At first it seems like the reader is stepping into a lighthearted, almost jokey poem. The kind that steps out of parlor rooms where guests and hosts drink and laugh together, but that isn’t the case, you realize as you read through it and realize that there’s no guests here, no joking or laughter. Only loneliness. The narrator is embracing themselves, longing for the company of another. The embrace isn’t real, it’s a façade. “And from the back it looks like someone is embracing you…from the front it is another story. You never looked so alone.”
The image you get from reading the piece is one which is comically painful. The image of a man standing alone in a room, arms crossed around himself with a “screwy grin”. The image of a man condemned by madness. You can picture him alone, or with a group laughing people, but either way the same feeling is accomplished. No matter how many people are there, he is ultimately alone and trapped in his own embrace, not the embrace he longs for.
There is only one main image presented by the author of the poem, but even with that one image he manages to transition it from lighthearted and funny—what we traditionally think of when we envision that motion of kissing oneself—to the image of a man in a straightjacket, locked up and smiling with his arms wrapped around himself. This transition flows with the emotions of the ‘character’ in the poem, the one who’s holding himself tight. At first it’s a joke, a motion to make people laugh and to be entertaining. Then it transitions to that view of the front, the absurd motions and face, the comparison to being crazy, to the need of a straightjacket and the whole mood shifts in just a single extra line break, a new camera angle which changes the entire perspective of both reader and writer.
The images set the lonely tone, and the change from lighthearted to a more disturbing one creates a juxtaposition which strengthens both sides. The man embracing seems happy; the man in the straightjacket is crazy with longing. The images offset and work with each other at the same time in a way that works with the entire feeling of the poem and the author and what they are trying to say about the ways in which people mask how they are really feeling. When you fake an embrace it is to make people laugh, to seem careless as though you couldn’t care either way, but turn the camera and you’ll see another story; that of the man who must embrace only himself.
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