My feelings are storms — Poem analysis

LoloAnxious

A storm is hounting my house. Rain is pouring down my walls and my pillow is imbued. Lightnings all over the sky. I feel the Darkness hugging me.

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Four short sentences, no line breaks, no rhyme: Lolo's piece looks almost like a diary entry, yet it is built with care. The subtitle, «My feelings are storms», states the central idea before the text begins. Everything that follows is that sentence turned into a scene. The poem never says what the feelings are. It only shows what it is like to be inside them.

The storm in the subtitle is plural, but the poem gives us one: "A storm is hounting my house." The word "hounting" is the most interesting spelling in the piece. As printed, it reads like a blend of "haunting", "hunting" and "hounding". All three suit the line, since a storm that haunts is a ghost, one that hunts is a predator, and one that hounds will not let go. Whether the blend is deliberate or accidental, the reader gets all three meanings at once. The house is also worth noticing. Judging by what follows, it stands for the speaker's inner life, because the weather soon stops staying outside.

The second sentence is the longest, and the storm is already in the building: "Rain is pouring down my walls and my pillow is imbued." Rain on the walls suggests the shelter is failing. The pillow is the most private object in a home, where a person lies awake or perhaps cries. "Imbued" is a surprising choice. The word usually belongs to qualities, as in being imbued with courage or sadness, and rarely to wet cloth. Here it makes the pillow seem to absorb the storm the way a person absorbs a mood, rather than just getting soaked. The poem does not mention tears, but the pillow invites the thought.

Then the rhythm snaps shut: "Lightnings all over the sky." There is no verb, so the sentence is a fragment, and that suits it, because lightning does not announce itself with grammar. The plural "Lightnings" is unusual, and it multiplies the flashes and makes the storm feel bigger than one sky can hold. Notice the movement of the whole poem. It starts with a house, moves to walls and a pillow, widens to the entire sky, and then narrows sharply to one person. The first three sentences carry only possessives ("my house", "my walls", "my pillow"), and the pronoun "I" arrives only in the last line. The self enters late, as if the speaker had been standing back and describing the storm until it could no longer be kept at a distance.

That final sentence holds the poem's turn: "I feel the Darkness hugging me." The capital D makes Darkness a character rather than the mere absence of light. The verb is the surprise. After "hounting", "pouring" and lightning, we expect something violent, and we get a hug. The poem leaves open whether this is comfort or captivity. A hug can console, but it can also hold you so tightly you cannot move, and the word "feel" suggests the speaker is not sure which it is. There is a sound link too. "Hounting", "house" and "hugging" all begin with an h, so the first sentence and the last answer each other, and the hunter has become the one who embraces.

The grammar adds to this. "Hounting", "pouring", "Lightnings" and "hugging" all carry an -ing ending or its echo, and the ongoing tense keeps the storm in the present. Nothing is over, and the poem offers no dawn, no clearing sky, and no sentence that begins "Then it stopped."

The poem matters because of how little it needs. It uses one of the oldest comparisons there is, weather for emotion, and makes it domestic, so that the storm is in the walls and the pillow rather than far away on a hillside. Its slightly unusual English, with "hounting", "imbued" and "Lightnings", gives the scene a strangeness that polished phrasing might have lost. And by ending on an embrace instead of a collapse, it makes a quiet, unsettling point about low moods: they can feel less like an attack than like being held by something you did not choose.

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