Ten short lines, not a single full stop and almost no comfort: Ram Krishna Singh's "Gloom" is a poem about feeling unseen. Its speaker is low, lonely, and tired of caring for people who don't seem to notice. The poem never explains why. It gives only the symptoms, and then, in its last two lines, an image of a sadness too deep for any light to reach.
The opening is blunt. "There's no meaning / in being cold and groan" is not quite grammatical, since "cold" is an adjective and "groan" a verb or noun, and the stumble feels deliberate. The speaker's language seems to sag along with the mood, as if there isn't energy left to finish the sentence properly. The colon after "groan" then points to the real source of unease: "silence frightens / between the acts." The theatrical phrase "between the acts" is intriguing. It could be the pause in a play when the stage goes dark and the performance drops away. Read that way, the speaker is more afraid of the empty intervals than of any dramatic scene. The poem hints that ordinary life is a performance, and that the quiet gaps in it are where loneliness gets loud.
The second stanza turns from fear to something closer to hurt. "Who cares how much / I care and love" is a small piece of wordplay, with "cares" and "care" bouncing against each other. The line is both a question and a shrug. It suggests the speaker's devotion has gone unrewarded, or at least unnoticed, and the repeated word makes the point. The speaker's care sounds trapped inside the same word that is used to dismiss it. Then the poem shifts abruptly to "forgetting wrinkles / in the lone pool." The image works on two levels. Wrinkles can be the ripples on still water, and they can also be lines on an ageing face glimpsed in a reflection. Either way, the pool is "lone," a word that echoes the sound of "groan" two stanzas earlier. These two words are the nearest the poem comes to rhyme, and the faint chime links the groaning of the first stanza to the isolation of the second. The grammar again leaves us unsure who is forgetting. It might be the speaker, trying to ignore the signs of age, or the water, which smooths itself out and forgets.
The final couplet is the shortest part of the poem and the only place the title word appears: "dreams shroud the gloom / unburnt in sun." A shroud is a burial cloth, so dreams here seem less like hopes than like a covering laid over something dead or dying. Yet the gloom survives, "unburnt," as if sunlight should have dispelled it, as morning mist is burnt off, and could not. The line can be read two ways. Either the gloom stays untouched despite the sun, or the dreams themselves are left unburnt and so never come to life. Both readings leave the speaker without relief, and the poem simply stops, with no resolution offered.
The form supports this. The stanzas shrink from four lines to four to two, so the poem seems to run out of breath. The lines are brief, usually two or three stresses, with no regular metre and no rhyme scheme. Capital letters appear only at the very start, and the lack of punctuation lets thoughts drift into one another. Sound does some quiet work as well. "Silence frightens" hisses softly, and the long vowels of "cold," "groan," "lone" and "pool" slow the reading down into something like a sigh.
What makes "Gloom" worth studying is its restraint. It could easily have been a loud complaint about sadness. Instead it compresses a state of mind into a few images (an empty interval in a performance, a still pool, a shrouded darkness) and trusts the reader to fill the spaces. Its ambiguities are not careless. They mirror a mind that cannot quite settle on what hurts most, whether it is loneliness, age, or unreturned love. For students, the poem shows how much feeling a very small poem can hold when each word is doing double duty.