Lines 1-2

The first two lines of “Kindness” establish a premise that runs throughout the poem: Before a person knows one thing, he or she must know something else. (The “you” in this work refers simply to the universal “you,” or people in general, not to a specific person.) In this case, the real meaning of kindness, which seems easy to understand, is shown to be more complex than one may realize. The speaker suggests, ironically, that to “know what kindness really is,” first “you must lose things.”

Lines 3-4

Instead of explaining what the opening lines mean right away, the speaker relies on an intriguing metaphor to make the point. (A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares an intended concept or thing to something unrelated as a way to clarify the original intention.) The speaker wants to describe how the future can “dissolve in a...