Mansions & sublets

a look at one of Léonie Adams's shortest & most inscrutable poems

This is a breakup poem.

It starts in the afterlife.

Of course, you have to have read The Fourth Dimension by C Howard Hinton (1912).

This explains the 5^th & 6^th lines. (He more or less wants to explain away all the Other Places of religion & legend as existing physically but on a “higher” dimension of space.)

Line 7 refers to John 14:2-- “In my Father’s house are many mansions” (KJV).

The next line, however, pictures rather a Classical pagan afterlife as in Homer & Virgil.

So the newly-perished soul plunges (evaporates, flies, walks) through a social, material, metaphysical, Christian & pagan series of deaths, or bardos maybe; & maybe all of them equally illusory.

Somehow this makes me think of a Remedios Varo painting.

She arrives with the 9^th line: the poet is still alive (still obsessively writing a breakup poem); let loose (freed) from its heartbreak & infatuation to wander the earth—

Which, in the 10^th line, is all that can be owned, not any thing or any person in it.

The skin, not touched anymore, has the final word.