The title promises a poem about taking sides, yet its central figure is the one thing in the poem that refuses to. "Commitment" invites us to expect a stance on history's horrors, and what we get instead is a portrait of something older and calmer than any cause: the earth itself, which receives humanity's violence and, in the end, its dead.
The first sentence sets the terms. The earth is "incorruptible," a word that carries moral weight, since it is usually applied to judges or saints. Against her stands "mankind," who subjects her to "his multiple invasion." The phrasing is military, as if human history were a series of armies marching across a landscape that never changes allegiance. The earth "suffers" this, and the verb is double-edged: she endures it, and she is hurt by it. Then comes the poem's most striking turn: "She's not concerned / How dialectics paralyze his mind." Dialectics, the machinery of argument and ideology, is set beside the physical misery of the camp, the rack, the rope, the cross. The poet seems to link abstract theorising with the suffering it accompanies, and the earth is indifferent to both the arguments and the agonies.
The list that follows is built on repetition. "Or who lies shattered... Or who hangs limp... Or who bears crooked crosses." The repeated "or who" makes the catalogue feel endless, a roll call of victims that could continue indefinitely. The images move from imprisonment to torture to hanging to crucifixion, gathering religious and political suffering into one sweep. The adjectives are blunt and physical: "broken," "tortured," "ugly," "limp," "crooked." Even the cross is "crooked," a small detail that denies the suffering any dignity or glamour. These are not noble martyrs but bodies.
The form tells its own story. The poem is a sonnet, though an unusual one. The first eight lines rhyme abab cdcd (mind/interned, hope/rope, rack/back), with "hope" and "rope" placed in a quietly ironic pairing, since the first word is nearly cancelled by the second. After the break comes a third quatrain, "given / is / driven / quietness," and then a closing couplet, "there / unaware." The rhymes are loose in places: "is" and "quietness" only half-chime, and "given" and "driven" are a near-rhyme at best. This looseness suits the subject, as though the poem were too weary for perfect symmetry. The lines are largely iambic pentameter, and the steady beat gives the opening an almost judicial calm that contrasts with the violence it describes.
The poem's pivot arrives with a question: "To her who gives life, what increase is given?" The answer is nothing. Humanity offers the earth no return for what she provides, only more damage. Yet the next image reverses the mood. The earth becomes "as patient as a mother," waiting for a son "driven / Back to her amplitude of quietness." That phrase is the poem's richest. "Amplitude" suggests spaciousness and abundance, and "quietness" is the opposite of the noisy dialectics and screaming rack of the first half. Death here is not a defeat but a homecoming, a return to a vast silence.
The closing couplet is the most tender moment. The earth "takes him to her sweet breast and holds him there / Like a tired child who sleeps on unaware." The word "unaware" is the final judgment: the sleeper never knew the mother's patience, never understood what he was returning to. It can be read as forgiveness, since the earth holds even those who wronged her, and as quiet pathos, since the child does not know he is held.
The poem's force lies in this contrast between human noise and earthly stillness. Rather than arguing for a cause, "Commitment" sets the length of suffering against something that outlasts it. Whether that offers consolation or merely a kind of cold comfort is left for the reader to decide, and that ambiguity is part of why the poem lingers.