Meeting and Passing
Meeting and Passing - form Summary
A Compact Conversational Sonnet
This poem is a sonnet that uses the compact, self-contained sonnet form to stage a brief, almost incidental encounter on a hill. The speaker and another person meet while each is moving in opposite directions; their interaction is small—footprints in dust, a parasol gesture—but the form concentrates that exchange into a single, completed moment. The sonnet’s unity and payoff come in the concluding couplet, where their paths cross and then continue, leaving the encounter precise, reciprocated, and quietly significant without grand declaration.
Read Complete AnalysesAs I went down the hill along the wall There was a gate I had leaned at for the view And had just turned from when I first saw you As you came up the hill. We met. But all We did that day was mingle great and small Footprints in summer dust as if we drew The figure of our being less than two But more than one as yet. Your parasol Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust. And all the time we talked you seemed to see Something down there to smile at in the dust. (Oh, it was without prejudice to me!) Afterward I went past what you had passed Before we met and you what I had passed.
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