William Carlos Williams

The Gentle Man

The Gentle Man - meaning Summary

Private, Quiet Compassion

A brief, intimate scene: the speaker notices the self-touch of fastening a collar and, in that small motion, admits a pitying thought toward the kind women he has known. The poem compresses bodily detail and emotional distance, suggesting loneliness, remorse, or a constrained tenderness. Its quiet, domestic action becomes a moment of self-awareness in which personal habit triggers a moral or emotional judgment about past relationships.

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I feel the caress of my own fingers on my own neck as I place my collar and think pityingly of the kind women I have known.

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