The poem never answers its own question, and that refusal is its whole argument. In "What is This Thing," Jessea L. Vaughan strings together a run of questions about love so persistently that the asking becomes the subject. Even the opening is quietly clever. The title reads "What is This Thing," and the first line, "We call love," finishes the thought, so the poem begins in the middle of a sentence, as though we have walked in on someone already thinking aloud.
Read closely, the questions follow the logic of someone examining an unfamiliar object. Where does it come from? Where does it go? What is its purpose? What is it made of? These are questions you might put to a machine, a mineral, or a strange tool found in an attic, and the poem turns them on the most human feeling there is. That mismatch gives the poem its slightly bewildered, vulnerable tone. The word "thing" is blunt and vague on purpose, the word of a speaker who has run out of better vocabulary. Notice, too, that "love" appears only in the phrase "We call love," at the start and again at the end. In between it is just "it." The phrase "we call" hints that the word may be a label stuck onto something nobody has actually pinned down, a name that has outrun our understanding.
The poem's one concrete image arrives in the middle: "Put ourselves on pedestals and / Tear each other down." A pedestal belongs to a statue, something admired from below, and the picture of pulling it over is violent. The poem says we put *ourselves* up there, not the person we love, which points at self-regard rather than admiration. It never says outright that this destroys love. It only asks where love goes "when we" behave this way, and the question carries a faint accusation. A tension runs underneath. Love "comes from" somewhere and "goes" somewhere, as if it moves by its own will, yet "we give it / To some and not all" and "we need it," as though it were ours to hand out. The poem lets both pictures stand, unreconciled. The line "To some and not all" is the sharpest, wondering why something so valued is so unevenly shared.
Formally, this is free verse, with no rhyme and no fixed meter. The lines are short and uneven, from the four syllables of "What is this thing" to the eight of "Put ourselves on pedestals and." Four lines end on the word "and" ("from and," "pedestals and," "purpose and," "need it and"), which leaves the reader hanging on a hinge and tipping into the next line. The effect is breathlessness, a mind that cannot stop adding questions. The repeated openings of "Where," "What" and "Why" build a drumbeat. The punctuation matters just as much. Commas and semicolons separate the clusters of questions, but the only question mark waits at the very end, so the poem works as one long question held in suspense. When the refrain returns almost word for word, "What is this thing / We call love?", the opening comma has become a question mark and the circle closes. We finish where we began, wiser only in knowing how much we don't know.
That is where the poem's value lies. Its language is plain, and its speaker never says "I" or "you." Everything is "we," "ourselves," "each other," so the questions belong to every reader rather than to one private story. It does not console us with a definition. It trusts us to sit with an open question, and it shows how form can carry meaning: something close to a single sentence that stretches across fourteen lines and cannot find its full stop until it has given up the search.