(I think I made you up inside my head.)
One of the poem's two refrains, this line reveals the depths of the speaker's instability and unreliability. While she expresses love for the "you" addressed here, vividly recalling their time together, she also feels unsure about whether she ever knew this person in the first place. Her doubts may reflect a very literal madness—perhaps she has so lost her sense of what is real that she finds herself inventing lovers—or they may reflect a feeling of extreme self-doubt and confusion following a rejection or heartbreak. Meanwhile, the parentheses that surround this quote show that, because the speaker is so overwhelmed and baffled, she can't actually achieve a constructive understanding of her own thoughts. She tries to analyze her experiences, stepping back to understand the roots of her misfortune, but the parentheses surrounding that process contain it and keep her from continuing past her initial, halting sentence.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
These lines reveal the speaker's feelings of simultaneous power and powerlessness over the world around her. In a sense, she feels that she has a radical level of control over the outside world. Despite the intense and possibly delusion-driven images she sees, the mere act of closing her eyes seems to eliminate them. In her vulnerable state, in which every normal act feels intensified, the ability to close her eyes and exclude sensory information feels remarkable to the speaker. At the same time, the ability to affect the outside world by altering her own subjective experience only places the speaker at a further remove from objective reality, making her feel even more destabilized and powerless. Moreover, while the colorful, movement-filled world she sees surrounding her is frightening, the quiet nothingness she sees when her eyes are closed is frightening as well.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
This quote encapsulates the poem's interest in the intertwining of love, sex, madness, control, and narrative. The words "bewitched" and "moon-struck" suggest that the lover's seduction has a magical, or at least magical-feeling, element, giving the lover almost total control over the speaker to such an extent that she is driven mad. This suggests an intriguing circularity: while the lover has driven the speaker mad, their control over the speaker also amounts to a type of madness that separates the speaker from her rational thoughts or self-control. Meanwhile, words associated with night, sleep, and magic—including "bed," "bewitched," and "moon"—evoke the world of fairytales. This offers an ironic comment on the romance at hand, which, far from being fairytale-perfect, has actually led to heartbreak. It also suggests that the speaker is trying to fit her own experience into different familiar narrative or stylistic worlds, testing it against the context of (in this instance) a fairytale, in order to see if it helps her make sense of her confusing situation.
