The most unsettling thing about «Master/\Slave» is how quietly it changes the subject, from *them* to *us*. It begins with two flat, almost brutal statements: the Slaves hate the Masters "& themselves," and the Masters hate "both & everything else." By the end, the poem has pulled the reader into a bathroom mirror. Its central idea is that systems of domination damage everyone inside them, and that the larger collapse the poem hints at is something we collectively refuse to look at. Nobody outside the picture is left to blame.
The title is a small puzzle. A slash and a backslash meet to form a peak, two strokes leaning on each other. That is one possible reading of the typography, but it suits the poem's argument: each term holds the other up, and take one away and the shape falls. The opening lines follow the same logic. Hatred spreads outward and upward, two objects for the Slaves and then "everything else" for the Masters. The word "themselves" drops onto its own indented line, as if self-hatred were the afterthought that sits heaviest.
Then the poem lurches into a stranger register. "A glacial surface is crawling across / our collective imagination" joins two contradictory pictures, the slowness of ice and the verb "crawling," which makes the glacier feel almost alive. Next to it, "the world burns," so the poem has ice and fire in the same breath. The isolated "waiting" is deliberately ambiguous. Is the burning world waiting to destroy civilisation, or is it burning *while* we wait? Either way, catastrophe is patient and we are not.
The pronouns change here too. The Slaves and Masters were "they," but from the second stanza onward everything is "we" and "our." Mirrors and windows give the poem two directions of looking, inward and outward, and the question "do we admire or look away?" suggests that both are forms of avoidance. The next question is the philosophical centre. What we see is "one more object / consumed / & constituted / by an infinite sea of others." The two verbs, nearly matching in sound, pull against each other. To be consumed is to be eaten up, and to be constituted is to be made. Both are done to us by others, which quietly dissolves the master/slave divide. If everyone is made and unmade by everyone else, nobody stands cleanly on one side. The "infinite sea" also completes a set of elements with the ice and the fire, a world pressing in from every direction.
The poem is free verse with no rhyme, and its pacing does the work that rhyme might. Lines are broken at awkward moments, and the ampersand recurs like a nervous tic, a compressed "and" that links things faster than a full word could. The most striking moment of structure is the dangling "&" that ends the stanza about the "tremor / beyond the horizon of thought," a "something that is nothing / at all." The poem trails off into a grammatical gap, enacting the thing it describes, a thought that cannot finish itself. The tense wobbles as well. "When we chose to avert our gaze" is past tense among present and future verbs, which reads as if the decision has already been made without our noticing.
The ending turns the mirror from metaphor into action. We "shatter the mirror," and the shards "dig deep into our hands." The violence meant to destroy an unwelcome reflection wounds the one who swings it. "Will we realise that" sits alone on its line, a held breath, before the final verdict arrives: "we have no one to blame but ourselves?" That closing question loops back to the poem's opening. The Slaves and Masters spent the first lines hating each other, and the last line takes away the luxury of an external culprit.
Nothing is given here about the writer or the date, so the poem has to stand on its own, and it does. In a few dozen words it links personal denial, social hierarchy and large-scale disaster into a single act of looking away. It offers no comfort and no solution, only a question left open in the reader's hands, which is what makes it hard to forget.