The Detached
The Detached - meaning Summary
Internal Life Shapes Fate
This poem groups three moments—death, prayer, and love—into a single, stark rhythm. It pairs vivid, threatening images with a blunt assertion that the deepest reality is interior rather than outward: Death is internal; Hell is internal; Love is internal. The language and parallel structure build a quiet, austere meditation on how inner life frames fear, longing, and moral choice, even as external forces press in with violence and ritual. Read this as a claim that what matters most is not what happens to us but what we feel and decide inside. It invites attention to inner life as guide and judge.
Read Complete AnalysesWe die, welcoming Bluebeards to our darkening closets, stranglers to our outstretched necks, stranglers, who neither care nor care to know that Death is internal. We pray, savoring sweet the teethed lies, bellying the grounds before alien gods, gods, who neither know nor wish to know that Hell is internal. We love, rubbing the nakednesses with gloved hands, inverting our mouths in tongued kisses, kisses that neither touch nor care to touch if Love is internal.
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