Three short lines, and the speaker cannot even say where they are. "Somewhere, I lie in between" is a vague start for a poem about not knowing. What the speaker is caught between turns up only in the next two lines: a life that keeps them "in the dark" and a self that does the same. The central idea is that darkness has two sources, one outside and one inside, and the speaker cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.
The poem is called "Darkness," but the word never appears in the text. What we get is the idiom "in the dark," which works on two levels. It can mean literal blackness, and it can mean ignorance, as in being kept in the dark about a secret. The poem leans on the second meaning without ever saying what the secret is. There is no object of knowledge, no hint of what the speaker fails to see. That emptiness works in the poem's favour, because readers fill it with their own uncertainty, whether about the future, a relationship, or themselves. The idiom also suggests that someone holds information and refuses to share it. Life is cast as that someone, a withholder with its own hidden agenda.
The grammar is built with care. The phrase "in between" sits at the end of line one, and the reader has to cross a line break to find out between what. "Between" also expects an "and" to complete it, and that "and" arrives only at the very end of line two, hanging there as a weak, unstressed last word. The sentence is stretched across the page and left in suspension, which is exactly where the speaker lies. The poem has no rhyme and no strict meter. The lines run about seven, eight and eight syllables, close enough in length to give the voice a flat, even tone, like someone stating a fact without drama.
The real engine of the poem is the mirror between lines two and three. "Life keeping me in the dark" becomes "Me keeping myself in the dark," with the same verb and the same ending. The repeated "keeping" is worth a look. It is a jailer's verb, but it is also what a keeper does when guarding or protecting something, so the poem leaves open the idea that the self-imposed darkness might be a kind of shelter. That is an inference, but the word makes it possible.
The pronouns matter too. The speaker says "Me," not "I," which sounds more informal and less in command. Grammatically, "me" is the word for the person things are done to, yet here the speaker is also the one doing the keeping. The doubling of "me" and "myself" splits one person into keeper and kept. Because line three repeats the shape and ending of line two, the poem loops. Moving from the first cause of darkness to the second does not lead anywhere new, only to the same dark again.
Even the verb "lie" carries a second possibility. Most obviously it means lying down, a passive posture that suggests resting, waiting or giving up. But a reader can also hear the other "lie," the untruth, and in a poem about a self that hides things from itself, that echo is hard to ignore. It is only one possible reading, but it fits.
The poem's only full stop comes after "dark," a short, hard word that closes the poem like a door. After the drifting vagueness of "Somewhere" and the dangling "and," the ending feels final and gives no promise of light.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It refuses the easy story in which the world is to blame, and it refuses the equally easy story in which the speaker is entirely at fault. The speaker sits in the uncomfortable middle, and it is not a comfortable middle at all, because neither side offers light. Anyone who has avoided a hard truth while also being genuinely unsure of it will recognise this double bind. The structure also hints at a quiet question the poem never asks aloud. If the self is one of the two keepers, then it is the one keeper the speaker might actually be able to persuade to open the door.