Sonnet - Analysis

A self-portrait meant for after the self

This sonnet reads like a vow to become an image once the living person is gone: the speaker keeps returning to the word profile, as if he wants to strip himself down to an outline that can survive emotion, history, and even speech. The central claim the poem keeps making is stark: what will remain is not a warm memory, but a calm sign—serene, hard, and strangely impersonal. Even the opening promise, I know that my profile will be serene, sounds less like comfort than like a decision to accept a colder kind of persistence.

Sky, mirror, and a style that must be broken

The serenity the speaker predicts is immediately placed in an unsettling setting: the nroth of an unreflecting sky. The misspelled direction and the phrase unreflecting sky push the poem toward disorientation and blankness, a world where nothing answers back. Against that blank, the speaker invents a different kind of reflection: Mercury of vigil, a chaste mirror whose job is to break the pulse of his style. A mirror usually confirms your face; here it disciplines and fractures. The poem’s self-portrait, then, isn’t vanity—it’s an attempt to purify the self into something watchful, metallic, sleepless, and no longer driven by the heartbeat of personal expression.

Ivy, linen, and the body as something merely left behind

The speaker treats his body with a cool, almost administrative distance. If ivy and the cool of linen are what will be the norm of the body he leave[s] behind, the body becomes a thing to be covered, wrapped, reclaimed by plants and cloth. That matters because it sets up the poem’s core tension: the body will decay into softness and covering, but the remaining identity will harden into a fixed outline. The repeated profile feels like resistance to the messy truth of flesh—an effort to keep only the clean edge.

Sand and crocodile: survival without blush

The poem’s most chilling image arrives when the speaker says his profile in the sand will be the old unblushing silence of a crocodile. Sand suggests impermanence—wind can erase it—yet the crocodile suggests something ancient, armored, and patient. The contradiction is deliberate: the speaker wants to be both a trace and a survivor, both fragile outline and primordial endurance. And unblushing is crucial: he imagines a silence that has no shame, no need to justify itself, no reddening of the face. That makes the serenity at the start feel less like peace than like emotional extinction.

A tongue that refuses flame

The turn comes with And though: suddenly the poem talks about speech, taste, and desire. The speaker’s tongue of frozen doves is a beautiful impossibility—doves imply tenderness or purity, but frozen they cannot move or sing. He insists this tongue will never taste of flame, only empty broom, an image that replaces passion with dryness and sweeping, as if language were reduced to housekeeping or to the rasp of bristles. Here the poem tightens its central sorrow: the self that remains will not be the self that loved. The outline endures, but it endures by refusing heat.

Freedom as a sign hung on a branch, dahlias that ache

In the final lines, the poem reaches for something like politics or ethics, but it stays dreamlike: a free sign of oppressed norms is placed on the neck of the stiff branch. A sign is public; a neck is vulnerable; a stiff branch suggests both rigidity and a kind of gallows. Freedom appears, but as a label pinned onto constraint. The closing image—the ache of dahlias without end—brings back sensual beauty, yet it is beauty turned into ongoing pain. Dahlias are lush, layered flowers; to give them an ache and make it endless is to admit that even the poem’s most vivid life-force can’t resolve the hardness it has chosen. The speaker’s final “profile” is, at once, a protest and a prison: a lasting emblem that survives by becoming quiet, cold, and painfully decorative.