"Tempered" is the word that holds Jeffrey Side's poem together, and it pulls two ways at once. To temper something can mean to soften or moderate it, as when mercy tempers justice. It is also what a blacksmith does to steel, heating and cooling it until it is hard enough to hold an edge. Being "tempered with delight" could therefore mean being gentled by joy or toughened by it. The poem never says which, and its strangeness grows out of that uncertainty.
The structure is simple. Five stanzas each begin with nearly the same line, "When you were tempered with delight," and the last one swaps "with" for "by." The repetition sounds like a spell, or the start of a fable, and the past tense makes it feel like looking back at a former self. Yet the "when" clause never gets a tidy "then" to answer it. Each stanza instead offers a new, unconnected set of images, as if delight were a lens that kept changing what the speaker saw.
Those images are surreal, and they carry mixed feelings. In the first stanza the forests "were not finite," which suggests delight stretching the world outward. Yet the same stanza says "your virtues were taken / down," a phrase that sounds like something being dismantled. The second stanza is full of tension: "you kept the saddest oceans, / you kept the proudest streams." Sadness and pride are given to water, so feeling becomes landscape, and the person addressed seems to hold onto sorrow even inside delight. The odd line "wild pens / would / not strain your sight" is harder to pin down. Judging by the imagery, it may mean that writing or expression no longer costs this person any effort, or that nothing wild is allowed near them.
The third and fourth stanzas turn toward the body and toward other people. "Sand upon your necklace" and "cream upon your / lips" are sensual, almost like a painting of pleasure, but they sit beside a loss: "you / never made the journey / through the park." The park is an ordinary, unremarkable place, and the poem treats never reaching it as a real absence. Then comes the most unsettling image: "consumed by bikers in the / light and / nurses in the dark." The pairing is deliberately mismatched. Bikers suggest noise, speed and appetite, while nurses suggest care and healing, and light and dark split the day between them. Being "consumed" makes the figure sound like something eaten rather than a person who chooses. The stanza closes with "taut strings / pulled / on you forever," where the line break leaves "pulled" alone on its line, so the reader feels the tug. The strings could belong to a puppet or to an instrument, and the poem does not settle it.
Rhythm and sound work quietly throughout. There is no regular metre and no rhyme scheme, and the short, broken lines make the poem hesitant and out of breath. Still, the refrain's long "-ite" sound keeps returning: "finite" ends the first stanza, "sight" ends the second, and "light" appears in the fourth. These echoes work like a faint chime, a reminder that delight is still the governing note even as the content darkens.
The final stanza changes the picture. "Strong bars" are "held around your / fortress," and "strong men / could never kiss the / wound you / would always hide." The tempered steel of the opening becomes protective hardness. The fortress and the bars may be defence or imprisonment, and the poem leaves that open. Only here does the word "wound" appear, and it reframes everything before it. The delight, the oceans and the bikers now look like layers built around something injured. The repeated "strong" is ironic, because strength keeps the wound from being healed, and "kiss" suggests tenderness is what gets shut out.
The poem is worth reading because it shows how pleasure and protection can slide into isolation without ever announcing the change. It does not explain who "you" is, and it does not need to. A reader can take the poem as addressed to someone else, to a former self, or to anyone who has used happiness as a shield. Its force comes from the pressure beneath its calm, repetitive surface, which reveals itself only in the closing lines.