NPPF Canto 1 "that golden paste!"

[jbor]

        No free man needs a God; but was I free?
        How fully I felt nature glued to me
        And how my childish palate loved the taste
        Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!
                                        (101-5)

I must admit I wasn't convinced by Keith's ("shocking"!) incest with Aunt
Maud theory, but there are questions about what in heck Shade's referring to
with his description of the odd mixture of flavours here. The immediate
referent of "taste" and "paste" is "nature", which is certainly vague enough
to sustain a lot of different interpretations, or to be a euphemism.

Is the suggestion that Shade is consciously and deliberately recalling an
experience of incest and referring to it cryptically in the poem? Or is it
that he's sublimated the experience and it has emerged spontaneously through
the poem? The things which didn't quite gel for me with the Aunt Maud thing
are the fact that Line 99 marks the start of a new stanza and new topic
(Shade's early loss of faith in God), and the fact that he exclaims how he
"loved the taste" of whatever it is he's talking about, but on the other
hand I'm having a hard time working out why "nature" would taste like a fish
and honey combo, or how that's a particularly palatable combination.

best