"Shut Out" begins with a terrible discovery. The poem's speaker arrives at a place they know very well: a secret garden of their own. This is a beautiful place, "pied with all flowers," a fountain of color and scent. And it's very much theirs: "My garden, mine," the speaker calls it, with insistent polyptoton. But though this is their own special, private, beautiful place, someone else seems to have intruded on it: for unaccountably, the gate is shut and locked.
The shape of the first lines mirrors the speaker's dilemma and their feelings. Listen to the powerful caesurae here:
The door was shut. || I looked between
Its iron bars; || and saw it lie,
The first line comes to an abrupt halt in the middle, just as the speaker comes to an abrupt halt at the locked door of their garden. And the semicolon in the second line slices through the speaker's vision just as those "iron bars" do.
Meanwhile, persistent assonance—"iron," "lie," "mine," "sky," "pied"—keeps a /eye/ sound pulsing through the lines like a thin high cry.
These pained, shocked, frustrated lines open a poem about an exile both literal and symbolic. The speaker will tell their story of loss in a form Christina Rossetti borrowed from In Memoriam A.H.H.—Alfred, Lord Tennyson's famous elegy for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam:
- Both poems are built from quatrains (or four-line stanzas) of iambic tetrameter. That means that each line uses four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "My gard- | en, mine, | beneath | the sky").
- And both poems use the same rhyme scheme: a circling ABBA pattern that means each stanza returns to the rhyme it started on.
- That's a suitable form for poems about loss and grief. Just as each stanza's rhymes circle back on themselves, Tennyson returns and returns to thoughts of his dead friend, and Rossetti's speaker returns and returns to their lost garden—both in fact and in thought.