Imitation - Analysis

Death at the doorstep, not in the distance

The poem’s central claim is blunt: death is not an abstract future event but a presence already installed in the speaker’s life. The opening vision makes Death almost domestic: she is seating / By quiet entrance at my own home. That quiet entrance matters—it suggests no drama, no battle, just a calm, inevitable waiting. Even before the speaker says I’ll die, the poem has already staged death as something the speaker can saw, like a visitor he recognizes.

That closeness turns frighteningly intimate when the speaker sees the doors opened in my tomb. A tomb is supposed to be sealed; an open door implies a passage already prepared. The future is pictured not as a mystery but as an unlocked room the speaker is being led toward.

Hope as something that escapes, not something that comforts

One of the poem’s sharpest images is the moment hope doesn’t simply fade—it was a-flitting. Hope behaves like a nervous bird, startled out of the body’s territory. This makes the poem’s despair active rather than passive: the speaker isn’t merely sad; he is watching the last inner resource physically leave him. That motion also sets up the next claim: death won’t just end him—it will erase him.

When he says traces of my past / In days of future will be never sighted, the dread shifts from dying to being unremembered. The poem ties identity to recognition: his eyes will never again be delighted / By dear look. The loss here is relational; what dies is not only the body, but the exchange of looks that confirms someone exists.

A farewell that is also an indictment

The poem’s emotional turn comes with the repeated Farewell, where private fear becomes a public leave-taking. The world he’s departing is described as a place of dangerous height—precipice above—and constant darkness: My gloomy road was a-streaming. That odd phrasing makes the road feel like a current, as if his life has been carried along by something he didn’t control.

In this section the poem is not only grieving; it is accusing. Where life for me was never cheering is a judgment on the speaker’s lived experience, and the bitterest line may be Where I was loving, having not to love! Love appears as a misdirected or unreturned force—an energy spent into emptiness. The tension is that the speaker can still love intensely, yet believes there was, in reality, no proper object for that love. Feeling survives; meaning collapses.

Beauty remains, but it can’t save him

After condemning his life’s bleakness, the speaker suddenly names the world’s loveliness with tenderness: the dazzling heavens’ azure curtain, Beloved hills, the brook’s enchanting dance. These details are bright, almost painterly, and they complicate the earlier claim that life was never cheering. The poem admits a paradox: the world can be beautiful and still fail to shelter a person from despair. Beauty is real, but it is not remedial.

Even peaceful shades of wilderness are addressed as if they were friends who can mourn. Yet the speaker doesn’t ask for rescue—only for witness. The command You, mourn doesn’t reverse the sentence; it tries to give the ending a small dignity, as if grief from the landscape could substitute for the human remembrance he fears he won’t get.

The final repetition: leaving everything at once

The poem ends by pressing its farewell into repetition: farewell, farewell at once. That doubling feels like a final effort to make the separation real—saying it twice so it will hold. It also intensifies the poem’s hardest contradiction: the speaker insists his traces will vanish, yet the poem itself is a trace, a last deliberate act of address. In other words, the speaker claims he will be unsighted by the future, but he cannot stop speaking to it.