Joy, in this poem, is not a feeling the speaker has lost but a person who has gone away without saying where. The speaker is left asking after them, and the whole poem is that asking. Nothing dramatic has happened, or at least nothing is reported. There is no quarrel, no death, no named disaster. There is only the long dull fact of absence, and a voice that cannot stop wondering where the missing one has gone.
The title makes a flat announcement: "Joy Is Traceless." The poem itself refuses to sound so sure. A traceless thing leaves nothing behind, but the speaker keeps asking questions, and questions only make sense if an answer might exist. The word "sojourn" matters here. A sojourn is a temporary stay, a lodging on a journey, so asking "in which sojourn?" quietly assumes that joy is still somewhere, resting in some other place and possibly able to come back. The title gives the verdict, and the speaker appeals against it. That tension between what the speaker fears and what the speaker hopes drives the poem.
The central image comes in the middle: "Life is now like diffused sunlight / of winter's oppressed daytime." The simile is more precise than it first looks. Diffused light is not darkness. It is light with the sharpness and warmth taken out, spread thinly, casting no clear shadows. That suits a life that has not collapsed but has gone flat and grey. "Oppressed" is the strangest word in the poem. Days are not normally oppressed, but giving the daytime a weight pressing down on it makes the whole season seem to share the speaker's mood. The small word "now" also sets this dim present against an earlier time when, we can infer, the light was stronger.
Joy is felt through two senses, and both have failed. At the start, "you are not in my sight", so the eye has lost it. Near the end, "I do not hear your flute", so the ear has lost it too. The flute is the most affecting detail. It turns joy into a musician whose tune once carried through the speaker's days, and it makes the silence active. The speaker is not merely failing to see something but listening for a sound that does not come. The poem doesn't explain the flute, and it is better for that. A reader can picture a piper somewhere out of earshot, playing for someone else.
The construction is plain and carefully shaped. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines are short, closer to broken speech than to formal verse, and the plainness suits someone too tired to decorate their grief. The poem falls into stanzas of three lines, three lines and two. The repeated phrase "for a long time" opens the poem and returns in the last line of the middle stanza, so the sense of duration frames the central image. Even the grammar adds to this. "You are not in my sight" is in the present tense, as if the absence were still going on while the speaker talks.
The most telling structural move is the repetition at the end. The opening cry, "Oh joy! Where are you, in which sojourn?", comes back as "Oh joy, where are you? / In which sojourn?" The exclamation mark becomes a comma, and the single line is split in two. The first time, the question bursts out in one breath. The second time it falters, with a pause before the final words. Nothing has been answered between the two versions. The speaker has only grown quieter, and the poem stops on the question rather than a resolution.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It would be easy to write about lost happiness with storms and tears. Instead the poem catches a quieter state that many readers will recognise: days that go by with nothing obviously wrong and nothing quite right, and a faint longing for the person or feeling that used to make them bright. It does not say whether joy returns, and it does not tell us why it left. That leaves room for the reader to supply their own loss. A good question to bring to it is whether the speaker's repeated asking is a sign of despair or of the stubborn hope that someone who is still being called may yet turn up.