Emptying is a short poem about what remains after intense feeling is gone. It moves through three small statements, each a step further down.
The first sets a cold, abstract tone: in some "mathematical vision," we get ahead by looking for a void. Emptiness becomes a goal, almost a solution to an equation. The second lines are warmer and more human. Sudden pleasures and sharp pains, given enough time, "turn into art." Experience is not lost but changed, though the phrase "after a time" hints that it costs something to get there.
The last lines are the bleakest. At the "burial of lust," who could avoid being ash? Desire is imagined as something laid to rest, and the mourner is already dust too.
The speaker sounds calm, reflective, and a little resigned. The mood is quiet and elegiac. The poem seems to suggest that emptiness is both what we lose and what we make art from, and it leaves that thought without comfort or complaint.