Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature. In this essay, he examines the ways that this poem implicitly talks about the problem of alienation, and the answers that it offers to the problem

Poetry can be powerfully, breathtakingly effective when it gives a clear and concrete vision of life. It can also, however, be simply too concrete sometimes, when the vision of the world that it offers is so tightly focused that readers can only recognize objects and events in the poem but cannot make meaning of them. And then there is the other extreme, the poem that is all about what goes on in the writer’s mind, filled with ideas that never quite relate to the physical world. When poetry goes wrong, it often means that the poet was unable to strike a workable balance between observation and meditation, between objectivity and...