Lloyd Addison's "The Wait" is about waiting for love and what waiting does to a person. The speaker begins by telling us to wait for a girl who has been "lately loved," someone fate seems to want as badly as the speaker does. Then the poem plays with the word itself: waiting "hastens" fate, a neat contradiction, and "wait" echoes against "weights," as if patience were a heavy load.
The language gets tangled and fragmented in the middle, which suits the speaker's unsettled feelings. Images of thunder, lightning, rain and night suggest a sudden, overwhelming emotion that is also lonely. The line "but two have come too late" hints at a missed chance, though the poem doesn't say exactly why.
By the end, time feels like "a space without entrance," an island drifting away. Yet the last lines turn quietly hopeful: "lonesome love has come to visit." The mood is yearning and reflective, with loneliness slowly giving way to arrival.