the reader and the audience alike, perhaps because desire itself is confusing and at times illogical in both its formation and outward expression.
Following his vanishing from Lee’s arms, Allerton is later conjured in a different role, a more intimate, sincere one. Guadagnino ends the film in observation of Lee as an older man, alone and moored upon his bed. In his isolation, the audience’s sympathies are dialled up, because ultimately, despite his rough edges, Lee’s loneliness and desire to be loved is the very lifeblood of the narrative. Because of his queerness and addictive habits, Lee is portrayed as an otherworldly alien presence, who, even amongst fellow queer people, is cast out because of his personality. He is a timid soul who wishes to please, whether it be sexually when shown performing fellatio on Allerton and other lovers, and even when the favour is returned by Allerton later in their liaison, we are shown elation beyond an orgasm. Why? Because for Lee, the experience of being loved and desired in return is what he wants, and is often neglected. Earlier in the film, we are also shown Lee’s outstretched, ghostly arm, seeking out the affection of a connection with Allerton. We are shown this because it resembles his real desire and longing. When we unify and consider all of these moments, Lee’s elderly, foetal isolation on his bed at the end is a sledgehammer to our feelings and thoughts. Lee dreams this because it is his fear to be left alone, on his bed, a place where we sleep (and die) and where we are privy to intimacy with others. However, Lee’s nightmarish dread is soon combatted by the return of Allerton, who hugs him from behind, returning the affection that Lee has sought out all of his life. The ending of the film allows us to not only witness Lee’s despair but also to locate his desire and longing as a safety measure that protects him, even in his dreams.
In the second stanza of Swinburne’s poem, the sexual imagery dial is most definitely turned up. Whereas the first stanza exists as an observation and preamble to the definitive act of ‘love,’ the second stanza seizes upon the speaker’s desire with alarming insight. For the speaker, his lover is augmented by metaphors comparing her face to “honey” or her body to “pasture.”For the speaker, these metaphors reduce the lover into something consumable, fertile, and passive. Honey suggests sweetness, temptation, and indulgence, while pasture evokes land that exists to be grazed upon and possessed. In doing so, the speaker’s desire shifts away from intimacy rooted in mutual recognition and toward a desire that is acquisitive and bodily. The lover is no longer a conscious subject, but a surface upon which longing can be satisfied. This reduction mirrors Lee’s treatment of Allerton, who gradually becomes less a person and more a vessel for Lee’s emotional and existential needs.
The eroticism of the second stanza is heightened by its insistence on touch and consumption. The speaker imagines himself physically engaging with the sleeping woman in a way that collapses tenderness into dominance. However, this fulfilment is deeply different from the gratification Lee experiences in his final dream, despite their surface similarities. Lee’s dream culminates not in sex, but in an embrace: Allerton cradles him from behind as he lies aged and alone on the bed. The eroticism here is muted, stripped of physical urgency, and replaced with emotional consolation. Where Swinburne’s speaker imagines desire as an overwhelming sensory experience, Lee’s fantasy reduces desire to its most essential form, the need to be held and recognised. Both scenes occur within dream states, yet they diverge in what they reveal about longing. The poem imagines desire as indulgence; the film imagines it as relief.
Still, the similarities between the two are striking. In both, the desired figure exists within a dreamlike or unconscious realm, unable to fully respond as an autonomous subject. Swinburne’s lover remains asleep throughout the poem, while Allerton in Lee’s dream is a projection of memory and yearning rather than a living presence. This removes the risk of rejection and allows desire to be shaped entirely by the desirer’s needs. The explicit sexuality of Swinburne’s second stanza, though vivid and corporeal, is ultimately just as illusory as Lee’s final embrace. Both are fantasies engineered to soothe the desirer’s loneliness.
By placing sexual fulfilment within sleep and dreams, both Swinburne and Guadagnino suggest that desire, when denied reciprocity or permanence, retreats inward. It becomes imaginative rather than relational. The explicit sex of the poem’s second stanza and the tender restraint of Lee’s final dream differ in tone, but they serve the same function: they are compensatory visions, created to momentarily ease the ache of longing. In both cases, desire is not resolved, only deferred, reinforcing the tragic understanding that what is most wanted often survives only in fantasy.
‘Love and Sleep’ reveals desire as a force that clouds judgment and unsettles reality rather than clarifying it. What begins as tenderness dissolves into fantasy, projection, and longing that can only be sustained in sleep, where consequence and resistance are absent. Like Lee’s final dream in Queer, Swinburne’s vision of desire offers momentary comfort at the cost of truth. Both works suggest that when desire is shaped more by insecurity than reciprocity, it does not lead to fulfilment but to repetition, illusion, and quiet ruin. In this way, desire becomes not an expression of love, but a refuge from the very reality it cannot survive.
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J.A.G Mabbutt is a poet, avid cinephile and writer. He has had both his poetry and writing published with Zimmer Magazine, Film East and Scribbled in the past year. Online you can find his poetry via @jag_poetry on instagram. In his day-to-day life, he is an English teacher based in Leicestershire. He studied at the University of Liverpool, receiving a degree in English Literature and History.