Few feelings are as ordinary, or as hard to put into words, as missing someone. John B. Colwell's "Dear Friend of Old" takes on that feeling in four short stanzas and arrives at a firm conclusion: separation is real, but it cannot touch the bond between two true friends. The poem moves from the pain of absence to a confident assertion of freedom, and the interest lies in how carefully it earns that confidence.
The opening stanza sets up a paradox about time. The days since the speaker last "clasped your hands" feel "multiplied, as desert sands," endless and uncountable, "And yet, how swift their pace!" Both things are true at once, and anyone who has missed someone will recognize it: the waiting drags, yet the weeks vanish. The image of the hands is quiet but telling. The speaker remembers the friend through a physical gesture of greeting, a reminder that the loss is felt in the body as much as in the mind.
The second stanza turns from time to space. "River, plain, and mountain trail" is a small catalogue of obstacles, and the poem lets the distance feel enormous before offering its odd, delicate simile: the miles stretch "as distance woven in a veil." A veil is a strange thing to compare a continent to. It suggests something that hides rather than blocks, something thin enough to see through. Already the speaker is hinting that the distance may be less solid than it looks, a covering over the friendship, not a wall through it.
The third stanza is the most interesting, because it admits something the rest of the poem might prefer to skip. The speaker is held in place by "little cares," described as "bands of steel." Then comes the hesitation: "(or are they gold? / For duty is both stern and dear.)" The parenthesis is the poem's most human moment. The speaker catches himself mid-complaint and corrects it, recognizing that the obligations that keep him from his friend are also things he values. The brackets work like a spoken aside, a thought half-whispered. Steel and gold sit side by side, one image of confinement and one of treasure, and the poem refuses to choose between them. That honesty keeps the final stanza from sounding too easy.
That final stanza is built like a verdict. "Not Time, nor Space, nor Cares That Be" gathers the three obstacles from the earlier stanzas, one each, and dismisses them together. The capital letters on Time, Space, and Cares give them the weight of personified opponents, as if they were three forces lined up against the friendship and defeated in a single line. The vocabulary shifts here too, from the concrete and physical (hands, sands, trail, steel) to the abstract and spiritual: "desire," "thought," "free." The speaker is bound in body but free in mind, and the closing words, "my friend forever," settle the matter with simple finality.
The form supports this movement. The poem is written in alternating longer and shorter lines, roughly four beats followed by three, a pattern familiar from hymns and ballads, and the rhymes (hands/sands, face/pace, between/between's echo in veil, hold/gold) give it a steady, song-like quality. The rhyme scheme is mostly alternating, though it loosens slightly in places; "veil" only half-answers "trail," and the third stanza's rhymes feel a little less settled, perhaps fittingly, since that is the stanza of doubt. The meter flows smoothly, which suits the poem's gentle, sincere tone.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It makes no dramatic claims about heartbreak and uses no elaborate metaphors. Its plain language and its willingness to complicate its own complaint make the final declaration believable. It suggests that friendship is not measured in days or miles but in the thought that crosses them freely.