“Blank Sonnet” explores the possibility of meaningless language through seclusion. This idea of language can also be conveyed through a school of formal linguistics called structuralism. In structuralism, signification is a process which contains two concepts; the signifier and the signified. The signified refers to the concept or image, while the signifier is simply the word that represents the concept. Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structuralism and signification, proposed that the signifier exists only for its use in social practice. “Blank Sonnet” agrees with this idea, as the speaker “yearns to sleep beneath a patchwork quilt of rum”, signaling that he wishes to be left alone to drink and sleep (which also happens to inherently be lonely). Secondly, he writes,
“Lovely Shelley, / I have no use for measured, cadenced verse / If you won’t read”. If we assume to be Shelley to be a past lover, the speaker’s point-of-view becomes much clearer. In absolute solitude, he no longer sees the usefulness in signifiers (words). This sentiment is also expressed in the closing of the poem:

“Icarus-like, I’ll fall Against this page of snow, tumble blackly
Across vision to drown in the white sea
That closes every poem -- the white reverse
That cancels the blackness of each image”,

wherein the speaker is talking about the way poems end, how the black ink that makes up the text turns into a sea of white, essentially comparing written words to meaningless colors.