Loneliness is usually described as a kind of emptiness, but I. L. Salomon's "I Lie Alone" begins by filling the bed to bursting. The speaker is physically by himself, yet the opening stanza turns "alone" into a trick of grammar: "I lie alone, yet lie with many selves." Over three stanzas, the poem moves from a night of anxious insomnia to a strange, calm vision in which solitude and wholeness turn out to be the same thing. Its central idea is stated in the penultimate line: "The finite and the infinite are one."
The poem is built like a slow breathing exercise. Its first line gives us three verbs, "I breathe, I think, I dream," and the final line brings them back in the same order, so that the poem ends exactly where it began. The change is that the opening line is a flat statement of existing, while the last one comes after "Awake once more," as if the whole poem were one long exhalation and the speaker has returned to himself renewed. The repetition of "I lie alone" at the start of each stanza works like a refrain or a tide, and each time it arrives it means something slightly different: first a complaint, then a metaphysical puzzle, finally something close to acceptance.
Formally, the poem is steady and traditional. The lines are mostly iambic pentameter, the long, speech-like line of English poetry, and the rhymes are loose enough to feel natural rather than forced. In the first stanza, "sleep" is answered by "creep," and "shelves" by "selves," a rhyme that quietly links the books on the wall with the divided self in the bed. Some of the rhymes are only approximate ("noise" and "Foscolo," "all" and "ritual" come closer to echo than to perfect match), which suits a poem about something that cannot quite be pinned down. The final stanza tightens things: "is" rhymes with "certainties," and "stream" with "dream," giving the ending a settled, resolved sound the earlier stanzas lack.
The imagery is where the poem is most alive, and much of it is paradoxical. The first stanza's "silences unspeakable as noise" makes quiet so intense that it becomes a din, and this "filtrating solitude" seeps into the room like water. The speaker's reaction is wonderfully physical: he creeps "under the cover to snuggle in the flesh / Of my beloved in drowse." Before any philosophy arrives, the poem admits a simple human fear and a simple human comfort. Meanwhile the moonlight whitens the poets on the shelves, "Frost and Foscolo" in the first stanza, "the Poems of Li-Po" in the last. The moon is a kind of silent reader moving along the bookcase, and the spread of names, an American, an Italian, a Chinese poet, suggests that this private bedroom contains a whole world's literature. The speaker is never as alone as he feels, because he is surrounded by other voices.
The second stanza is the strangest and most ambitious. Here dreaming becomes dangerous and godlike: "I drown whole worlds and it is I I drown." The doubled "I" in that line is striking, since the drowner and the drowned are the same person. The "third eye" that "oversees the ritual" suggests a part of the mind standing back to watch the rest, which the poem seems to present as a kind of spiritual detachment, though that reading is an inference. The soul and flesh each try to escape the other, and the speaker glimpses an "enormous Light" in his own "universe." Yet the stanza still ends on "an unending night," so the vision is real but not yet comforting.
The comfort arrives in the last stanza, where the speaker is "Hushed on the surface of a dazzling stream." The image is lovely because it holds two opposites at once: a stream is always moving, yet he rests on top of it. That matches the line "No end to endless change," which sounds like a contradiction until you feel how it works. Change itself becomes the one thing that never changes, and therefore a certainty.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses the easy version of either mood. It does not pretend loneliness is pleasant, and it does not stay trapped in despair. It takes a very ordinary experience, lying awake at night, and shows how the mind, given enough darkness, can turn it into a small revelation.