Dave Bonta's short poem pictures a man alone and afraid, compared to a castle keep, the strongest, innermost tower of a fortress. He is solid and defended, but also "still with fear," so the stillness reads less as calm than as a kind of freezing. The image suggests someone who has built walls around himself and is now trapped behind them.
The middle lines turn to a question: will love find him "in a lie"? He seems afraid of being discovered, or of love arriving and catching him pretending. The ending is tangled and hard to pin down. The idea that it was "the same outside / as with a lock and a state" seems to link being shut in with being shut out, as if freedom and confinement feel alike to him. The title, "Of human bondage," backs this up, hinting that the prison here is emotional.
The mood is guarded, tense and uneasy, with a sense of longing held back by fear.