Silence Isolation Quotes

Superior people don't need your constant company. But it doesn't sound like they're fine with being alone all the time. They don't make long visits, but presumably they still do make visits.

In what way is the cat self-reliant? We might initially assume that the cat is self-reliant in how it hunts. It doesn't need anyone else's help to find and catch the mouse. But that's not what the speaker's father describes here. Instead, he describes the cat running off to eat its prey privately – in other words, the cat is self-reliant in that he doesn't need anyone else around to enjoy himself. It's not getting the mouse but enjoying the mouse that the cat wants to do alone.

If these superior people are robbed of speech by speech, we assume they've been talking to someone. After all, whose speech delighted them? Like the cat that wants to enjoy his mouse alone, these superior people sound like they might be a little selfish. They grab onto something great someone else has said, but then they want to keep their delight to themselves? That's not exactly enjoying solitude – that's picking and choosing when you want someone around and when you don't. Is that really fair?

According to the speaker's father, we should be OK with solitude and we should be self-reliant. We assume with this quote, however, that the father describes how we can show our deepest feelings to other people. Why does it matter if our feelings are revealed to others or not? If we are truly self-reliant, shouldn't we be fine with just having our feelings and not caring if anyone notices we're having them?

The poem begins with the speaker's father saying that superior people don't make long visits, which suggests that these people prefer not to stay too long. They, for their own reasons, want to keep everything short and sweet. In the poem's last two lines, we realize that, actually, it's the father who doesn't want them to stay too long. Superior people aren't necessarily those who like to keep moving, but rather those who understand the implicit message in "Make my house your inn."