Emptiness
Emptiness - meaning Summary
Emptiness as Kept Companion
The poem describes a speaker’s persistent inner emptiness and the ways he tries—and often fails—to disguise or transmute it into writing or social costume. He admits hiding the void until it grows large, then considers confessing it to the right person. A quiet recognition occurs between him and a woman who also conceals her own inner world. The poem ends on his surprising attachment to that emptiness and reluctance to release it.
Read Complete AnalysesI've learned mine can't be filled, only alchemized. Many times it's become a paragraph or a page. But usually I've hidden it, not knowing until too late how enormous it grows in its dark. Or how obvious it gets when I've donned, say, my good cordovans and my fine tweed vest and walked into a room with a smile. I might as well have been a man with a fez and a faux silver cane. Better, I know now, to dress it plain, to say out loud to some right person in some right place that there's something not there in me, something I can't name. That some right person has just lit a fire under the kettle. She hasn't said a word. Beneath her blue shawl she, too, conceals a world. But she's been amazed how much I seem to need my emptiness, amazed I won't let it go.
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