Spicer's "Suicide" never says what happens to its young man, and that restraint is the source of its power. We are given a single morning, a room, a window, a mirror, and a sequence of small, strange observations. The title tells us where all of it is heading, but the poem itself stays almost clinically quiet, as though describing a death by listing the things that have already stopped working.
It begins with a failure of memory: "At ten o'clock in the morning / The young man could not remember." The sentence breaks off without an object. He cannot remember what, exactly? The poem leaves the blank open, and the blank spreads. By the next lines his inner life has been reduced to props: "His heart was stuffed with dead wings / And linen flowers." Both images are of things that imitate life without being alive. Wings that cannot fly, flowers made of cloth, a heart stuffed like a taxidermied bird. The verb "stuffed" is especially cold; it suggests something hollowed out and then filled with filler. Even language is nearly gone: "there is nothing left / In his mouth but one word." We never learn the word, and its absence is what makes it ominous.
The images that follow keep turning the body and the room into dead matter. "Soft ashes / Fall from his arms" when he takes off his coat, as if he were already burned out from within. The window offers him "a tower," and then, in a small stutter, "a window and a tower." That repetition is revealing. He sees the same things twice because nothing new is arriving; perception has become a loop. The watch "has run down in its case," and, in one of the poem's eeriest turns, "He observes the way it was looking at him." The object now has a gaze, while the man has lost his own. Time has stopped, and the inanimate world has quietly taken over the work of watching.
The syntax mirrors this deadening. Almost every line is a short, flat statement in the present tense, and the grammar rarely varies: he is conscious, he sees, he observes. There is no rhyme, and no steady meter to carry us along; the couplet-like pairs of lines simply sit side by side, each one a separate, still image. Even the pronouns drift. The poem opens with "the young man," slides to "he," and ends with "the stiff geometric youngster," a phrase that turns a person into a shape. "Geometric" is a chilling adjective for a human being, suggesting angles without warmth, a figure drawn rather than lived.
The ending is the only moment of violence, and it is oddly double-edged. The youngster "Shatters the mirror with an ax," and then comes the final line: "The mirror submerges everything / In a great spurt of shadow." Notice who acts and who is acted upon. He strikes the mirror, but it is the mirror that overwhelms the scene, flooding the room with darkness. The earlier "shadow stretched / Upon a white silk cushion" returns here in enormous form. A mirror is where a self checks that it exists; breaking it can be read as an attempt to destroy the self, and the shadow that pours out suggests the attempt succeeds. This is an inference from the imagery rather than a stated fact, but the poem's whole logic points that way.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it handles a subject that is usually met with outcry or sentiment. There is no confession here, no explanation, no pleading, only objects, glances, and a final burst of dark. The reader is left to feel the numbness from the inside, which is more unsettling than being told about it. The poem proves that emptiness can be vividly described, and that a few exact, strange images can say what an argument never could.