The speaker longs for a world emptied of a particular person, a world so unlike her current one that memory could not follow her there. She imagines becoming someone else, someone who could read or mend or plant bulbs without being ambushed by thoughts of this lost love. The repeated wish, though, is already shadowed by the title: it is in vain. She knows that no matter how different the world might be, some small sensory detail would find her—like the smell of white yarrow flowers in a wet August field—and bring the old pain crashing back. The poem’s mood is quiet but intense, caught between the desire for numbness and the certainty that grief lives in ordinary things. It leaves the reader with a sense of inescapable memory and a heart torn out by something as fragile as a flower.
In Vain — Summary
Oh, for a world empty of you, Quite bare of anything. With any likeness to the old. For wild remembering!
A world so wholly different, I would be different too. And read, or mend, or plant the bulbs, Without a thought of you.
But this can never be at all; Some small thing thereabout Would bring that same hurt back again, And tear my wild heart out.
Perhaps the smell of yarrow flowers, Of yarrow flowers set In a lost field. White: yarrow flowers. Out in the August wet.