Somewhere in the middle of "The Shoe," the speaker falls asleep, and the poem doesn't tell us where. He asks it himself: "When do I fall asleep?" That single line is a hinge on which reality swings into dream. Before it, the scene is plain: someone typing late at night, worried he is "disturbing everyone," when a shoe comes in the window. After it, nothing obeys ordinary logic, yet everything is narrated in the same flat, reasonable voice.
That calm is the poem's main comic engine. A shoe that "seems to be / smiling at me" is greeted with "I'll keep it," as if it were a perfectly normal piece of luck. The speaker's guilt about the typing returns in dream form. The police arrive, he is "accused of disturbing / the peace," and he holds up the shoe "as evidence" and demands, "what is the meaning of this?" The question sounds like a complaint to the universe, and it also hints at what a poet might ask of any odd object that turns up in his work. One neighbor "goes insane / with rage," a reaction wildly out of scale with a little typing. The speaker then narrates his own fate in uncertain questions, "Is there a fight? Am I knocked cold?", like a dreamer who cannot yet see the next scene.
He wakes "in Vladivostok," in a cell, with birds singing outside. The place name is a gift: a distant port at the far edge of Russia, exotic and faintly ridiculous, as arbitrary as dream geography tends to be. Then comes a deadpan sentence, "Years pass," and the form changes. The short, breathing lines give way to one dense block of prose, and the fantasy rushes forward without a pause. The speaker has become "one of the best poets in Vladivostok," a sly qualifier, praised for his "lilting rhythms." The poem itself has no such lilt. It is unrhymed free verse built from short, plain statements, so the dream-poet's reputation is a joke the real poem is in on.
The fantasy inflates by the logic of wish-fulfilment. First the intellectuals clamor, then "the masses join in," and soon the cheering is "picked up by sensitive instruments on the moon." The government falls out of shame, and its ministers "strip off their clothes, make full confessions" and are "skewered, skinned and stuffed," a run of hard, clipped sounds, before they "gratefully" accept their fate. The violence is cartoonish, and the ministers' politeness about it is the point. The daydream mocks a writer who imagines himself so important that power must kneel and kiss his feet. Even the venue, the "National Soccer Palladium," sounds like a grand name slightly mangled, as things do in dreams.
Yet the triumph feels hollow, and the poem turns on a small word: "But I have only one shoe." After toppling a state, the speaker wants something much smaller, a partner for the dance. The girl with the matching shoe produces the poem's only exclamation mark, "It is the very mate of mine!" It is the most sincere moment in the piece, and it is delivered as a joke about footwear.
The ending reverses everything. The speaker wakes to "shoe-like weeping," an odd, exact phrase, and finds the shoe on the sill "dreaming of Vladivostok." The smile from the opening has become tears, and we cannot be sure whose dream we have just read. It may be the speaker's, or the shoe's, or the loneliness of both blended together. Judging by the imagery, the shoe works as a double for the poet. Both are single, unmatched objects sent out into the night in the hope that a mate, a reader, or an answer exists somewhere.
The poem is significant because it lets absurdity do serious work. It is funny about literary vanity: the fantasy of reviews, fame, and revolution brought on by a little typing. Underneath that, it is tender about the wish to be recognized and completed by someone else. By the end, the revolution matters far less than the missing shoe.