Desire and ability have come apart, and the speaker of "Passion" is stranded in the gap. The opening line says it flatly: "Anxieties don't end / with age." The poem rejects the comfortable idea that growing old brings calm. What it offers instead is a contradiction. Fire is still "raging," yet "passions" are "shrinking." The wanting survives while the power to satisfy it fades, and the poem is about that mismatch.
The form enacts the same stalling. There is no punctuation, no full stop, and not even a capital after the first word, so the poem reads as one unbroken, sleepless thought. Grammar slips too. "With age fire raging to quench" leaves out its connecting words, and the reader has to decide whether the fire is raging *because* of age, *despite* it, or simply raging to be put out. That ambiguity suits a mind too tired to finish its own sentences. "Ecstasy a far cry" drops its verb altogether, as if even the grammar of pleasure has gone missing. The lines are short and uneven, with no regular metre and no rhyme, so nothing steadies the voice. The nearest thing to music is quiet echo: "age" inside "raging," the faint "end" and "and" at the starts of lines one and five, and the hard *h* that links "help," "hell" and "hollow."
The line breaks do a good deal of the work. "Drugs hardly help reach" ends on "reach," and the poem then makes us wait for "climax" on the next line, which is exactly what the speaker is doing. The word arrives, but "any more" follows at once and takes it away. The same trick works on "journeying." It promises movement, but the journey runs "through dried roses to nightmares," from a ruined garden to a worse place, and never reaches anything good.
The imagery is small and sharp. Fire and "quench" set up an old pairing of desire with heat, but the poem withholds the relief that pairing usually promises. The drugs are a failed attempt at it. The dried roses are harder to place. Judging by the imagery, they suggest romance that has been preserved but has lost its scent and softness, something kept and no longer alive. Then comes the line "I smell hell all day," and the sense of smell, absent from the roses, reappears in a darker form. "Hell" carries a hint of brimstone, and "all day" means the nightmares have spilled out of sleep into waking hours. The sleeplessness explains why: with no sleep to separate them, night and day merge into one torment.
The first-person pronoun is held back until line eight. Before that the poem speaks in abstractions: anxieties, age, drugs, ecstasy. The speaker seems to hide behind general nouns until the suffering is too present to keep abstract. After that the lines turn physical and personal ("I smell," "I suffer"), and the poem ends on its quietest and bleakest image: "the hollow of my mind." Passion is usually placed in the body or the heart, but here it has withdrawn to the mind, an empty space where desire echoes without anything to act on. The title also gains a second meaning. "Passion" can mean strong desire, but its older sense is suffering, and the verb "suffer" appears just before the end. The poem asks us to see that these are one experience.
The poem matters for its refusal to console. Writing about ageing often reaches for wisdom, acceptance or gentle humour. This speaker offers none of them, and he admits to drugs and to a body that no longer answers. The poem makes no excuse for him and offers no moral. In ten short lines it presents desire as something that can outlive the body and turn into torment. Students may find the subject uncomfortable, but that discomfort is part of the poem's honesty, and the bare style makes the confession harder to dismiss.