No Love In This House Poem Analysis

“Vigilante” - This poem is exactly what the title says it is. In this short poem, Komunyakaa describes the short journey of a hired vigilante. He describes the vigilante’s work to kill another fellow human as routine when he states that the vigilante in “a dusty boot in a stirrup / swings himself into a sweat-burnt saddle” (2). The dust on the boot describes and emphasizes how the due to the fact that he’s always being hired, the vigilante doesn’t have time to clean his shoes, and so they accumulate dust from his travels. The poem drives a sense of duty inside of me. This is because this vigilante so nonchalantly finishes the job that he is assigned by killing his opponent who can only “[bob] on the sights of five guns” (16). It makes me want to get work done in a quick and nonchalant manner as well. …show more content…
It seemed a little too easy to read at first, so I read it over again and realized that it is a really straightforward poem. The beginning of the poem begins with a very graphic scene of two lovers, the narrator and his wife, about to make love to one another. The rest of the poem follows the tone of the first stanza of the poem where the narrator continues to describe very vividly what he’s doing to his wife. Then when the poem reaches the climax along with the narrator, the title is appears. When the narrator “drive[s] [himself] into [her],” she begins to sing the name of some other man (16). A man who “propped / on another woman’s kitchen table” (18-19) This “another woman” can be inferred as the wife of the narrator who eventually found out who the man “in Rifle Gap” is and the connection he had with his wife (19,17). It’s very sad, this situation, because it happens to millions of people everyday; however, I also feel good knowing that the narrator found out in a better way than finding out on his deathbed or never at all like the great majority of