Sixteen words, four short lines, and a whole emotional collapse played out in order. The speaker addresses someone who has left and lists their own reactions: weeping, screaming, and then, unexpectedly, laughter. The central idea is that heartbreak refuses to settle into one feeling. The poem suggests that the most disturbing reaction to loss is not the tears but the laughter that comes with them, and the title, "Foolish", hangs over all of it like a verdict.
The first two lines are built as twins. "I wept over you" and "I screamed for you" share the same grammar, and both end on the word "you", so the beloved sits in the strongest position of each line, as the target of all this feeling. The pair also escalates. Weeping is private and quiet, while screaming is loud and meant to be heard. The small prepositions matter too. We weep *over* something already lost, the way people weep over a grave, but we scream *for* someone or something we still want to reach. Judging by the wording, the speaker is mourning and pleading at once.
Then the pattern snaps. Line three drops the "I" entirely: "And laughed and laughed." With the pronoun gone, the laughter seems to have no owner. It reads as something that happens to the speaker rather than something they choose. The doubled "laughed" and the repeated "and" give the line a stuttering, breathless rhythm, the way laughter comes in bursts and can't easily be stopped. The poem never says what kind of laughter this is. It could be bitter, hysterical, relieved, or a defence against everything the first two lines admitted. That refusal to explain is what makes the line unsettling. The end-rhyme also breaks here. The repeated "you" that closed lines one and two disappears, and line three ends on "laughed", so the sound pattern gives way just as the mood does. There is no conventional rhyme scheme anywhere in the poem, only that echo of "you" before it is withdrawn.
The last line delivers what the others have been waiting for: "When you walked away." Only now do we learn the occasion, and it complicates what came before. Did the speaker weep and scream before the departure, trying to hold the person back, and laugh only as they left? Or did all three reactions pour out at the moment of leaving? The order is left open. The verb is also telling. The person did not storm out, run, or slam a door. They "walked", calmly and without hurry, and that calm sets the speaker's noise against the other person's composure. Notice too where the word "you" lands. It began the poem at the end of lines, in the spot of greatest emphasis, but here it sits in the middle of the line, and the line ends on "away". The beloved literally exits the position of power. The poem also has no punctuation at all, not even a final full stop, so the laughter is never officially switched off.
That brings us back to the title. "Foolish" has no subject attached, which invites several readings. The speaker may be judging themselves for weeping and screaming over someone who could simply walk away. The laughter itself may be the foolish thing, a cover for pain. Or the word may point at the departing person. The most natural reading is self-judgment, and it is a strangely mild word for such violent feelings. Calling a scream "foolish" shrinks it, which may be exactly what the speaker needs to do in order to survive it.
What gives the poem its force is how little it uses. There is no metaphor and no decoration, just four plain verbs (wept, screamed, laughed, walked) and a single pronoun repeated until it vanishes. The imagery is of sound and the body rather than pictures, so we hear the crying and the laughter more than we see anything. The poem gives no name, place, or backstory. All we know, from the text itself, is a speaker and someone who has gone. Within that small space it makes an honest, uncomfortable point: grief can contradict itself, and the contradiction may be the truest part of it.