Meeting - Analysis

A meeting that is also a confrontation

This poem stages a reunion as a kind of duel: two people stand Face to face, and everything in their speech insists that recognition brings not tenderness but threat. The central claim the poem makes is stark: time has not softened this relationship; it has merely disguised it. Even before anyone speaks, the figures are Hidden by old age and wrapped in a masker’s cloak and hood, as if age itself is a costume that both conceals and reveals. What emerges in conversation is not nostalgia, but the raw fact of mutual injury: Each hating what the other loved.

Old age as a disguise, not a reconciliation

The opening image matters because it complicates what we expect from a late-life encounter. The cloak and hood suggest carnival or performance, yet they’re also practical cover: anonymity, defensiveness, a refusal to be fully seen. In that light, the line Bodes me little good sounds less like superstition than self-protection: to meet this person again is to risk re-entering an old pattern. The poem’s atmosphere is tight and suspicious, with age functioning not as wisdom but as a temporary hiding place awhile—a word that hints the hiding cannot last.

Insults that are really confessions

The dialogue escalates quickly into a contest over shame. One speaker warns against boasting, then goes further: don’t even claim, he says, that such as I once had such a man / For lover. The insult is double-edged. It belittles the other as someone unworthy, but it also exposes a wound: the speaker is haunted by having loved him at all. When he declares, Of living men I hate him the most, the extremity reads like emotion trying to pass as principle. Hate here sounds like a way of keeping desire, regret, or humiliation from showing on the face.

The poem’s tension: disgust versus the memory of sweetness

The second speaker answers with rage and calls that past love a loony’d boast, as if to love the other would be evidence of madness. Yet the poem’s key contradiction is that both men keep returning to the idea of that love, unable to leave it unnamed. Even while they deny the relationship’s value, they treat it as dangerously memorable. The repeated phrasing such as he and such as me reduces both to types—class, reputation, moral category—suggesting that what they are socially has poisoned what they were privately.

The turn: imagining a truer language underneath the rags

The poem turns in its final movement, when the second speaker proposes a hypothetical: if they could discard / This beggarly habiliment, they might have found a sweeter word. This is the first moment in the poem that opens a door rather than slamming it. The insult-laden present is suddenly framed as a kind of enforced costume—beggarly not only in material terms but in emotional vocabulary. The tone shifts from contempt to a reluctant, almost intimate tenderness: the idea that the ugliness of their speech is not the whole truth, only the truth they can afford to speak while masked.

What if the masks are their morality?

The last lines raise a sharp possibility: perhaps the cloak and hood are not just age and poverty, but the identities that let them survive—pride, resentment, social rank, the need to win. If so, sweeter language is not unavailable because love was false, but because it demands exposure. The poem ends without reconciliation, yet it leaves a lingering ache: the sense that the harshest hatred here may be guarding the most complicated kind of knowledge—what they once called each other when no one was listening.