Its Settled - Analysis

A farewell that sounds like a verdict

The poem’s central claim is that the speaker’s departure from his rural home isn’t just a move but a kind of self-sentencing: once he leaves, he believes he is barred from return, and that exile will end in a particular kind of death in the city. The opening declaration, “Yes! It’s settled! Now and for ever,” has the hard, over-loud finality of someone trying to convince himself. Even the landscape is framed as something he will never again deserve to hear: the “winged leaves of poplars” that used to “ring and rustle” above him. Nature is not merely missed; it becomes a lost music, and the word “never” sets the emotional stakes immediately.

The home already collapsing

What makes the goodbye brutal is how quickly it turns into an inventory of abandonment. “Our house will sag in my absence” imagines the home physically drooping, as if it depends on his presence to remain upright. Then the poem adds a colder fact: “my dog died a long time ago.” This isn’t fresh grief; it’s a marker that the ties were already fraying before the speaker left. The repetition of these lines at the end matters emotionally more than technically: the poem circles back to them like a mind unable to stop touching the bruise. It suggests that the speaker’s “settled” decision doesn’t settle anything inside him.

Moscow as a beautiful weight

The poem’s hinge is the move from the plain’s private soundscape to Moscow’s public, heavy grandeur. The speaker says, surprisingly, “I admire this city of elm-trees,” and notices “decrepit buildings and homes” with a kind of tender attention. Moscow is not painted as purely corrupt; it is worn, lived-in, and oddly hypnotic. The phrase “Golden somnolent Asian entities” resting “on temple domes” makes the city’s sacred architecture feel drowsy, even foreign to itself, as if its spirituality has become decoration. That sleepy gold contrasts with the speaker’s agitation later; the city seems to doze while he spirals.

Night walking, and the pull of the den

When night comes, the poem’s tone sharpens and sours. Moonlight “dissipated” shines “Like hell in the dark sky of blue!” The simile is jarring: light is supposed to console, but here it exposes and condemns. The speaker “walk[s] down the alley, dejected,” heading to “the pub for a drink, maybe, two,” a line that tries to sound casual while admitting dependence. Calling the pub “a sinister den, harsh and roaring” shows he knows exactly what kind of place it is, yet he goes anyway. The tension is clear: he is drawn toward what harms him, and he narrates that pull with bleak clarity rather than surprise.

Performing shame as entertainment

Inside the pub, the speaker becomes both observer and participant in moral collapse. He reads poems “for girls that go whoring” and “carouse[s] with thieves with delight.” The word “delight” is the most disturbing detail, because it refuses a simple repentance story. He isn’t only trapped; part of him enjoys the degradation, or at least the intensity of it. Then the poem tightens into self-judgment: “Now I speak but my words are quite pointless,” and his heart’s “beat” accelerates toward a confession that sounds like a slogan of despair: “I am totally worthless, / and I cannot re-enter the past.” “Worthless” names how he sees himself; “cannot” makes nostalgia into a locked door.

The cruel comfort of fate

The refrain returns: the sagging house, the long-dead dog, and the line that seems to comfort him precisely because it is hopelessly definitive: “I’m fated to die with compassions / in the crooked streets of Moscow.” The phrase “die with compassions” is the poem’s strangest knot. It suggests that what will kill him is not only drink or city life, but a tenderness he can’t turn off in a world that turns tenderness into pain. In that sense, the poem’s deepest contradiction is that the speaker condemns himself as “worthless” while also presenting himself as someone doomed by an excess of feeling. He can’t go back, but he also can’t stop caring about what he left behind.

If it’s truly “settled,” why does the poem need to say it twice? The repeated home-and-dog refrain feels like a self-administered punishment: he keeps dragging the image of collapse in front of himself, as if to prove he has paid for leaving. The poem won’t let him become a clean city sinner or a clean country exile. He remains caught between admiration and disgust, pleasure and shame, and the unanswerable desire to hear those poplars “ring and rustle” one more time.