A poem called «nothing» sounds like a poem with nothing to say, and that is part of its trick. The speaker addresses someone facing "things you have / Absolutely no control Over" and offers a single idea: everything ends. Pain will pass, but the same rule applies to "happiness" and even to "us". The comfort is real, but it comes at a price, and the poem never pretends otherwise.
The title does a lot of work. Set in lowercase and quotation marks, it looks like a word someone has said aloud, perhaps the answer you give when asked what's wrong. That is my inference, but the poem supports it, because "nothing" then returns in line four, "Nothing lasts forever", and changes meaning. A brush-off becomes a law of the universe. The word also drives the grammar of the ending. "Nor" can only follow a negative, so the "Nothing" of line four reaches forward into "Nor us / Nor happiness / Nor pain", and the whole closing sequence hangs from that one word.
The poem has no punctuation at all, and capital letters appear in odd places: "Over But", "Nothing". They seem to mark where a thought restarts, so the poem reads like someone thinking aloud and correcting course. "Sometimes yes it is hard to deal" begins with a concession, as if answering a friend who has just admitted how bad things are. The speaker agrees first and consoles second. The line break after "deal" also leaves the verb hanging before "With" arrives, which neatly acts out the struggle it describes.
The rhythm is loose and speech-like, with no rhyme scheme, but the line lengths still shape the feeling. Lines three and four sprawl, with "Absolutely no control Over But" and "It will get over Nothing lasts forever" running on without a pause for breath. That crowded, unpunctuated stretch feels like being overwhelmed. Then the poem collapses into fragments of two or three syllables. After all that sprawl, the short lines land as plain statements.
Sound and wordplay carry more weight than imagery here. There are no pictures of storms or seasons, and the "things" in line two are left deliberately vague, so any reader can fill the gap with their own trouble. Instead, the poem plays on one small word. "Over" appears first as a preposition, the things you have no control "Over", and then as a verb, "It will get over". The first sense is about helplessness, the second about relief, and the poem moves from one to the other. The idiom is also reversed. We normally say that *you* get over something, which puts the burden on the sufferer. Here "It will get over", so the trouble itself does the leaving. Then "forever" echoes the same "-ver" sound, so "over", "over" and "forever" chime like a small refrain.
The ending repeats "Nor" three times, a pattern of repeated openings that builds a rhythm of its own where rhyme is absent. The pronouns also shift. Until then the speaker says "you", at a slight distance, but "us" pulls the speaker into the same fate, so the advice becomes solidarity. The order of the list matters too. "Happiness" sits in the middle, flanked by "us" and "pain", and the poem ends on pain, so the last thing we hear is that suffering will end. Yet the line before it takes away what we would most like to keep. The consolation and the loss arrive together.
That balance is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not say things will get better, only that they will pass, and it accepts that this is a thin comfort because it applies to good things too. Its unpolished surface, with no punctuation and a few stray capitals, suits that honesty, since it sounds like a real thought rather than a finished piece of advice. For students, it shows how much a short poem can do with one repeated word, a shifting pronoun and a pun on "over", without any elaborate imagery.