Three tercets, no capital letters, not a single full stop: "Goth" reads like something muttered in the dark rather than composed at a desk. The title does a lot of the work. It names a stance as much as a subculture, a love of night and a contempt for everything bright and ordinary. The poem then lets that stance run into some awkward, funny, and oddly tender contradictions.
It begins with a damnation that has lost its subject: "going to burn." There is no "I", as if the sentence were a shrug or a fate. Then the expected hellfire shrinks to "the burnyard", a plain, practical word for a place where rubbish is burned. The grandest Gothic threat is moved to the back of a farm. The third line, "a dog would save me", deflates the drama again, and it also holds some real feeling. The rescuer is not an angel but an animal, loyal and unglamorous. Readers may also notice that "dog" is "god" spelled backwards. The poem never says so, but the reversal suits a speaker who is turning the sacred upside down.
The second stanza is the poem's sharpest. "Worse than my last / night's mouth" breaks across the line so that "last" hangs for a moment as a final thing before "night's" arrives. The "mouth" is probably the foul taste of a bad night, though it could equally be what was said in it. Something is worse than that, and the grammar leaves it open until the long line that follows: "the corn-ordinary world I scorn." The hyphenated compound sounds like slang coined on the spot, squeezing "corny" and "ordinary" into one adjective. Then comes the best trick in the poem: "scorn" contains "corn". The speaker's contempt is made out of the very thing he despises, so he cannot reject the ordinary world without carrying it inside his own vocabulary. Judging by the imagery of burnyard, corn and dog, the setting is rural. A goth pose in a place with no cathedrals or graveyards, only fields and bonfires, is a tension the poem seems to enjoy.
The final stanza turns from rejection to desire. "Being infinite as / my desire of seeing" is deliberately slippery. It could mean the world is endless, or the scorn is, or the speaker's wanting is. The word "infinite" also echoes the repeated "in" of "in the burnyard" and "in and with the night," so a small syllable keeps returning like a pulse. The last line is the most interesting. To see "in and with the night" is not to see despite the darkness but by means of it, as if night were both a place and an instrument. That makes the goth stance less about gloom than about appetite. The speaker doesn't want to disappear into darkness. He wants to look harder.
The poem's shape supports this. The first stanza uses short lines, and the second ends with a long, heavy one. The third settles into lines of nearly equal length, which feels like a steadier, more open breath. There is no end punctuation, so the poem trails off instead of closing, which suits a desire called infinite. Nothing rhymes in the formal sense, but the sound is carefully packed. The dark, closed vowels of "burn," "worse," "mouth," "scorn" and "night" feel chewed. "Burn" is repeated and then folded inside "burnyard," so the word seems to catch fire on the second pass. Together with "corn" and "scorn," these echoes give the poem a tight sonic texture despite its looseness on the page.
What makes "Goth" worth reading is its tone. It takes a pose seriously enough to give it real language, such as damnation, bad mouths, endless desire and the night as a way of seeing. It also lets the pose be a little ridiculous, with its burnyard, its rescuing dog and its scorn that can't escape the corn. The poem is neither mocking nor purely sincere, and that balance is what makes it feel honest. For students, it is a useful example of how much can happen in thirty or so words, through ambiguity, enjambment and a single well-placed hidden word.