Nobody in these five lines says what the voice wants. That silence is the first thing worth noticing, because the poem is called "Struggle" and yet no one seems to be fighting. The speaker never does anything. All the action belongs to the voice, which arrives, demands, goes quiet and returns, while the "I" shrinks to a single possessive: "my head."
The central idea is that satisfying a craving does not end it. The poem's vocabulary is the vocabulary of appetite: "satisfied," "fed." Judging by those words, the voice behaves like a hunger, but the poem never decides whether it is a hunger for food, for a habit, for approval, or for some harsher kind of self-criticism. That openness lets any reader who has given in to something just to buy a moment's peace slot their own experience into the gap. The struggle here is less a single battle than a loop.
Watch how the voice changes as the poem goes on. It begins as a "voice," something abstract and almost human, lodged in "the back" of the head, where it can be heard but never looked at. By line three it has become "it," and once it is being "fed" it sounds closer to a pet or a baby, a creature with needs that must be met. The small, strict words around it read like the terms of a contract: "only when," "until," "completely." The voice does not settle for a little, and the speaker seems to know the rules by heart.
The grammar acts out the same imbalance. Line one has no verb. Line two begins with "Gone," and line three with "There," and neither has a subject to hold it up. These fragments read like notes jotted down by someone too worn out for full sentences. The voice takes over the syntax the way it takes over the head.
Sound does quiet work too. "Head" and "fed" make the poem's only full rhyme, and they close the two lines that describe the voice being present, so the rhyme clicks shut like a lock. "Satisfied" and "plead" also end in a hard *d*, which means four of the five lines finish on the same closed consonant. The exception is "leaves," the one line about escape, and it is also the shortest: four syllables, against seven in line three. Relief takes up almost no room. Even there the poem will not let go, because "leaves" shares its long *ee* sound with "plead," so the departure already echoes the return. The word "back" works the same way on a larger scale. It appears in the first line ("the back of my head") and again in the last ("comes back"), bending the poem into a circle.
The final word, "plead," is the sharpest choice. A voice that orders can be defied, but a voice that begs works on pity and guilt, and that is much harder to refuse. The poem stops mid-appeal, with no answer from the speaker. Nothing is resolved, and the natural next move is to read line one again.
That is where its significance lies. In five plain lines it does more than describe a cycle: its shape, its sounds and its missing subjects all repeat the pattern it talks about. It also refuses to name the craving, so the poem stays small but fits many different struggles. It leaves the reader with the uneasy sense that the voice, like the poem, will be back.