Loneliness in Ndrek Gjini’s “The Refrain of a Pensioner” is not an empty state but a quiet ceremony. The poem follows a retired man through the small, repeated actions of his day: sitting on a bench, breathing the green air of a park, drinking light, rising, and walking toward evening. On the surface this is a snapshot of old age. Underneath, it turns a daily walk into a slow approach to the final night, where death may either keep waiting or take him for good.
From the first stanza, the imagery makes the man a receiver of the world’s nourishment rather than a figure of complaint. He is “lonesome,” yet his loneliness is filled with sensation. The phrase “green air” fuses breath and colour, as if the park itself is entering his lungs, while “the milk of light” makes sunlight something drinkable and almost maternal. The verb “drinks” suggests dependency, but also a kind of innocence: the pensioner, at the end of life, is once again feeding on simple things. The word “idly” matters too, because it frees his actions from usefulness. This is not a walk to buy something or meet someone; it is a ritual that exists for its own sake.
In the second stanza, the poem becomes stranger and more inward. When the man rises, he “puts the path, / as a fiction book, in his pocket.” The path, a real strip of ground, is transformed into a story he can carry. That image suggests memory and imagination have grown as important as the walk itself; he owns the journey as one owns a favourite narrative. The destination is “the gate of twilight,” a threshold rather than a place. Beyond it lies “white-dream night,” a phrase that blends blankness and vision. It could mean sleep, death, or the pale clarity of old age—perhaps all three at once. The gate is not crossed quickly; it lies ahead, as if the whole day is spent approaching it.
The final stanza gives the poem its title’s refrain. “Every day he repeats this journey” compresses the man’s life into one recurring movement, like a chorus returning after each verse. The most surprising phrase is “without betraying the day, air or wind.” Loyalty, not endurance, becomes the central virtue. The man keeps faith with nature and with each ordinary day, even though his route never changes. Then the poem turns on two opposed possibilities: either “the twilight runs away from him” or “the night locks him in forever.” The personification of twilight running away suggests death eluding him, leaving him to repeat the walk another time. The locked night suggests enclosure, finality, perhaps even a gentle imprisonment. By holding both possibilities open, Gjini refuses to make old age simply tragic or simply peaceful.
The poem’s significance lies in the dignity it gives to a figure easily overlooked. The three stanzas are unrhymed, but the poem does not feel loose; its lines move with a slow, walking rhythm, and the title’s idea of a refrain is carried by repeated sentence shapes and the return to the same journey. The tender verbs of receiving and keeping, the path folded away like a book, and the open gate of twilight all make the pensioner’s routine feel less like emptiness than like a song with one quiet, unresolved last note.