Some poems about exclusion shout; "Of Proportion" does something quieter and more unsettling. Its speaker stands outside a place he can see but never enter, and he describes it in the calm, orderly language of the very kingdom that rejects him. The kingdom is "proportion": harmony, symmetry, the mathematical beauty of "spheres and other equal bodies." The speaker is a hunchback by birth, and the poem is the record of what it means to be measured against a standard of perfection that he, by definition, cannot meet.
The opening line sets up an almost courtly fantasy. Proportion has a "kingdom," a word that suggests hierarchy, privilege, borders. Those inside "dance" the "fearless symmetries," and the adjective is telling. Symmetry here is not just beautiful but brave, as though being whole were a kind of confidence the speaker has been denied. The second stanza shifts into the vocabulary of geometry and commerce at once: "propositions," "spheres," "prosperity," "act and publish." The perfect shapes are not only admired but successful; they flourish and broadcast their own excellence. The speaker, meanwhile, receives their glory as mere "news," something that reaches him secondhand.
The most striking image arrives in the third stanza: "I was marred in the firing, hurt in finish." This is the language of pottery. The speaker imagines himself as a vessel that cracked in the kiln, a flawed object rather than a person. That metaphor is quietly cruel, because it takes the judgment of others, the "eye judging me neither simple nor whole," and lets it harden into self-description. Notice, too, how the flaw spreads. The "hand afflicted by the eyesight's tremor" suggests that being looked at badly makes his own perception shaky. Being seen as imperfect, the poem implies, damages the ability to act.
The musical stanza deepens the sense of failure. He calls "music into my partial soul," and the word "partial" is the key: he is not merely physically incomplete but feels spiritually fragmentary. Yet the music will not come. "The strings slack at the hesitant invitation, / The horns silence on the penultimate note." That last detail is painfully precise. The music dies not at the beginning but one note short of completion, which mirrors the speaker's whole predicament: he gets close, and the final resolution is always withheld.
Formally, the poem is unrhymed, but it is far from loose. Each stanza has three lines, and the lines are long, stately and roughly iambic, with enough variation to keep them from sounding mechanical. Here lies a quiet irony: a poem about the impossibility of perfect proportion is itself carefully proportioned. The balanced tercets and measured lines show the speaker's longing to belong to exactly the order he describes. He can build the form of symmetry; he cannot live inside it.
The final stanza turns on a beautiful and chilling image: "simple doors of perfect, unclouded crystal." Crystal is transparent, so the speaker can see in, but it is also hard, and the doors are closed. Those who have passed through "return no echo," and the poem ends not on the speaker's pain but on the imagined reward of those inside, honored by "pure equations" while "their bodies and straight souls respond." The pun is hard to miss: "straight" means both upright and morally clean, and the poem lets physical shape slide into judgments about worth. That slide is what the poem quietly exposes.
What makes "Of Proportion" significant is that it refuses easy consolation. There is no moment of defiance, no declaration that the speaker's difference is secretly beautiful. Instead, the poem shows how a cultural ideal of harmony can function as a locked door, and how someone excluded by it may come to speak in its terms. The reader is left uncomfortable in a productive way, asking who gets to define wholeness, and what it costs those who are told they fall short of it.