Silhouette - Analysis

A life told as a refusal

The poem’s central drama is that it keeps promising a story and then withholding it: it offers a biography as a silhouette, an outline without confession. The speaker begins with a charged sequence—something like desire, politics, or violence—ran in, and turned and became an act, yet immediately shuts the door: I may not tell. That refusal isn’t coy so much as defining. What follows is the record of consequences without the originating event, as if the poem believes that the decisive moments of a life are often both indecent and unspeakable, and that language arrives late, after the road has already happened.

The road that returns, and the end of borrowing

The early image of the road is strangely doubled: it Ran down there and then was afterwards there, as though the past is not behind you but reinstalled in the present. In that climate, the poem rejects secondhand explanations: no more borrowing / Of criticism and no desire to add pleasure will be seen that way again. The tone here is dry, almost bureaucratic, but it’s also wounded: once an act has happened, commentary and pleasure look like luxuries, like decorations pinned on too late. The contradiction is sharp: the poem uses language to tell us it can’t tell, and it keeps moving forward by marking what it will no longer use—criticism, pleasure, borrowing—as if those were moral temptations.

Oppressors with blank mouths, and a path that moves inside

Then the outside world appears, but as a grotesque close-up: the blank mouths / Of your oppressors. The phrase makes oppression feel less like an argument than an appetite—mouths that can consume, shout, erase, but are also blank, empty of meaning. Against them, much / Was seen to provoke, suggesting that even mere visibility is dangerous. The poem’s path, Though discontinuous and sometimes Not heard of for years, nevertheless move[s] up—only to reveal a claustrophobic surprise: It was inside the house, always getting narrower. What sounded like progress becomes containment. The way forward is not a road outward but a corridor inward, an ascent that tightens into domestic confinement.

But it all turned out another way: the cozy trap of ordinary life

The poem’s most audible turn arrives in one plain sentence: But it all turned out another way. After imagining extreme lengths and fictitious subterranean / Flowerings next to the cement—a vivid image of creativity or desire forced to bloom underground beside the hard infrastructure of the real—the poem swerves into the lived texture of a certain American ordinariness: So cozy, so ornery, a man in a 1964 Ford not thinking of the price of anything, with the grapes and her tantalizing touch. The details are sensual and specific, but they don’t open into intimacy; they thicken into distraction. Even the fish—life behind glass—Hung close to the glass, suspended, mirroring the speaker’s own condition: drawn toward contact, halted by an invisible barrier.

Behind the curtain: catastrophe domesticated

The poem’s most painful tension is that catastrophe is both present and inert. The speaker says he never knew her / Except behind the curtain, turning romance (or knowledge itself) into a stage effect: proximity without access. Then comes the astonishing line: The catastrophe / Buried in the stair carpet. Disaster is not a headline event; it’s embedded in the house’s fabric, literally underfoot, absorbed into décor. And yet it stayed there / And never corrupted anybody. That claim feels less like reassurance than denial: if a catastrophe can be buried and still count as harmless, what does the poem have to call catastrophe at all? The tone here is eerily calm, as though the psyche has learned to live with the lump under the carpet by naming it and then insisting it doesn’t spread.

Growing up to a stammering horizon, and the bell that never gets answered

The ending gives a muted coming-of-age: one day he grew up, and even the horizon—normally a clean line of promise—Stammered politely. The world’s edge becomes hesitant, socially careful, unwilling to speak plainly. The sky is not sublime but domestic: like muslin, a cloth you might drape over furniture, a weather made of household fabric. And the old house remains sealed in its habits: no one ever answered the bell. The final image turns the whole poem into a scene of unreceived appeal—someone arrives, calls, waits—and the life inside keeps not responding. The refusal from the first line has become a settled practice.

The hardest question the poem leaves us with

If the act can’t be told, and the catastrophe can be Buried without corrupt[ing] anyone, then what counts as change here: the original event, or the lifelong habit of not answering? The poem’s narrowing house suggests that what finally oppresses the speaker may be less the blank mouths outside than the interior architecture of avoidance—curtain, glass, carpet, muslin—soft materials that nevertheless keep everything in place.