There is a common critical opinion that for Roethke, "all problems centered in the self" …, and that "one of Roethke's gravest limitations [was] that his feeling for the specifically human dimension [was] insecure"…. What little critical comment there is on Roethke's "Dolor" places the poem against this background of the preoccupied self, and sees it as the exception that proves the rule. For example, for Karl Malkoff, "Dolor" is "the possible exception" to his opinion that "Roethke was never able to write very good poetry about society." And the poem is Kenneth Burke's exception to his opinion that in The Lost Son, Roethke "goes as far as humanly possible in quest of a speech wholly devoid of abstractions."

My point is that "Dolor" is no proving exception at all. Instead, the poem itself demonstrates the rule. Roethke does use abstract words; but he connects them so personally to the intimate experience of the poem that he renders them concrete. (p. 25)

The opening of the poem may seem forced—a conscious echo of "Prufrock" … but it is neither abstract nor melodramatic. The personal emotion attaches itself to the otherwise neutral object. The emotion charges the object, and in turn the object holds the personal emotion accessible on the page. What makes Roethke's perception doubly accessible, then, is this imaginative tension between the (personal) emotion and the (common) object, and—in language—between the abstract and the concrete word.

This accessibility begins to broaden in the fourth line, "Desolation in immaculate public places." For the first time in the poem, the dolorous prepositional phrases are interrupted—almost in the nick of time—by a flat, convincing statement. Up to this point, the tension in the poem has resided not in some metaphoric likeness-unlikeness, as much as in the personal emotion at work upon common detail—then back. Here in the fourth line the pairings begin to become inevitable as the reader is convinced of the poem's slant of perception by the line's general truth-in-experience…. There is just enough sadness available in the real objects of daily life. To it, Roethke supplies the personal charge. The result makes convincing even the "unalterable pathos" of the three-line catalog of abstraction-object that follows….

Roethke's accumulation of emotional detail climaxes once again in the eighth line in "Endless duplication of lives and objects." There has been so much duplication of prepositional pairings in the poem, so much convincing tension of emotion (lives) and objects, that it could as well go on endlessly. Instead, Roethke broadens his catalog of despair out further into experience to embrace all our lives, all our objects.

The poem's final climax strikes at the end of its last five lines. The closing vision depends upon the duplicated tension that precedes it—as much as the tension itself requires inexorable resolution and focus. Through the last five lines of the poem, Roethke springs his syntax. He introduces dust in the ninth line, calls it common bland flour, amplifies its quiet threat, then springs the verb—"sift." Roethke broadens his terror "through the long afternoons of tedium," quietly down corridors of common experience. The insidious film—of crystalized despair—coats our lives, glazes the duplicate faces turned grey with despair itself. Roethke's multigraph repetition of "duplicate" is superb. The vision he finds endlessly in the lives and objects of the first part of the poem re-doubles here at the end. The endless repetition of despair seen everywhere in the objects of the poem settles rhythmically in upon the heart. "Standard" suspends the last line an instant like a sigh, grey standard type, grey paper, grey dust, depression grey walls, duplicated everywhere. Standard upon our faces, the external despair closes in and in. (p. 26)