Few homes in poetry turn as quietly treacherous as the one in Groot's "Regression." The poem opens as a tribute. The house "raised" the speaker, its walls "nursed" them, and its carpets "broke my falls." Every verb belongs to a parent, so the house is less a setting than a second mother. The chain of sounds in "walls," "falls," "halls" and "calls" runs through the opening like footsteps down a corridor. It is the nearest the poem comes to rhyme. Otherwise there is no regular rhyme or metre. The piece is free verse that half-slips into prose, and its rhythm comes from sentence length: long, gently accumulating clauses at first, then sudden short cries.
The title names the central idea, a return to helplessness. The poem never says why it happens, and the imagery allows more than one reading. "My legs are no more" and "words slurred" could suggest an old person losing body and memory. They could equally describe a nightmare in which the speaker is pulled back into infancy. I find the first reading more persuasive, but the poem's refusal to settle the question is part of its power. The most inventive image supports both readings. The "barriers and guide rails" the speaker traces in "diminishing light" could be the bars of a cot or the handrails of an elderly person's hallway. The same objects protect at both ends of a life, and the poem makes that symmetry feel unsettling instead of comforting.
The first real turn comes with the single word "Mum!", set apart in quotation marks against the long sentences around it. What follows reverses the opening: "My muffled screams echo back at me / It chokes me, swelling my tears." The house that once answered every cry now returns only the speaker's own voice, and "echo" becomes the poem's quiet horror. Even the early "loving calls...and warmth" carries a hint of this. The ellipsis leaves a gap before "warmth," as though it can only be remembered, not felt. The odd line "fading light defends me" can be read as a kind of mercy, since not seeing clearly may spare the speaker from understanding what is happening. That is an inference, as the phrasing is strange enough to resist a firm answer.
The second paragraph is where form and meaning merge. The tidy narration collapses into one dense block, with no pauses for breath. Ellipses multiply, "again" keeps returning, and the thought "Fading, hazy, unclear" trails into repetition. Then comes the sentence "my ears feel unclear, are near? Hello?", where hearing, clarity and distance blur into one another and the grammar breaks mid-thought. The poem describes slurred speech by slurring its own syntax. Judging by the pattern, this is deliberate. The reader is not told that language is failing but made to watch it fail.
The final line is the most carefully shaped: "I am the babe this house did know, yet I know not who hears me." Its slightly archaic word order, "did know" and "know not," gives the sentence a ceremonial weight, like a verdict. It also inverts the opening. At the start the house knew the speaker intimately, with its walls, floors and halls as faithful carers. By the end the house still knows the babe, but the speaker no longer knows anything, not even who is listening. The question of who hears is never answered, and "Mum" never replies.
The poem is worth reading because it compresses a whole life cycle into a single building and a few minutes of fear. It lets the reader feel loss through sound and syntax instead of explaining it. A few phrases, such as the abstract "unclear" repeated several times, are blunter than the best images. Even so, the roughness suits a speaker who is losing control of words. The poem leaves its reader in the dim hallway, calling, and listening to the house say nothing new.