Five Senses - Analysis

The poem’s central claim: the senses make meaning, then take it away

Five Senses argues that perception is both our most intimate power and something that finally exceeds us. In the first stanza, the speaker’s senses gather into a meaning, turning all acts, all presences into an ordered inner experience: a rhythm that dances, a pure design. But the second stanza revisits that same sensory richness and flips its ownership. The senses still generate pattern, yet the pattern belongs to something other than the speaker: a rhythm that dances / and is not mine. The poem’s emotional charge comes from that shift from confident integration to uneasy awe.

Lily-light: making a self out of “elements together”

The lily image gives the first stanza its calm authority. A lily can gather water, light, and soil into a single bloom, and the speaker imagines her mind doing the same: in me this dark and shining. That phrase holds a key tension. The self is not purely illuminated; it is mixed, both shadowed and bright, and the senses don’t simplify it so much as hold it in one living contradiction. Even opposites—that stillness and that moving—are pulled into coherence. The speaker doesn’t claim to invent the world; she claims to compose it into felt order.

“Shapes that spring from nothing”: creation without a clear source

Twice the poem insists that what takes form seems to come from nowhere: shapes that spring from nothing, a pattern sprung from nothing. This isn’t casual mystery; it’s the poem’s pressure point. The senses gather the world, but the act of turning sensation into a meaningful design feels almost supernatural—too elegant to be accounted for by willpower. The speaker can name the result (rhythm, design, pattern), yet she can’t locate a responsible origin. Meaning arrives like an emergence, not a choice.

The hinge: from “a pure design” to “not mine”

The second stanza begins as if it will simply restate the first—While I'm in my five senses—but its verbs tilt the experience from steadiness to vertigo. Now the senses send me spinning. The inventory expands—all sounds and silences, all shape and colour—but these aren’t gathered into a lily’s poise; they become thread for that weaver. The image is intimate and unsettling: a web is within me growing, yet it follows beyond my knowing. The speaker is both the site of creation and someone partially excluded from it.

The weaver’s web: intimacy without control

The weaver metaphor changes what meaning is. In the first stanza, meaning feels like the speaker’s own synthesis—her senses forming a pure design. In the second, meaning is a process happening through her, using her senses as materials, but guided by an intelligence she can’t claim. The concluding line—and is not mine—doesn’t sound like despair so much as a clear-eyed surrender. The poem holds a hard double truth: perception is the closest thing we have to being alive in the world, and yet the inner order it produces may belong to a deeper, impersonal patterning that the self can only witness.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If the rhythm is not mine, what exactly is the I that speaks—owner, instrument, or audience? The poem seems to suggest that the self is most itself precisely when it admits it cannot fully author the patterns it experiences, even while those patterns grow within me.