Nine short lines are enough for "Isolate" to take a person apart, piece by piece. It begins with a whole speaker, someone who can walk and talk, and ends with a pair of hands that no longer seem to belong to anyone. The central idea is that isolation is more than being alone in a room. It slowly empties a person of purpose until they feel like an object going through the motions of a day.
The title is worth pausing on. "Isolate" can be a verb, an adjective or a noun, and the poem never says which it means. It could be an order, a condition, or a label for the person we are about to meet, the way a scientist might call a sample an isolate. Each reading fits, because by the end the speaker has been treated as something set apart and examined.
The opening line, "I walk and talk alone," is almost all one-syllable words, and "walk" and "talk" chime so closely that the sentence sounds like a habit. The talking has no listener, so it is closer to muttering than conversation. The next line, "from one thing to another," is bleaker than it first seems. The speaker moves between *things*, not people or places, and the vagueness suggests days that blur together. The line also reads two ways: the speaker may be walking from task to task, or the talk may be drifting from topic to topic with no one to steer it.
Then something changes. "I" appears only once in the poem. After the first line the speaker stops being a subject and becomes a series of descriptions: "a blank to be filled," "a stone prisoner." The grammar shows what is happening. The speaker no longer does anything, and the phrases simply hang there without verbs. "To be filled" is passive, as though someone or something else will have to supply the content.
The second stanza turns the body into a piece of crude sculpture: "a stone prisoner / with arms and holes for every / tired supper." The word "holes" is deliberately unflattering. A mouth and eyes become openings in stone, and the body is reduced to limbs and apertures. Its one named job is to take in food, and the supper is called "tired," although it is surely the eater who is tired. That transferred word is the poem's only plain admission of feeling, and it arrives in the least dramatic place possible. The line break after "every" adds to the weariness, because the sentence has to push on to the next line to reach its dull noun. There is also a quiet link between "a blank to be filled" and "holes" for supper. Both are emptiness waiting for something to fill it, and the poem implies that food and routine are all that is on offer.
The poem has no regular rhyme scheme and no punctuation, but sound still binds it together. "Alone" in the first line and "stone" in the fourth are a true rhyme, five lines apart, and "holes" repeats the long *o*. That low, hollow vowel runs through the poem and links loneliness to stoniness.
The final stanza is the strangest: "and hands that have / nothing to do / with hands." The first "hands" are the physical ones. The second seems to mean everything hands normally stand for, such as holding, helping, greeting and making. Because the line breaks leave "nothing to do" alone in the middle, the phrase also means that the hands are idle. The poem ends on the same word twice, with its meaning split, which makes the word sound hollow, like a word said too often. The hands are present but disconnected from their purpose, and so, the poem implies, is the person.
What makes "Isolate" worth reading is how little it says and how much that small space holds. It does not mention a cause for the loneliness, and it never asks for pity. The poem shows a self shrinking from a person to a body to a pair of hands, and that quiet shrinking makes the isolation more believable than a louder complaint would.