In Place of a Dedication

"Midnight Verses" begins with a brief introductory piece that establishes the mood of the poem's speaker and puts readers in the mood for what is to follow. The first two lines concern the speaker's relationship to vast stretches of nature. Visually, readers are shown open vistas of the ocean's waves and entire forests, but not any individual person. In the second line, the relationship to the sky is an uneasy one: the sky is presented as being enamel, which gives a hard coating to cookware and pottery, while the speaker is said to be "sketched onto" it. The speaker is thus seen in the clear sky, but is not a part of the sky.

The last two lines of this introduction establish the emotional situation that the poem is to deal with: the difficulty of being separated from a lover, which is, though...