A man heads north to do a bit of odd-job work, and that is nearly all the speaker of this elegy tells us. The title promises mourning, but the voice sounds like someone chatting about a chore. The gap between the casual tone and the weight of what is left unsaid drives the poem. Its central idea is that grief cannot be tidied away with a fresh coat of paint, and that the speaker's errand quietly changes from covering things up to opening them.
The first stanza sets a breezy, homespun register: "slap some paint," "Rhubarb Farm," the "Great White North," which sounds like a nickname rather than a place. Then comes the strangest line, in which the Northern Lights "tease the tar out of hungry coyotes." It echoes the idiom "beat the tar out of," but the violence is softened into taunting. The lights glitter and the animals stay hungry, so the image is of something beautiful that gives no nourishment. The poem never says so, but that image seems to fit a speaker who returns to a place where something is missing. Even the house's owner, a locksmith, suggests a world of things that are closed and secured.
The second stanza turns from landscape to one room. "I left the memory of my first born there" is the emotional center, and the poem's own phrasing makes it feel like leaving a coat on a hook. What follows is a still life: a "dirty bib" in a "cold, dark crib," with the bib and crib chiming almost like a nursery rhyme turned sour. The syntax breaks into fragments ("In the bedroom with the crooked eaves."), as if the speaker can only manage pieces. The poem never says what happened to the child. The word "elegy" and the cold crib suggest loss, but that is an inference, and the poem leaves it unconfirmed. The phrase "Locked out from critical eyes" also carries a double edge. The room is hidden from outside judgment, but "critical" can also mean crucial, so what is shut away may be the most important thing in the house.
The third stanza steps back to "a life here, many lives," and then three lines begin with "None." This repetition works like a verdict, and each line measures a life and finds it short. None is "large enough to silence a world full of din," none "rich enough to move ahead and keep assail," none "firm enough to tough it out and settle in." The lines lengthen and sag, and the rhyme of "din" with "in" gives a dull, closing thud. The phrase "keep assail" is awkward, since the verb is left without an object, and that awkwardness may be deliberate. It reads like language straining to say something and failing. The "din" also contrasts with the silent nursery, since the noisy world goes on while one room stays quiet.
The ending is the poem's most telling structural move. The opening line returns, but the stanza that follows is cut to two lines, and the purpose of the trip has changed. At first the speaker will "slap some paint" on the house, which is a cosmetic and covering action. Now he will "pry boards from covered windows," an action of exposure that lets in light and air and is harder to do. The poem stops on an infinitive, with the work still to be done. We never see the windows open, so the poem refuses an easy consolation. The season matters here too, because early autumn comes before the real cold, and the journey north points toward winter.
The poem's significance lies in its restraint. It is not regular in rhythm or rhyme, and it relies on loose, speech-like lines, with sound echoes (bib and crib, eaves and eyes, din and in) appearing where they can. It mixes folksy humor with unspoken sorrow, and it lets objects, such as a bib, boards and a lock, carry the feeling that the speaker will not state outright. The reader is left to notice how much sits behind a plain declaration like "I'm headed up."