Leave The Hand In - Analysis

A mind trying to negotiate closeness without losing leverage

The poem reads like a nervous, quick-witted interior monologue that keeps switching subjects because the real subject is closeness: how it begins, how it traps, and how you protect yourself while still wanting it. The speaker’s language is full of social situations that are supposed to be reassuring—friendship, courtship, vows, home—but each one arrives with a catch. Even when the speaker sounds casual or jokey, the underlying worry is consistent: intimacy demands commitment, and commitment demands exposure.

From running in the streets to being fully booked

The opening feels like it starts mid-conversation: Furthermore drops us into a world where Mr. Tuttle (a name that sounds both ordinary and cartoonish) used to have to run in the streets. That image suggests urgency, vulnerability, maybe even a childlike freedom. But the present tense is managerial and cramped: each time friendship happens, they’re fully booked. Friendship isn’t a warm accident anymore; it’s an appointment calendar with no openings. The poem keeps staging this shift from spontaneity to constraint, as if adulthood has turned even affection into a scheduling problem.

Amaryllis and sparring: beauty doesn’t cancel competition

The speaker tries to offer something gentler—Sporting with amaryllis in the shade—a deliberately lush, decorative phrase. But it immediately flips into a contest: sparring partner, someone who gets there first. The tenderness of flowers in shade can’t hold its ground against the fear of arriving second. That question—you wonder if it was all worth it—and the quoted reply—Yes, why do it?—make the poem’s emotional engine visible: the speaker wants connection, but the moment it resembles a game with winners, it becomes suspect. Even pleasure is evaluated like an investment, and the poem’s chatter becomes a defense against being outmaneuvered.

Held on the line: apologies, appetites, and the urge to seem harmless

In the middle section, the speaker sounds stuck in modern limbo: I’m on hold, and It will take quite a lot for this music to grow on me. Being on hold is literal (a phone line) and emotional (suspended between yes and no). The speaker insists, I meant no harm, and even claims a history of rescuing—I’ve helped him / from getting stuck before. But the next snap—Dumb thing—undercuts the self-portrait of competence. The line All my appetites are friendly is especially unstable: it sounds like reassurance, yet it also admits there are appetites, desires that need to be socially palatable. The poem keeps trying to translate hunger into something safe.

Children’s freedom versus the speaker’s demand to choose

The poem briefly gestures toward an ideal: Children too are free to go and come as they please. That sentence feels almost wistful—freedom as effortless movement, without repercussions. Yet right after that comes a stark political/domestic command: I ask you only to choose between us, then shut down this election. The child’s open door becomes an adult’s forced referendum. The oddness of between us hints at a triangle (or at least competing claims), and calling it an election makes affection sound like a public process with ballots and losers. The speaker wants the choice made—and then wants the process to disappear, shut down, as if decision itself is messy evidence.

Card games and vows: don’t show your hand, but leave the hand in

The poem’s central contradiction tightens around the repeated hand imagery. The speaker warns: don’t reveal too much of your hand, a phrase from cards and strategy—keep your advantage, don’t expose your intentions. But then, with a sudden stage-like intrusion—Then up and pipes the major—comes the counter-order: leave the hand in, or else change the vows. The two imperatives collide. One says: protect yourself, conceal. The other says: commit, stay in, keep your hand where it can be seen and held. Even change the vows suggests that commitment is negotiable, revisable, maybe even a performance you can rewrite when it stops suiting you. The poem won’t let intimacy be pure; it keeps it adjacent to tactics.

The menace of courtship, and the home that turns to marsh

When the poem finally names romance directly, it does so as threat: The bold, enduring menace of courtship is upon us / like the plague. Courtship is not tender pursuit but an infection that spreads through a community—none of us are immune, and none of us can say what trouble / will be precipitated once it has its way. That phrasing turns romance into weather or chemistry: something that precipitated trouble like a storm front. And then the poem locates the domestic aftermath in a startling sentence: Our home is marshland. Marshland is half-solid, half-waterlogged; it won’t bear weight reliably. The speaker’s idea of home is neither firm ground nor open sea, but a place where you can get stuck—echoing that earlier rescue line about helping someone not get stuck.

A tender glimpse indoors, and a stubbornly ungolden outside

The final images feel like someone trying to salvage coziness: After dinner was wraparound, and You got a tender little look at it. Wraparound suggests enclosure, warmth, maybe the curved, softened edges of an evening that holds you. Yet the last line refuses the expected cinematic finish: Outside, it never did turn golden. The world doesn’t provide the flattering light that would make the relationship’s story feel resolved or beautiful. The line is quiet but adamant: the speaker can manufacture ceremonies (elections, vows, dinners), can even offer tender glimpses, but can’t force the external world into the reassuring color of late-afternoon romance.

The poem’s dare: is love possible without strategy?

If you take the poem at its own word, the problem isn’t simply that courtship is frightening; it’s that the speaker can’t stop thinking in terms of leverage—hands, sparring, getting there first, choosing sides. So what does leave the hand in really ask: to risk sincerity, or to accept being trapped? And if the speaker obeys the earlier warning not to reveal too much, is that prudence—or a refusal to ever step into the same light where things might finally, unmistakably, turn golden?