A shadow is the one companion who never leaves your side in daylight, and this short poem turns that fact into a quiet portrait of loneliness. On the surface, "My shadow" is a catalogue of what shadows do: they walk behind us, copy our height and size, and vanish at night. Underneath, the speaker seems to be describing the only listener they have. The shadow hears everything ("As I talk, / Listening") and judges nothing ("Never, / Commenting"). That sounds like the perfect friend until you notice it never replies either. The central idea is that company without a reply is a form of solitude, and that when other people are absent, the speaker's own double is what remains.
The construction is unusually disciplined. There are eight quatrains, and each follows the same recipe: a short phrase naming a thing or a moment ("Behind me," "My height," "At night"), an -ing word, a small qualifier, and a second -ing word to close. Walking and syncing, listening and commenting, mimicking and copying: the poem keeps returning to the same grammatical ending. Most of the shadow's actions are participles, hanging from the speaker like the shadow itself. The shadow never gets a verb that can act alone. The only conjugated verbs belong to the speaker ("As I talk") and the sun ("the sun is / Shining"), the two things the shadow depends on. The grammar imitates its subject: attached, dependent, unable to move first.
There is no conventional end rhyme. The repeated -ing endings work as a rhyme of grammar instead, a steady drone that gives the lines a falling beat, like WALK-ing, SYNC-ing, FOL-low-ing, almost footsteps. The lines are very short, often one or two words, so you read in small stops and starts, and the monotony feels deliberate. Line breaks sometimes split a phrase just where it matters. "Only in, / Lighting" cuts the thought mid-step, as if the shadow itself were flickering at the edge of the light.
The imagery starts physical and then turns inward. The first three stanzas are about outlines: position, height, size. The fourth changes the register: "My eyes, / Crying, / It's circles, / Despairing." A silhouette cannot show tears, so the shadow can only cry by copying the speaker. The "circles" may also suggest the dark rings under tired eyes. That is an inference from the image, but it fits, since people carry a kind of shadow on their faces when they are exhausted. From here the shadow stops being a trick of light and becomes a mirror of feeling.
The next two stanzas build on the logic of light and dark. The shadow exists "Only in / Lighting," while "the sun is / Shining," and at night it is "Disappearing, / In darkness, / Leaving." The cruelty is that the shadow is present when the speaker is least in need of company and gone when the dark closes in. Then comes the poem's sharpest contradiction: "My twin, / Allying" sits beside "My stalker, / Following." The same behaviour, trailing the speaker everywhere, is named once as loyalty and once as menace, and the speaker cannot decide which it is.
The last stanza is the most ambiguous. "My heart, / Deserting, / Only, / Shadowing." Perhaps the speaker's heart has left, so that only a following remains. Perhaps "only" belongs to the final word, so that all the heart can do is trail behind. Either way, "shadowing" is the poem's last word, and it has slid from noun to verb to a description of a person's whole inner life. Elsewhere the absolutes "Always," "Never," and "Only" mark the speaker's world as one of extremes, with nothing in between.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. The subject is familiar and the frame is rigid, yet the repetition lets us feel what it is like to be accompanied by something that only echoes. The name it appears under, "Asta La Vista Baby," sounds like a farewell, and farewells are what the poem keeps circling: leaving, disappearing, deserting. It is a small poem, but it shows how restraint can carry real feeling.