What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

The couplet-like exchange frames desire as reciprocal: both men and women, Blake suggests, seek in the other the visible “lineaments” (features, traces) of desire already satisfied. Read this way, attraction is not to innocence or restraint but to the marks of experienced pleasure—an unsettling claim that exposes how erotic longing can be mediated by signs, reputation, and imagined prior fulfillment. The repetition also ironizes gendered expectations: despite cultural scripts that portray male and female desire as fundamentally different, the poem collapses them into the same demand, implying a shared human appetite and a critique of moral posturing around sexuality.