Nobody in "HER" is given a name, and that is where its power starts. The title is the pronoun in its object form, "her" rather than "she," and the grammar quietly agrees with what the poem says. She is something that is gone home to, thought of, and looked at. Only once does she become the subject of a sentence, in "She's always been there," and that line is a plain statement of fact, with no complaint in it.
The poem never says who she is, and the guesses it invites are part of its design. She could be a mother left at home, a woman valued only for her appearance, a homeland, or even the speaker's own self seen in a mirror. The last line, "Yet you think of her as only a reflection," points toward that last reading, but the other readings stay open. Whichever one you choose, the central idea holds. Someone loyal, constant and present is treated as secondary, a mere image of someone else, and that is a kind of erasure.
The imagery is stripped down but harsh. "Chain to the neck" is the poem's most physical picture, and it is deliberately unclear. The line leaves out the verb, so we cannot tell who is held by the chain, and the next line, "Compelled not to go," is just as shifting. It could describe her, who cannot leave, or the speaker, who feels bound to return. The opening line, "I go home to her," makes the speaker's return sound like habit or duty, so the two figures may be imprisoned together. Even "the only one left" works two ways: she might be the sole person remaining in the speaker's life, or the last of something that has been disappearing.
The sixth line carries the poem's emotional weight. "Yet forgotten and abandoned / Faithful but disregarded" sets two pairs of opposites side by side, and the second pair is the sharper one. "Faithful" is a word we usually use of dogs, lovers and believers, and it suggests a loyalty that asks for nothing. "Disregarded" is a cold, bureaucratic word, as if she has been quietly filed away. The poem puts warmth and coldness into one line to show how unfairly the two are matched.
There is no rhyme, and the poem needs none. Its music comes from short, clipped lines. The first four run only four or five syllables each ("Chain to the neck," "Compelled not to go"), which sounds like someone speaking in small, tired phrases. The lines swell slightly in the fifth and sixth, with "Yet forgotten and abandoned" at eight syllables, as the list of wrongs builds up. Then the final line stretches to twelve syllables, nearly three times the length of the first stanza's shortest line. The reader is carried straight through "Yet you think of her as only a reflection" with no room to pause.
The stanzas shrink as well: six lines, then two, then one. The poem narrows as it goes, like a space closing in, and it ends on the sentence that carries the accusation. Two other changes work alongside the shrinking. The poem begins with "I," moves to the instruction "Just think of it," and ends with "you." The speaker starts by confiding, then pleads, then points a finger. The repeated "Yet," at the start of line five and again at the start of the last line, links the two charges. She is forgotten, and she is also misunderstood.
The word "reflection" also has two meanings, which gives the ending a second layer. A reflection is an image in a mirror, a copy without substance. It is also a thought, as in "to reflect on something." The line can be read as saying that you see her as only an image, or as saying that you think of her only in passing, without really thinking. Either way, she is denied independent existence.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. In about forty words it gives us a speaker, a captive, an accuser and an accused, and it never explains any of them. Because the reader is addressed as "you" in the final line, the poem implicates us. We were told to "think of it," and the closing line suggests we may be the ones who have failed to.