Robert Kern's "This" withholds the one thing a reader most wants: what "this" actually is. Six short lines circle a belief about the world, and the belief never appears. We learn only how it behaves. It lacks support ("The world provides no evidence of this"), it is stubbornly personal ("my sense of things"), and it cuts two ways at once: "This is driving me crazy. / This also keeps me sane." The poem is about the strange position of holding a conviction you can neither prove nor give up.
The title and the repeated word do most of the work. "This" is a pointing word, and pointing only means something if there is an object to point at. Here the finger keeps jabbing at empty air. That makes the poem a kind of blank form. A reader who thinks of religious faith, a hope for another person, or a private idea of who they are will find that the poem fits each of them equally well. The speaker's secrecy is not coyness. The poem is about the shape of believing, not any one belief.
That shape comes through in the grammar. In the first two lines, "this" is an object: "I think this," "evidence of this." The speaker is in charge, holding the belief out for inspection. By line three it becomes a subject ("this is my sense of things"), and by the last two lines it fully takes over: "This is driving me crazy," "This also keeps me sane." The speaker shrinks to "me," the thing being driven and kept. A belief that began as something thought has become something that acts on its thinker, and the poem never announces that shift.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter, and it sounds like speech, almost like someone talking to a doctor or to themselves. Line lengths still do quiet work. The second line is the longest, stretching out with its measured, almost legalistic phrase "provides no evidence," as though the world's case against the belief deserves a full hearing. After that the lines contract. The question "Must I discard this?" is the shortest line in the poem, and it is the only question. Nobody answers it. The lines that follow do not reply but pile up a second, contradictory fact, so the poem ends in tension, not in a decision.
The vocabulary is also worth slowing down for. "Evidence" belongs to courtrooms and laboratories, while "sense of things" belongs to intuition and mood. The poem sets these two kinds of knowing against each other without ruling between them. "Discard" is an odd choice, because it treats a belief like a card in a hand or an old object in a drawer, something you could simply throw away if you were sensible. The question's slightly pleading "Must I" shows how little the belief behaves like an object. Then comes the ending, where "crazy" and "sane" sit as opposites, and the sound of "sense" in line three seems to echo forward into "sane," as if the speaker's sanity were built out of that sense of things. The small word "also" matters too. The speaker does not say "but this keeps me sane." Line three has already used "But" for the clash with evidence. "Also" simply lets the two truths stand side by side, and the speaker accepts the contradiction without resolving it.
There is almost no imagery in the usual sense, no pictures of weather, rooms or landscapes. The poem's only image is the abstract one of the world as a witness that fails to testify. That bareness suits it. By refusing to decorate, the poem keeps attention on the mental experience, which is the uneasy comfort of a belief that costs something to keep.
The poem is significant because it names a feeling most people recognize but rarely admit: that some of the ideas holding us together are ones we could not defend in an argument. It does so in about thirty words and avoids both defending the belief and mocking it. The final line leaves the reader where the speaker stands, unable to discard "this" and unable to say what it is.