Come On Dear - Analysis

A mind trying to remember, and refusing to stay put

At its core, Come on, Dear reads like a speaker attempting to tell a coherent story about love and time, only to have the story constantly slip into dream-logic, sarcasm, and sudden lyric radiance. The poem opens with a gesture toward historical certainty—another era, almost another century—but immediately undercuts it with the casual, self-correcting I was going to say. That small wobble becomes the poem’s governing motion: it keeps reaching for stable narration, then veering into a kaleidoscope of scenes that feel half-remembered, half-invented. The result is not random; it’s a portrait of consciousness under pressure, when the speaker wants to explain what happened (to you, to us), yet can’t trust any single version of events to hold.

The saint in the pew, and the comfort of prescribed feeling

The first image is pious and staged: The saint wept quietly in an ebony pew, and the speaker adds, almost dryly, It was the thing to do. Emotion here is a social script, not a private eruption. Even the laughter that follows arrives as ornament—garlands of laughter studded with cloves and lemons—sensory and festive, but also arranged, like décor at a ceremony. The distant nimbi around standing figures make holiness feel like a costume worn at a distance. And yet the stanza ends with a soothing, suspicious verdict: Inexplicably, all was well for a time. The poem gives us a brief, almost pastoral pocket of order—people connected, laughter strung like a wreath—while admitting it can’t explain why that order ever held.

Love: everyone’s subject, nobody’s responsibility

The second movement turns sharper, as if the earlier ceremony has begun to echo unpleasantly in an empty hall: discordant echoes rein in the heyday. Then comes one of the poem’s bluntest contradictions: It was love, after all—the grand justification—yet it’s also what everybody was talking about and nobody gave a shit for. Love becomes a public currency that’s been inflated into meaninglessness: discussed, circulated, and emotionally neglected at the same time. The speaker’s tone here is not romantic; it’s irritated, almost disgusted by the gap between language and care. The poem’s tension crystallizes: if love is the central story, why does it feel like nobody can—or will—treat it as real?

The narrator interrupts himself: blame, authorship, and the “book” of it all

Right when the speaker seems ready to elaborate, he yanks the wheel: But why am I telling you. That sudden self-interrogation doesn’t just change topic; it exposes anxiety about authority. He mentions who wrote the book, and someone who stamped his initials in a fairway for all blokes to see. This is a strange little parody of legacy—carving your name into leisure-land, marking territory where it doesn’t matter. The poem starts to treat storytelling itself as a kind of swaggering inscription: who gets to author the shared past, who gets credit, who gets believed. Even the conditional phrase if only came down / to this smidgen shrinks the whole enterprise; what if everything reduces to a tiny remainder, a fragment no grand narrative can redeem?

Tunnels of love, loose-leaf lives, and animals who might judge us

The poem’s surreal comedy intensifies into something bleakly intimate when it asks whether apes and penguins would be any wiser for the tunnels of love we shuffled through. The phrase tunnels of love suggests a carnival ride—manufactured romance, darkness on rails—yet the passage is full of fear: skeletons, bats, danger at every turning. The speaker describes a life not as a path but as a binder: a loose-leafed trajectory drifting through shallow water. That’s a devastating image of contingency: pages that can fall out, a direction that isn’t bound, a journey that never reaches depth. Against that flimsiness, the mention of apes and penguins reads less like whimsy and more like a taunt—if even animals wouldn’t learn from our versions of love, what does that say about how we’ve been living it?

Iodine sunset and conditional freedom: the world as permission slip

The third section pivots into prophecy: Only when the iodine sunset / bleeds again will all children / get permission to go where the grass is short. The mood becomes oddly bureaucratic—freedom is something granted, delayed, regulated. The landscape, too, is domestic and constrained: an absent-minded postman leaves earnests, the eaves are clipped / close to the houses. Even the sacred architecture in clerestory turns into a measuring device—Five days from the last clerestory—as if time can be tallied in church-light. Then comes the drained intimacy: your ambiance drained into pockmarked shutters. Whatever you is—lover, friend, memory, audience—it’s pictured as atmosphere leaking away into damaged surfaces. The poem’s earlier “all was well” has become a scene of residue and depletion.

Obviously the jig was up: comedy as a way to survive the collapse

Just when that loss might become purely mournful, the speaker cracks it open with vaudeville: Obviously the jig was up, followed by What’s that? Whose jig? The joke is defensive and revealing. It suggests the speaker can’t bear a clean, declarative ending; he has to interrupt even his own verdict, to keep the air moving. And then, unexpectedly, he claims a new clarity: I can see clear / ahead into the flying. The phrase is both nonsense and exhilarating: “flying” becomes not an act but a region you can see into, like weather. The poem’s tone turns from caustic to strangely buoyant, as if the speaker has talked himself into a momentary liberation.

The poor, the apron, the stars: dignity that doesn’t need explanation

In the poem’s final stretch, images of social quiet and personal grandeur sit side by side. The poor don’t talk much about it suggests a kind of muted knowledge—suffering or endurance that stays unadvertised. Then a woman appears in luminous domestic detail: her apron is ambrosial with trellised stars, and her stance can stare down even the most unquiet. The poem doesn’t explain who she is; it simply grants her authority. After all the earlier talk about who “wrote the book,” this figure feels like an alternative to authorship: a lived steadiness, a radiance in work-clothes, a power that doesn’t bother to declare itself. On days like this, the speaker says, you ride free—a sudden gift of motion and release, offered not as a solved argument but as a weather-change in the soul.

A sharp question the poem won’t answer, but won’t drop

If permission is required for children to go out, and if nobody gave a shit for the love everyone talked about, then what exactly is this freedom at the end—earned, imagined, or borrowed? The poem keeps staging versions of authority (saints, clerestories, books, initials in a fairway) and then slipping past them into sensation (cloves and lemons, an iodine sunset, trellised stars). It’s as if the speaker suspects that the only honest escape from false stories is not a better story, but a truer kind of seeing.

Numismatics in the pocket, diamond drip overhead

The closing images raise the stakes into a kind of cosmic kitsch: numismatics in his pocket that jitterbugs in cyberspace could conjugate, and then fate’s awning releasing a diamond drip that grows bigger / than both of us, big as all outdoors. Coins, grammar, dancing, cyberspace—human systems of value and meaning—are suddenly dwarfed by something impersonal and glittering that descends anyway. The poem doesn’t end with reconciliation; it ends with scale. After the speaker’s swiveling between ceremony, cynicism, fear, and tenderness, the final claim feels like this: our private dramas are real, but they occur under a vast, indifferent brilliance—and sometimes that very vastness is what lets us breathe.