Town

The town symbolizes tension between beauty and melancholy. The narrator acknowledges certain aspects of humble, quiet beauty in the town, but he ultimately seems to assert that such beauty is overridden by an essence of listlessness and dereliction.

House

The narrator’s house symbolizes isolation and loneliness. The narrator’s only consistent company in the house is his cat, and he generally spends his time in the house writing and struggling with his sense of sadness and isolation.

Nature

Nature symbolizes the uneasy position of modern humanity in relation to more long-term natural phenomena. The narrator views nature as an essential part of the human experiences, and thus he views many modern developments as having the effect of creating barriers to nature.

Politics and Poetry

Politics and poetry symbolize the narrator’s struggle to unite literary beauty with the cruelty and ugliness of the world. The...