How does Kevin Young use imagery in Chorale?

In the last lines of this poem, a true sense of the blues comes in. The speaker is lonely and sad, a typical theme of the blues. The running mate is not present. The speaker is left to ruminate about the past, as he looks around his room and notices only the spiders and the cobwebs. Spiders, like the tide, are part of nature, but there are few people who can think of spiders without feeling skittish. The image of spiders might have been chosen as a metaphor for the speaker's discomfort. Spiders in one's bed do not conjure up images of a good night's sleep. The presence of cobwebs indicates a space that has accumulated dust and dirt, a place that has not seen much movement. The untidy bed in what seems to be a close room not entered by anyone but the speaker might portray a sense of the speaker's depression. If spiders and cobwebs were not enough to make readers grasp the speaker's emotions, the last line of the poem makes matters clear. The spiders share the speaker's shivering bed. He might be pleading for some unknown person to share his lonely bed as well, but a shivering bed is not very inviting.