Space Between - Analysis

The poem’s central claim: intimacy is real, but never complete

Judith Wright builds Space Between around a stubborn, almost physical fact: even the closest human connection leaves a remainder of distance. The poem begins with a startling equivalence: the space between lip and lip can resemble the gap between living and long-dead flesh. That comparison is not saying love is deathly; it’s saying that separation can feel absolute even when bodies are near. From the start, the poem insists that closeness and estrangement aren’t opposites—we can experience them at the same time, and the mind can misread a small gap as a final one.

Lip-to-lip and the shock of the “same”

The opening sentence does a lot of emotional work with one word: same. A kiss is the emblem of unity, yet Wright focuses on the tiny interval that still exists even there—between one mouth and another, between one self and another. By yoking that interval to the divide between the living and the dead, she brings grief into the room with desire. The tone is quiet but severe: can sometimes seem makes the claim sound tentative, yet the image has the force of certainty, as if the speaker has learned this through repeated disappointment.

Straining toward the living, and toward memory

The poem then widens from lovers to everyone: We strive across, we strain—language of effort, not ease. The reach is two-directional: toward those who breathe the air (the present, the physically available) and toward those in memory (the absent, possibly dead). This matters because it shows the space between is not only interpersonal but temporal. You can be separated by a room, or by time, or by death; either way, the ache feels structurally similar. The blunt line Here is never There lands like a verdict. It reduces all longing—romantic, familial, elegiac—to a simple impossibility: location, presence, and inner experience cannot be swapped.

The “united person” who is still “each alone”

The poem’s hinge comes in the direct question: What is the space between. The speaker tries to name the paradox of relationship: something enclosing us in one and making a united person, yet also dividing each alone. Wright doesn’t sentimentalize the union; she treats it as a psychological construction that coexists with solitude. The key tension is that we genuinely become a we—the poem allows that—while also remaining irreducibly separate. The word enclosing is especially sharp: unity can feel like shelter, but it can also feel like a boundary drawn around two people, a small world that still contains internal distances.

Bridges that cross, nets that don’t hold

Wright answers her own question with images that are hopeful and then immediately sabotaged. She offers Frail bridges crossing from eye to eye, from flesh to flesh, from word to word. Seeing, touch, and speech—our main tools for connection—are real bridges, but they are delicate. Then the poem shifts to a harsher metaphor: the net / is gapped at every mesh. A net is meant to catch and keep; here it is designed to fail. Even when we weave communication carefully, the holes are built in. The tone becomes more resigned, less questioning: the speaker seems to accept that the best human engineering cannot seal the openings.

The final insistence: silence goes deeper than touch

The ending is both communal and fatalistic: this each human knows. The poem doesn’t present isolation as a special tragedy belonging to one speaker; it’s basic knowledge. Wright stacks up possible antidotes—however close our touch, intimate our speech—and dismisses them with the quiet reach of silences, spaces that will not close. The deepest thing in the poem is not love, not grief, not even the body, but the unfillable gap that remains after contact. And yet, by naming those gaps so precisely—lips, eyes, words—Wright also suggests the bridges matter because they are frail, not because they are futile. The poem’s bleakness is tempered by its attention: if spaces won’t close, we still keep crossing.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If Here is never There, what are we doing when we speak intimately—trying to travel, or trying to build a shared Here? The poem seems to argue that relationship is not the disappearance of distance but the decision to live beside it, fully aware of the gapped net and still reaching for another eye, another word.