A promise opens the poem: tell me your secrets and I will keep them. The speaker is patient ("I wait to know") and trustworthy ("safe within me"), but the offer goes nowhere. The person addressed can only speak to the speaker's shadow, and the shadow "does not speak to me." The poem is about the gap between two people who want, or at least ought, to be close, and about how the speaker slowly comes to see that the silence on the other side may not be what it seems.
The first four lines build that gap through a small, strange image. A shadow is attached to the speaker's body yet cut off from the speaker's mind, so the secrets are sent to the one place that cannot pass them on. The sound of the lines suits the subject. "Secrets," "safe," "speak," "shadow" and "speak" again scatter soft s-sounds through the opening, a hush that belongs to whispered confidences. The title, "Within you and without," seems to lean on the same split. "Without" can mean outside, but it can also mean lacking, and the poem moves between being locked out and being empty.
Then the poem turns from conversation to landscape. The speaker lives "in a world of wind / And night and stars," a list of things with no ground under them. The following lines define that world by what it is "Far from," and the phrase comes back three times like a refrain. The first image is vivid: "brown roots that point / Skeletal fingers at the sky." Roots are meant to be hidden and to hold things in place. These are exposed, bony and reaching upward, a gesture of appeal that nobody answers. Next comes the "deserted water-hole" with its "lonely crow," which is "Cawing into the empty air." Here the poem is quietly clever. The crow is a voice with no listener, and a few lines later the speaker's own words will do the same thing. Dryness, bones and loneliness make the landscape a picture of failed communication before the poem says so outright.
The third "Far from" breaks the pattern. After roots and water-hole, both things you could point to, we get "the searching," an abstraction. The sentence then runs on into "the moment" when the other person falls silent "Like a mountain." That line is short and stands alone, and the brief pause it creates feels like the stillness it describes. A mountain suggests grandeur and permanence, something that cannot be moved. Against it, the speaker's "words bleat." The verb is humbling. Bleating is a small, anxious, animal noise, and it makes the speaker sound like a lamb calling up at a cliff. It also pairs with the crow's cawing, so that both creatures in the poem's imagery fail in the same way.
The last line is where the poem's insight sits. The mountain's silence is called "serenity," which is how the speaker first reads it, but that serenity "conceals some other exhaustion." The word "other" is worth pausing on. It implies that the speaker is exhausted too, from waiting and searching and bleating, and that the person across the gap is tired in a different way. What looked like calm strength may be weariness. The poem does not say what causes it, and the judgment is left open, so the reader sees the silence as a possible burden rather than a refusal.
Formally the poem is a single block of sixteen lines of free verse with no regular rhyme or metre. The one clear echo is "me" ending lines 2 and 4, which repeats the same word rather than finding a new rhyme and so reinforces the closed-off self. Line lengths shift with the thought, from the conversational opening to the drawn-out "Cawing into the empty air" and the clipped "Like a mountain." As printed here, the final line ends with no full stop. That suits a poem about something unresolved, since the sentence trails into exhaustion instead of arriving anywhere.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It could have blamed the silent partner or ended on self-pity. Instead it moves from the speaker's frustration to a more generous, uncertain recognition that the person who will not speak may be as worn out as the person who keeps waiting.