Empty My Heart, of Thee

Empty My Heart, of Thee - meaning Summary

Emptiness After the Beloved

The speaker addresses the heart and a beloved, imagining attempts to excise that person. She offers metaphors—artery, sea, root, heavens—to show that removing the beloved would amount to self-erasure rather than relief. The poem insists absence is impossible without annihilating identity: subtracting the loved one would leave nothing of the speaker to continue. It frames love as constitutive and existential, where loss is not merely sorrow but an obliteration of self and of permanence.