These Things - Analysis

What Bukowski Calls Support

The poem’s central claim is bleak and specific: much of what we most proudly keep afloat in our lives is not lifted by meaning, but propped up by panic and habit. Bukowski begins by deflating the comforting metaphor of progress: the things we support most well have nothing to do with up. That quick dismissal turns support into a kind of maintenance work—keeping something from collapsing, not helping it rise. And the reasons he lists—boredom or fear or money, plus the jagged phrase cracked intelligence—make the speaker sound disgusted not only with society’s motives but with his own.

A Small Circle, a Small Candle

The poem then supplies an image for the human scale of perception: our circle and our candle of light / being small. This isn’t just modesty; it’s claustrophobia. The repetition—so small—insists that the true problem isn’t ignorance itself but our inability to tolerate it: so small we cannot bear it. The tone here shifts from scornful diagnosis to a more intimate confession. The speaker isn’t merely blaming other people for superficial living; he’s describing a shared nervous system, a shared recoil from limitation.

The Hinge: Idea as Escape and Disaster

The poem’s turn arrives with a single bodily verb: we heave out with Idea. Idea is capitalized like a substitute religion, something abstract and grand enough to compensate for the smallness of our actual circle. But the verb heave matters: it suggests strain, nausea, propulsion—an escape that is not graceful. In reaching for the big, the speaker says, we... lose the Center. That line defines the poem’s core tension: we crave meaning and coherence, yet our craving pushes us toward inflated concepts that unmoor us from whatever real center we had. “Center” could mean an inner life, a moral anchor, a daily reality; the poem keeps it broad because the loss is widespread.

All Wax Without the Wick

The candle image returns, sharpened into a verdict: all wax without the wick. Wax is the material of light, but it cannot light itself. Without the wick—without the thin, practical conduit—wax is just potential, or worse, decoration. Bukowski’s accusation is that we build impressive substances of meaning (wax) while removing the working core that would make them burn. It’s an image of hollow spirituality and hollow intellect at once: big, smooth, and useless. The poem implies that our grand “ideas” often operate like wax: they look like illumination, but they don’t actually illuminate.

Old Names as Road Signs to Nowhere

In the closing movement, the poem turns outward to culture and language: we see names that once meant / wisdom. Those names—philosophies, institutions, heroes, ideologies—have become mere labels. Bukowski likens them to signs into ghost towns, where the promise is still posted but the living substance is gone. The tone here becomes elegiac and a little haunted: the world is full of directions, but the destinations are empty. And then comes the harshest narrowing: only the graves are real. After all the talk of “Idea,” the poem ends on the physical fact that refuses abstraction: death, the ground, the undeniable weight of what’s left behind.

A Sharp Question the Ending Forces

If the signs point to ghost towns, the poem quietly asks: what would count as a real town—a real center, a wick that actually burns? Bukowski doesn’t offer a program, but he does imply a standard: whatever is real must be able to withstand smallness without fleeing into capital-I Idea. The final line makes that demand merciless: if only the graves are real, then every “wisdom” that cannot face that reality is just another empty sign.