How do structural choices in Charles Simic's "At the Vacancy Sign" convey sadness?

In “At the Vacancy Sign,” Charles Simic expresses many negative emotions; his structural choices reflect that sadness. Let's look at how this works.

First, notice the short, choppy lines of the poem. They provide a staccato rhythm that taps out a near despair. Also, look at how fragmented each stanza is. There is not a single complete sentence in this poem. Every phrase is an incomplete fragment, often left hanging without a verb, a subject, or both. These choices leave us staggering from phrase to phrase, image to image, wondering where the poem is going.

Let's look at an example from the fourth stanza:

Dark suit,
Empty sleeves dangling
On a chair across the room.

This bleak image is split into short phrases, which contributes to its bleakness. The rhythm is choppy, and the sentence is incomplete. Like the empty suit, it is missing something. The suit is missing the human being, while the lines are missing the spark of hope; their structure reflects their content.

Now read through the poem again, and pick out a couple more examples of places where the poem's structure mirrors its imagery or message. Indeed, you will find that the poet does an excellent job of weaving sadness and negativity directly into his poem.

How does "At the Vacancy Sign" express sadness through its structural choices?

The emotion of sadness appears in the poem's structural choices because Charles Simic builds “At the Vacancy Sign” around short words and enjambed lines.

The words comprising “At the Vacancy Sign” are neither grand nor cheery. Simic sticks to small words that have flat sounds. The largest words contain three syllables—“imagine” in line 8 and “Vacancy” in the title. By choosing to structure his poem around truncated words, Simic produces a tone of sadness. Indeed, sad people might often feel clipped or cut off. Their feelings of sorrow may accompany a sense of diminishment or austerity. In Simic’s poem, the words have to make do without many syllables. Additionally, the words don’t sound cheerful. There are not a great deal of bouncy, springy vowel sounds. The curtailed syllables produce a poem that sounds flat, stark, gloomy, or sad. Moreover, many of the words carry connotations of sorrow or abnegation: "small," "grim," scarce," "alone," "thin," and "quiet."

Another way Simic’s structural choices reflect the emotion of sadness appear is through enjambments. Only four of the eleven lines feature end-stops—an explicit grammatical transition, such as a comma or period. Over half of the poem’s lines are enjambed, so they topple into the next line without an overt break. The dominance of enjambments arguably creates a connotation of sadness in that the lack of pauses and breaks mimics the sense of endlessness or hopelessness that so often accompanies despair.