A man's mouth comes up like the sun, but at the wrong hour. That odd image opens "Vulgarian," a six-line portrait of someone we never see whole, only in pieces: first a mouth, then a hand. The poem is about the gap between a man's grandeur and his emptiness. Its central idea is that a pompous figure can be a target for suspicion and an object of pity at once.
The title sets up an expectation. A vulgarian is a person of coarse tastes, often one with money or status who flaunts it, and the word grows out of the Latin *vulgus*, "the common crowd." We expect someone loud and swaggering. What the poem delivers is smaller and sadder.
The first couplet does the work of a sunrise and a deflation together. "His mouth rose at noon" can be read two ways. Noon is when the sun is already at its peak, so this rising has nowhere left to climb. It might also hint at someone who gets up late and idles through the morning. Either way the grand image is slightly off. Then comes "a red sad thing," with no commas to separate the adjectives, so the description lands flat. "Red" suggests rawness, perhaps drink or anger, and "sad" takes the air out of it. Calling him a "thing" strips him of personhood, but the sadness keeps us from enjoying that too much.
The middle couplet is the poem's pivot. At eight syllables, "we should be the first to doubt him" is the longest line, and it is the only one to bring in a "we." The reader is drawn into a moral stance. The line never says why we should be first, and the poem suggests only that doubt is a kind of duty when someone presents himself as important. The next line drops sharply to four syllables: "lord of nothing." The title's lordly swagger is cancelled in three words. The phrase also quietly echoes "thing," so that "a red sad thing" becomes "lord of nothing." The sound stays nearly the same while the meaning shrinks to zero.
The final couplet turns to the hand, and the language gets stubby. "His thick white short hand" piles up three one-syllable adjectives, and the line is awkward to say aloud, as clumsy as the hand it describes. Then the simile arrives: the hand is "like a letter to the void." A pale, flat palm becomes a sheet of paper, a message held out toward something that will never answer. Is it a plea, a greeting or a command? The poem doesn't say. "Void" picks up "nothing" from two lines earlier, so the poem's closing image is a gesture of reaching, and it leaves a trace of tenderness behind the contempt.
The form is spare. There are three couplets, no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation. The lines run about five, four, eight, four, five and seven syllables, so the poem lurches rather than flows, with its longest line in the middle. Sound ties the lines together more quietly than rhyme would. "Mouth" in the first couplet and "doubt" in the second share a vowel. The rounded sounds of "rose," "noon," "lord" and "void" give the poem a hollow, echoing quality that suits its subject.
The poem is significant for its restraint. A satirist could have called this man a fraud outright. Instead the poem gives us a mouth, a hand and one instruction to doubt, and lets the reader do the rest. It never says who he is, which leaves room for readers to put a name to him, whether a politician, a boss or a blowhard from their own lives. The poem's discovery is that someone can be ridiculous and pitiable in the same breath, and that the emptiness at the center of such a person is also what makes him sad. A letter to the void will never be answered, and the poem holds both our doubt of him and our pity in those last lines.