Before TikTok, before health class got awkward, our first exposure to sex may have come from poetry… and we never even noticed.

The Classroom

The teacher read to us…

Wild Nights – Wild Nights!

By Emily Dickinson

Wild Nights – Wild Nights! Were I with thee Wild Nights should be Our luxury!

Futile – the Winds – To a Heart in port – Done with the Compass – Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden – Ah – the Sea! Might I but moor – tonight – In Thee!

…her voice flat, her cheeks blushing slightly. We, barely-teens, copied the poem into our notebooks and moved on. No one raised an eyebrow. No one blushed. And yet, years later, that same line would echo in our heads with an entirely different meaning.

We were being slowly ushered into adulthood, not with diagrams or awkward lectures, but with verse.

In the era before open conversations about sex were allowed in schools, we learned about sex in literature classes. Teachers may not have said it out loud (though our senior year teacher did), but they handed us poems and stories full of passion, longing, coded desire. And we read them. We memorized them. We internalized them.

Without ever being told, we began to learn.

What They Didn’t Say in Health Class

Health class gave us anatomy. Literature gave us yearning.

Instead of “this goes there,” we were handed Shakespeare and Dickinson. We didn’t learn about sex as an act; we absorbed it as a mystery. A power. Something layered and often painful, but beautiful.

It was intentional. School boards and teachers approved texts that passed surface-level censorship, while knowing full well what burned beneath the words. Passion veiled in metaphor became the unspoken curriculum.

This was an era before Kindles. We saw romance novels that the adults were reading. Whether intentional or not, the adults allowed the beauty of sex into our schools, hidden, in plain sight.

Beautiful Code: How Erotic Meaning Hides in Plain Sight

The encrypted sexual mechanics with Metaphor.

• Shakespeare gave us “my nobler part to my gross body’s treason.” That was a penis blushing in iambic pentameter.
• Emily Dickinson whispered “Rowing in Eden—Ah, the Sea!” as if we were talking about boats.
• Walt Whitman sprawled across pages, body and soul, plunging tongues to bare-stript hearts.
• William Blake warned the rose about “the invisible worm / that flies in the night,” and we never realized it was a poem about disease, sex, and death.

These weren’t just flowery lines. These were heat and ache, dressed in respectable verse.

We All Read It

We read them in 8th grade, 10th grade, and senior year. We wrote essays on form and structure. Maybe we felt something. Perhaps we were confused, I know I was. Perhaps we dog-eared a page without knowing why.

Years later, we picked up those books again and went: WTF.

The rocking horse wasn’t just a rocking horse. The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock wasn’t just about coffee spoons. And Dickinson’s wild nights? Not just a summer storm.

This was by design. However, I believe that this design was put in place centuries ago. Literature taught us what teachers were not allowed to teach through the use of metaphor, longing, intimacy, and restraint. We were allowed to feel, even if we did not yet fully understand.

What We Might Be Losing Today

Today, the tension has flipped. Health class is explicit, while literature is policed.

We're removing the texts that let us grow into understanding—the nuance and layers of adult themes at a child's pace, in beauty and safety.

When we cancel metaphor from the classroom, we leave students with only bluntness or silence. Metaphor matters. Beauty matters. Together, they give readers, especially teenagers and young adults, the space to arrive when they're ready.

A Love Letter to the Literature That Let Us Grow Up Gently

This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about preservation. Those dog-eared books, once required reading, were more than assignments. They were patient, gentle mentors. They taught us to feel desire without shame. To see intimacy in complexity. To encounter sex as something more than mechanics. (Some things are best learned “on the job.”)

We owe a thank you to every line that lingered. Every poet who smuggled eros into verse. Every teacher who let it pass without explanation, trusting that we would one day return and understand.

Call to Action

What did you read in high school that hit differently when you got older? What coded messages did you miss the first time around? Let’s remember.