"Semblances" opens with a joke that is also a confession. Roses, we are told, have "authority," and that authority "protects us from / Our rural selves." It is an odd way to put it. Roses are usually delicate things, decorative, a little sentimental, yet here they work like a bouncer or a bishop, guarding a gate between who the speakers are and who they would like to seem. The speakers take off their overalls and denim shirts, the clothes of work, to stand and admire flowers. Already the poem has set up its central tension: what a person wears and cultivates on the surface versus what lies underneath.
The second stanza turns this into a small social comedy. On Sunday afternoons the speakers put on "a dark blue tie, / Gray trousers" and receive guests "beside the blossoms." Even the rose has a name, "Talisman," which is both a real variety of rose and a word meaning a charm that wards off harm, so the flower literally becomes the lucky object that protects the performance. The ladies "delight," and the men "delight ourselves at playing gentlemen." That verb "playing" is the hinge of the poem. Gentility is not something these men are but something they act, like children dressing up, and the repetition of "delight" shows how the pleasure is half genuine and half self-congratulation.
The most telling line may be the quietest: "We convince ourselves of our meaning." Notice that the speakers are not convincing their guests but themselves. The drink in hand and the "proper words" are props, and the sentence admits that meaning here is manufactured rather than found. There is something tender in this, since the effort to be better than one's habits is a real human impulse, but also something uneasy, since the word "convince" always suggests that doubt is nearby.
Then the poem drops its mask. "All this is important," the speaker insists, and the phrase sounds almost defensive, as if answering an unseen accuser. The "even though" that follows lets the night in: "Night may find us brutal, / Throwing shoes at a bathroom wall, / Cursing through the door / At a wife in bed and crying." The details are small and strangely specific. Nobody smashes a house to pieces; shoes are thrown at a wall, and the cursing happens through a door, not face to face. The violence is half-hearted and humiliating, and it ends on the word "crying," which reframes the brutality as something closer to despair. The wife, unseen and silent, lies in bed behind a closed door, the one person who never gets to admire the roses on equal terms.
Formally, the poem matches this movement. There is no rhyme and no regular meter; the lines are conversational free verse, and the plainness is part of the effect. The first two stanzas run in longer, smoother, almost courteous sentences, while the final stanza breaks into a staccato list of participles ("Throwing," "Cursing," "crying") that feels like a loss of composure on the page. Even the pronoun matters. The constant "we" and "us" turns a private shame into something shared, as though this double life were a common condition rather than one man's secret.
What makes "Semblances" worth reading is its refusal to pick a side. It does not sneer at the roses or declare the Sunday self a lie and the nighttime self the truth. Both are real, and the title's plural, "Semblances," suggests that there may be no single true face at all, only appearances laid over appearances. The poem's discomfort lies in that possibility: that civility can be sincere and fragile at once, and that the garden may be less a place of beauty than a shelter that keeps the night from showing in daylight.