Anna M. Johnson's "Yearnings" is a poem of eleven short lines that tries to say what a desire actually is, and arrives at an answer that is startlingly bleak. Longing, she suggests, is not noble or romantic. It is a restless residue, something the heart and mind produce and cannot get rid of. About the poet herself I can say nothing reliable, so everything here rests on what the words on the page do.
The opening stanza makes a claim about substance, or rather the lack of it. Yearnings "pulsate / In the human heart," a verb that borrows the rhythm of a heartbeat and makes the feeling seem physical, involuntary, almost bodily. Then comes the deflation. Apart from "colors vibrant on the air," yearnings "have no form." The image is oddly beautiful for a poem so pessimistic: a shimmer, a flicker of colour hanging in the air, vivid but without any body to it. The final line of the stanza lands the blow: "In truth they bear no part." The phrase is deliberately slippery. It can mean that yearnings take no part in reality, that they contribute nothing, or that they bear no fruit and have no share in anything solid. Because the sentence is compressed, it holds all those possibilities at once, and the reader is left feeling how insubstantial these feelings are.
The second stanza turns from the heart to the mind, and from vibrancy to decay. Longings "gather in the human breast," as though collecting there like dust or silt, and the poet calls them "Waste matter of this mortal mind." This is the poem's most striking phrase. We usually imagine desire as the best part of us, the thing that drives ambition and love. Johnson reclassifies it as refuse, the by-product of a thinking creature that has nowhere to put what it cannot have. The word "mortal" matters too. It ties the waste to our limited lifespans, hinting that we long precisely because we are finite and incomplete.
The last three lines extend the idea through fire. Longings "smoulder on / Forever at unrest." Smouldering is a precise choice: it is not the bright blaze of passion but a low, slow burning that gives off heat and smoke without ever either flaring up or going out. That connects back to the "colors vibrant on the air" of the first stanza, since smoke and glimmer are exactly the kind of formless, drifting thing the poem has been describing. The enjambment after "smoulder on" lets the line itself carry on to the next, which mimics the endlessness it names, and "Forever" is placed so that it feels like a sentence handed down.
Formally, the poem is brief and irregular. There is no strict metre; the lines vary in length and stress, so that the rhythm feels closer to uneasy speech than to a polished song. Rhyme appears but is loose and delayed. "Heart" and "part" echo each other at the stanza's start and finish, framing the first stanza, while "unrest" in the last line chimes faintly with "breast" in the second stanza's opening. These sparse echoes work like the feelings described: they reach for resolution without quite achieving a tidy one. The repeated sentence shape, "Yearnings but pulsate," "Longings but gather," also gives the two stanzas a parallel structure, and the unusual placement of "but" (meaning "only" or "merely") quietly diminishes the subject before the poem has even begun to argue.
What makes the poem worth reading is the nerve of its reversal. Many poems praise longing as the engine of art and feeling; this one refuses to flatter it. By insisting that yearnings are formless, wasteful, and permanently unsettled, Johnson invites us to ask whether our deepest desires are as meaningful as they feel, or whether they are simply the restless heat our minds give off. The poem never answers, and that open, uneasy ending is its quiet strength.