“At the Gym” foregrounds desire more than any other emotion. This emphasis is, in part, due to the speaker’s complicated understanding of desire as a drive that needs to be controlled. However, this idea of control itself is complicated, and the poem suggests that desire can be controlled with both negative and positive outcomes.

The negative aspects of controlled desire is perhaps the kind of control typically associated with Christian theology. One of the appeals of exercise, according to the speaker, is to gain “some power / at least over flesh, / which goads with desire” (Lines 16-18). The process of lifting weights is thereby framed an exercise in willpower that trains the weightlifters to ignore their bodily desires. Though it is not clear to what particular desires the speaker refers, the association with “flesh” suggests that the desires are sexual or physical in nature. The desire might be as simple as the desire to stop lifting the heavy weights, and it might be as complicated as the desire to commit adultery. At both extremes, the person experiencing desire needs to control that emotion to the point that their willpower is stronger than the temptation.

The speaker, however, is also aware of this desire’s corollary.