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The short, stabbing sentences, the constant downward inflection at the end of each one plunging it into gloom, together with the suppression of any connecting links between them, all mirror the emptiness and desolation of the speaker. Nothing in the poem suggests forward movement, flow, promise. Although the poet does not allow these grammatical elements of the poem to suffer a total collapse, we gain the unmistakable impression that it is only with great effort that the poem succeeds as intelligible utterance, so strong are the forces pulling the speaker towards final dissolution and lapse of consciousness. Taken together, these seven statements stand as a mechanical read-out of the psyche, responding to the unspoken standard questions concerning name, kin and place of address. The answers reveal the self alone, nameless and loveless. It is a condition characterised by unexpected contraries-such as "Barren of events/Rich in pretensions"and by paradox-"Obscurity/My real name." The speaker's world is wholly self-referential. He inhabits a void, a vivid blood-red thread in an otherwise empty space. A thread, by association, connects something to something. It is from the thread that the fabric is woven. Here the thread bridges Nothingness and Eternity-but there is no projection of the tapestry wholeness concomitant with the span of Eternity The slender thread, like a vein of blood, is suspended alone.

This representation of the self which despair has cast into utter isolation is paralleled in several poems by Emily Dickinson. For her, too, pain suggests itself as something spatial:

There is a pain-so utter
It swallows substance up?
Then covers the Abyss with Trance?[2]

And as something which induces a breakdown of the temporal sense:

Pain has an Element of Blank-?
It cannot recollect
When it begun-or if there were
A time when it was not-?

It has no Future-but itself?
Its Infinite contain
Its Past-enlightened to perceive
New Periods'of Pain.