The Description of the Human Body He believed the heat of the heart somehow caused all movement of the body. Blood vessels he realized were pipes, he saw that veins carried digested food to the heart. (This was brought further by William Harvey. Harvey developed the idea of the circulation of the blood.) Descartes felt that an energetic part of blood went to the brain and there gave the brain a special type of air imbued with vital force that enabled the brain to experience, think and imagine. This special air then went through the nerves to the muscles enabling them to move. The Description of
I, being born a woman and distressed from artificial constraints, legal or social, or their psychological residue, jealousy." Rather than interpreting the conflict of the poem as an interpersonal one, some critics view the conflict as an internalized "battle of blood against brain." The body may "cloud the mind" of the speaker, but her "staggering brain" loses to her own "stout blood," not to her lover's moves in some sexual contest (Millay 7, 10). By positioning the woman as subject, not object, Millay simultaneously fulfills and subverts the conventions of the sonnet. I, being born a woman and distressed "I, being born a woman and distressed" is