The title promises a sound, and the last line takes it away. "The sound of suffering" turns out to be a sound nobody else can hear: the speaker's body is in turmoil, yet "I don't make a sound." That gap between what is felt and what is voiced is the poem's central idea. Hawthrone gives us grief with the volume turned down in the outside world and turned up inside the skull, where the only noise is "Blood rushing my ears."
The poem never says what has been lost. The speaker mourns "what was mine," and that is all we get. It might be a person, a place or an earlier version of the self, and the poem refuses to choose. This vagueness works in its favour. Instead of explaining the loss, the poem shows what it does to a body, which makes the feeling easier for any reader to recognise.
The body is treated roughly. Agitation "climbs the rungs of my spine," which turns the backbone into a ladder, each vertebra a rung, and makes an abstract feeling rise physically, one step at a time. A ladder usually suggests a way out or up, but here the climb seems to end in the pressure of the final lines, the pounding in the ears. Then the limbs give way. The legs are "twisted in all angles," and "knees and elbows bend," the very places where a body folds. The phrase "over time" can mean a slow collapse or simply bending as the hours pass, and either way the speaker is curling in on themselves. By the fourth line they are low enough to "dig my nails in the ground," clutching at something solid. The verb *dig* also carries a faint echo of burial, which suits a poem about mourning. The movement of the poem is downward, from spine to legs to earth.
The form follows the same shrinking. Counting syllables, the lines fall from ten in the first line to five in the sixth, and the last four lines are almost entirely short, plain words. There is no regular metre, so the rhythm feels more like laboured breathing than song. The rhyme is just as uneven. Lines one, three and five end on "spine," "time" and "mine," so the body, the passing of time and the loss are bound together by a single sound. Lines four and seven close on "ground" and "sound," and this second rhyme is the cleverest move in the poem. It places "sound" at the very end, the word the title promised, in a sentence that denies it. The speaker stays silent, but the poem itself makes a noise through its rhyme. Lines two and six, "angles" and "ears," are left without a partner, as if they were the parts of the body that cannot be tidied up.
The grammar also breaks down. "Dig my nails in the ground" has lost its subject, as though the "I" were too overwhelmed to be named. The poem uses no punctuation at all, so it never reaches a full stop and ends on "sound" without any sense of resolution. Suffering here does not finish its sentence. The repeated "As" in "As I mourn what was mine" and "As I don't make a sound" ties the two actions together. The second "As" can mean "while," so that the grieving and the silence happen at once, or something close to "because," as though the silence were part of the grief itself.
The poem is only seven lines long, yet it captures something familiar: pain can be total and still invisible. A person can look perfectly quiet from the outside while everything inside is climbing, twisting and roaring. The poem also shows how form can act out its meaning, through shrinking lines, a missing subject and a rhyme that sounds out the word the speaker cannot say. Because the reader hears the sound the speaker will not make, the poem ends by making silence audible.