The speaker dies in the first line, yet the poem is not really about dying. It is about being asked a question and finding that no honest answer will hold still. Someone, the "you" of a letter, has claimed that the years from eighteen to twenty-two matter most in anyone's life. The speaker, who thinks she should take stock "at the last," goes looking for what she did with those years. What she finds is one blunt, ungrammatical sentence: "I know what I waited."
That missing "for" carries a lot. We expect "waited for" something, but the verb is left with no object, and the waiting becomes the whole content of those years. The poem then makes the idea sound physical: "under water and breathing blood." This is drowning, and it is also an odd kind of survival, since the speaker is breathing the very thing that should kill her. Then comes the flat, almost stubborn repetition: "it was like waiting / it was like waiting." She has no better simile, and the second line adds nothing to the first. That absence of progress is the point.
The opening image works the same way, only larger. After death, the speaker's pieces scatter "through / the sharp curve of sky" and come to rest "on / their own hesitations." Fragments land on hesitations, not on the ground, so even the scattered self settles into indecision. The line break after "on" leaves the word hanging, and the poem keeps enacting what it describes. "Restlessness" and "waiting" look like opposites, but the poem treats them as one condition: a mind in constant motion with nowhere to go.
The poem's form supports this. It is free verse, with no rhyme, no capital letters and almost no punctuation. Two parentheses are opened and never closed, one after "restlessness" and one after "since I should think." The thoughts they hold simply run out, as if the speaker could not find the end of her own sentence. Elsewhere the syntax is ambiguous on purpose. "Peace mockery" sits beside "the hope of a sometime" with nothing joining them. A reader has to decide whether the hope of peace is a mockery or whether peace itself is. The mockery is "as cheerful as the laughing girl at Playland." The name suggests an amusement park, and judging by the image, a fairground figure with a fixed grin. It is a sharp comparison: a bright, mechanical laugh that has nothing to do with how anyone feels.
The most unsettling passage is the spiderweb. "I can't tell you the dead // see themselves suspended" can be read two ways. She may be unable to tell us about the dead at all, or unable to tell us that they see themselves this way. Both readings leave her knowledge in doubt. The dead hang "caught between," and the poem stops there, with no second term to complete "between." Then comes the line that denies any comfort: "they do not touch back again." Contact is no longer mutual. The dead may be seen, but they cannot answer.
The ending turns toward the living. "You must ask me another night," she says, "when you have begun to live a second time." Then she will give "a third answer / to what is after all only one question." The arithmetic is odd. We have had one answer, about waiting, and a second is implied, so the "third" suggests a series of replies that never settles. The question stays the same while the answers change with the person asking, and the asker's own life seems to shape what can be said. Meaning is not stored somewhere waiting to be reported. It changes as the one looking back changes.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It would be easy to write a ghostly speaker who delivers the secrets of death, and this one refuses. She offers hesitation, a half-finished thought, and an honest "I can't tell you." The title, "Letter Seven," suggests one piece of a longer exchange, though the text alone does not settle that. Either way, the voice reads like someone writing back across a gap that neither side can fully cross. It leaves us with a difficult idea, that looking back on a life may show mostly waiting, and that no single answer will ever be final.