Read Jill Alexander Essbaum's "The Heart" (1971): Four simple chambers.A thousand complicated doors.One of them is yours. My professor asked...

The poem
is addressed to somebody who the speaker loves. For the sake of clarity, we shall assume for the
moment that the speaker is a woman and that the addressee is a man. The speaker in the poem is
telling the man that there is a place in her heart for him or perhaps that there is a way to her
heart for him.

The human heart is comprised of four chambers, which are
called the right atrium, the left atrium, the right ventricle, and the left ventricle. Between
these chambers, there are valves which control the circulation of the blood between the
chambers.

In the poem, the speaker refers to "Four Simple Chambers"
and "A thousand Complicated Doors." The "Chambers" and "Doors" are
here intended as puns (or play on words). This is because they at once connote the biological
components of the human heart, whereby the doors represent the valves and also literal chambers
(meaning rooms) and doors.

The question I think your professor is asking you
to grapple with is why the poet would use these two words, "Chambers" and
"Doors," to mean two different things at once. On the one hand, the image of rooms and
doors connotes a physical space, and on the other hand, the chambers and doors (if we take doors
to represent valves) represent a human heart.

Perhaps the speaker
deliberately creates these two contrasting, simultaneous images to suggest that her heart, in a
figurative sense, is a complicated, labyrinthine place. The implication might be that her
emotions are complicated or that there are lots of people who she loves and who have a place in
her heart.