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The poet places before us a volley of questions, unadorned, without a locating context. They seem at first to be mere fragments of the inner life. However, if we come closer to the text, as Valery suggests, we realise that this self-questioning of the poet creates an active and dynamic imaginative world of its own, that the poem does have a perfectly rounded inner and outer form.

Here, as in the previous poem, the poet begins by focussing his entire attention on a single sound-in this case, the sound of distant footsteps. The course of the poem dramatically enacts their advance until, in the last line, they would "seem" to be beside the speaker. This exterior movement of the poem is matched by an inner movement. The speaker is unable to ascribe the footsteps of the first line to any known source. He looks within himself for the answer, examining his life. And with this successive self-questioning of the second and third lines some sort of realisation appears to dawn in his mind as to their true identity The intensity of this gradual discovery is magnificently conveyed in the half-formulated:

For whom is my life?
and its fully articulated counterpart:
For whom is my life all eagerness?

At this stage the approaching nearness of the footsteps themselves intrudes upon the speaker's enquiry and his involuntary cry of "Ah" is a response of mingled surprise and ecstasy. This sudden convergence of inner and outer reality compels the speaker to seize the knowledge he seeks. In a flash he realises that it is his Beloved Lord who has come so near and the last line of the poem quivers on the point of meeting between them. Indeed, to some extent, it halfway anticipates this meeting and the poem closes with a quiet reversal of status from the actual to the imagined.