The Naked and the Nude Appearances Quotes

Notice how the poem starts with an introduction of a person thinking and seeing in the world? That's a good indicator that we're going to be paying lots of attention to how he sees things—or, put another way: how things appear to him.

Our speaker's not alone in all his looking. (That would be creepy.) Nope, lots of lovers like to look at their partner's body. Remember the cliché "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"? Well, our speaker is concentrating on the act of beholding.

Nakedness is just nakedness, right? How do you see anything other than just skin? Well, if you're a doctor, you're training to see through the skin (not literally—unless you're a radiologist). But doctors see the body as a set of symptoms. This means that, to them, the body appears to be something completely different from its surfaces.

And here's where the rubber hits the road. The nude uses language to appear to be something other than it is. It's showmanship. It's not like the nude is actually less naked than a naked person. No way. It's just that the nakedness (even here's it's called by the term "dishabille") is discussed in different terms.

Wait, isn't nakedness just the appearance of skin? So why the double emphasis on seeing a body's surface (skin) and its lack of clothing (nakedness)? We're betting that it's because it creates a subtle comparison. The nude is covered in something that's not quite skin. In fact, it's fancy language ("rhetoric") that makes the skin seem like something else entirely.