Few love poems begin by complaining about how hard loving is, and fewer still begin in another language. Jack Spicer's «Song of the Poor» opens and closes with a Spanish couplet, "Ay que trabajo me cuesta / quererte como te quiero!", which can be rendered roughly as "Oh, what effort it costs me to love you the way I love you!" The key word is *trabajo*, which means both "work" and "trouble." Love here is not a gift or a flowering but a job, and an exhausting one. The poem keeps that Spanish refrain untranslated, as if the feeling were too old or too bodily to be carried over into English, and the English lines in between respond to it like an echo trying to explain itself.
What follows is strange and tender. Because the speaker loves, the table, the heart and the lamplight "feel sorry" for him. The grammar is the first surprise. We expect people to pity a lover, perhaps, but here pity comes from furniture and light. The list is also oddly democratic: "the table / And the heart and the lamplight" puts a heart on the same level as a piece of wood and a source of illumination. The "and" repeated between them flattens everything into a household inventory. The speaker's inner life seems to have spilled into the room, so that his feeling is not private but something the whole domestic world can see and sympathize with. Nothing in the poem answers him except these objects, and the beloved, addressed as "you," never speaks at all.
The second stanza swerves into a question that sounds like a street vendor's cry: "Who will buy from me / That small belt I have / And that sadness of white thread / To weave handkerchiefs?" This is where the title earns its meaning. The speaker is poor, and the only goods he can offer for sale are a small belt and, remarkably, "sadness of white thread." Sadness is turned into a material, something spun and woven into handkerchiefs, the cloth we use for wiping tears. There is a quiet logic in it: if grief is all you own, you can at least make something useful from it. But the question hangs unanswered. No one buys, and the poem does not pretend otherwise. The word "small" in "small belt" deepens the humility, since even the possessions are diminished.
The structure is a kind of frame. The Spanish couplet opens and closes the poem, with the middle built from two parallel three-line stanzas that differ only slightly. The first uses "the table / And the heart and the lamplight," the second "the ceiling / And the heart and the air." The heart is the one constant, while the surroundings shift from table to ceiling and from lamplight to air, moving upward and outward, as though the pity were rising through the house and dissolving into the atmosphere. Between these two refrains sits the vendor's question, so that the poem's center is a plea for a buyer, flanked by the objects' sympathy. There is no regular rhyme in the English, and the short lines have a speech-like, unadorned rhythm that suits a song of the poor, plain and without ornament.
Part of the poem's significance lies in this mix of languages and voices. The Spanish lines read like a borrowed folk lament, while the English lines sound like someone absorbing that lament and answering it in his own plain words. The effect is of a very old kind of song, the song of unrequited or burdensome love, being passed along rather than invented. What the poem finally suggests is that love can make a person feel poor in the most literal sense: stripped down to a few objects, a bit of thread, and a feeling no one will purchase. Yet the poem also quietly contradicts its own sadness. By turning the table, the lamp and the ceiling into witnesses, it shows a speaker who is, strangely, never alone. If no person pities him, the whole room does, and in that crowded, sympathetic emptiness the poem finds its own odd comfort.