When
the speaker says, "I am all longing," she means something like: "The very
existence of my being is yearning for that which I do not have." In other words, she is
deeply unhappy; she does not have anything that she wants and seems to acknowledge that she
never will.
This notion is reinforced in the setting of the poem which is
"a woody grove, under an oak-tree" in a "earthen cave." The speaker tells us
that her life underground reminds her of "all [her] friends" who "dwell in the
dirt." In other words, all of her friends are dead, and being underground just reminds her
of that disturbing fact.
Her daily life in the poem appears to revolve only
around mourning. She tells us:
There I may sit a
summer-long day,
where I can weep for my exiled path,
my many
miseriestherefore I can never
rest from these my minds sorrowings
While some might argue that the speaker is being hyperbolic, her
tone is quite seriousness. This is a women afflicted by severe melancholy, and she cannot seem
to...
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