This poem’s speaker is a woman who is disillusioned with, and may feel guilty
about the relationship she is in. The studio apartment in which she lives,
(maybe with her lover and/or husband) symbolically parallels the relationship.
Lines 1-7 suggest that she used to have an ideal vision of the relationship (and
the studio), but in the cold light of the morning, the vision disappears. The
studio’s deteriorated state symbolizes the state of the relationship. Another
way to put it is that her perception of the studio’s state reflects her
sadness. She perceives the studio’s disrepair when she has lost her rose
colored glasses. Lines 8-14 describe more of the studio’s messiness. For
example, remnants of the previous night’s love (the bottles of wine) now
appear dead and empty, suggesting to me, that these signs of the studio’s
dirtiness, are symptoms of the problem but don’t create the problem itself.
The relationship seems to be the problem. In lines 15-22 the lover is described
as bored and incommunicative. The speaker, perhaps motivated by her guilt, makes
an attempt to clean the studio and just maybe, her allowing the coffee pot to
boil over could be interpreted as symbolizing her allowing her lover to continue
to behave as he does. The final four lines appear to indicate that while the
speaker regains her idealized vision of the relationship at night, every
morning, she knows that it will disappear again.