Katherine Mansfield’s speaker feels cut off from someone she loves by an invisible distance. She stands on one side of a gulf of silence; the other person is on the far side. She cannot see or hear them, but she knows they are there. The loss is so intimate that she calls out a childish nickname and pretends the echo is their voice coming back.
The mood is lonely at first, almost grief-stricken. She admits that speech and touch cannot close this gap. She once thought they might fill it with tears, but that would only deepen the sorrow. Then the feeling turns. She wants to shatter the silence with their shared laughter. It’s a shift from despair to a fragile, defiant hope—joy might succeed where crying and words have failed.