You Taught Me Waiting With Myself - Analysis

A lesson in solitude that turns into a plea

The poem reads like a message to someone who has trained the speaker in endurance—and then, quietly, like a request that this training not end in abandonment. The central claim is that the addressee taught the speaker how to survive separation (Waiting with Myself, Appointment strictly kept), but the speaker now needs a different kind of knowledge: not how to bear absence, but how to be received after it.

Waiting with Myself: discipline without comfort

The opening lines have the clipped calm of someone repeating a hard-won rule. Waiting with Myself suggests a solitude so complete it becomes its own meeting—an Appointment that must be strictly kept. Waiting isn’t portrayed as hopefulness; it’s a regimen. The phrase also carries a faint sting: the speaker has been taught to be her own company, as if the world (or this particular You) cannot be relied on to show up.

The tough praise of fortitude of Fate

When the speaker says, You taught me fortitude of Fate, the gratitude sounds real but restrained, as if the lesson required a kind of emotional bracing. Fate here is not romantic destiny; it’s a pressure system. The line This also I have learnt lands like a stamped certificate—proof of competence—yet it also hints at how many such lessons there have been, and how impersonal they are. The speaker can endure; the question is what endurance is for.

An Altitude of Death that doesn’t hurt more than living

The poem’s most startling paradox arrives with An Altitude of Death. Death is pictured not as darkness but as height—thin air, distance, a clearing away. And yet the speaker insists death can No bitterer debar than Life had done before it. The verb debar matters: the injury is exclusion. Life has already locked the speaker out; death, at worst, repeats that ban. The tone here is controlled, almost clinical, but it carries a weary defiance: if life has already been a kind of rejection, death loses some of its terror.

Yet there is a Science more: the turn toward judgment

The hinge comes at Yet there is a Science more. After the speaker’s stoic accounting of what she has learned, a new domain opens—something beyond fortitude. Science suggests a knowledge with rules and consequences, not simply feelings endured. The poem pivots from surviving deprivation to understanding what deprivation means in a larger, possibly eternal, setting.

Christ’s bright Audience and the fear of being disowned

In the final stanza, the private training in loneliness suddenly faces a public tribunal: Christ’s bright Audience. The addressee is said to know The Heaven well enough to understand—and the speaker’s request is pointed: That you be not ashamed / Of Me. This is the poem’s key tension: the speaker has been taught self-sufficiency (Waiting with Myself), yet what she wants most is recognition, not independence—someone to claim her Upon the further Hand, on the other side. The intimacy is stark: the speaker’s greatest dread isn’t punishment but embarrassment, not damnation but being treated as an awkward association in a place of radiance.

A sharper question the poem refuses to answer

If life has already debarred the speaker, is the speaker asking Heaven to correct that exclusion—or only asking the same person who taught her to endure it to finally stop enforcing it? The poem leaves that unresolved, which is exactly its ache: endurance has been mastered, but belonging remains uncertain.