Assembled in 1862, at the height of the Civil War, from poems written at varying dates, this chapbook opens with a poem about reading a letter, and closes with a poem about encompassing despair. Both are, in one sense, instructional poems:
this is how to read a letter,
this is how to encompass despair.
The first, however, is intensely personal: "the way I read a letter's this…" the poet tells us, and then gives an exact and occasionally humorous blow-by-blow of how she locks the door, goes as far away from it as possible so she won't hear the interruption if anyone knocks, makes sure that nothing, not even a mouse, is in the room with her, and then, at the end, reads the letter, which she had hoped would bring happiness, the "Heaven" she still lacks.
The last poem, in contrast, is severe, general, and relentlessly abstract: the impersonal "No Man," who might or might not be a woman, toils around a circular "Goalless Road," "unconscious" of the distance, the diameter of the circle, or that the setting of the sun makes it impossible to see that the progress may be an interminable, hopeless, ignorant, pointless circling. Between the first and the last poem, the implied narrative and the symphonic changes of the chapbook take us from the personal to everything that destroys personal choice, and from the lively, hopeful, searching imagination, to a hopeless, meaningless, but still persistent quest.
go to "structure."