The poem explores themes of patience, self-control, and the struggle to manage desires. Through a meticulously structured sonnet, the speaker outlines a careful approach to life, storing pleasures metaphorically like honey and bread for later consumption. Yet within this structured form, there simmers a sense of unruly passion and frustration with the waiting. The speaker expresses a deep hunger and incompleteness while navigating the trials of life, ultimately conveying an emotional tension between restraint and longing, culminating in a hope for eventual resurrection and enjoyment of life's simple joys again.
I hold my honey and I store my bread in little jars and cabinets of my will. I label clearly, and each latch and lid I bid, be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete. And none can tell when I may dine again. No man can give me any word but Wait, the puny light.
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt drag out to their last dregs and I resume, on such legs as are left me, in such heart as I can manage.
My taste will not have turned insensitive to honey and bread old purity could love.
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