Wallflowers

This poem speaks about words--words we don't use, words we may not recognize, and words that may never find a "home." I feel like this poem generally talks about the depth of literacy. Shakespeare made his own words. How will we ever know if a word is a word until it is spoken? Where do these words exist? That is a question that the poem begs. Words are a person's own conceived ideas and notions that may not exist until they are merely thought. So this poem could be about a variety of subjects--words, thoughts, realities. But I think Donna Vorrey is talking about words here, as she pulls some from the shadowed corner and brings them to light--gegenshein, zoanthropy. Some words that are a rarity in our mind and in our own literature. Mrs. Vorrey was simply giving the stray words a home, right here in her poem.