"The Next Table" – Lust
The central theme of the poem is lust. In the poem the speaker closely watches a young man who sits at the table next to her in a casino. Even though he is clearly only in his early twenties, something in the speaker convinces him that he has slept with him decades ago. He cannot stop watching his every movement, imagining the sexual encounters he is certain they’ve already had and pictures him naked in great detail, while forgetting everything else around them. The speaker clearly physically desires the young man as he is focused entirely on his body and not once mentions his character or mind.
While he claims that it “isn’t some erotic fantasy” (l. 4), the context of the poem hardly allows it to be anything else. The young man does not to recognize him and he claims that their encounter is about as long ago as the man is old. This might only be an inner excuse for him to feel this lust about a stranger much younger than himself.
"Walls" – Social Isolation
The central theme of the poem is the loneliness and social isolation the speaker feels. While he was distracted, the titular walls were erected around him, isolating him from the rest of the world. Now, the speaker is stuck, feeling lonely and incapable of joining society by himself again. He does not clearly state who put him in this prison, but alludes to a number of people who intentionally separated the speaker from themselves, which further emphasizes how lonely he is.
"An Old Man" – Regret
The major theme of the poem is regret. The poem portrays an old man in a café, seemingly focused on the newspaper in front of him. Internally however, the man is consumed by regret and anger about his life. He blames Time for going by too quickly for him to really make something out of his life before it was too late as well as Youth for falsely promising him to last forever.
Ironically, it is regret that keeps the old man from enjoying what little time he has left now. Instead of actually doing something, even something as trivial as reading the newspaper and engaging with the world, he is trapped in his own mind, until these feelings exhaust him enough to fall asleep.
