The first line is a classic rhetorical question, addressed apparently to a sympathetic audience of fellow searchers, appealing to their general agreement: 'Who would consent to be taunted for failure in a search?' Obviously, anyone would try to avoid such a sneer. As so often, we can't tell who or what is under discussion until we've waited-- under mushairah performance conditions-- for the second line. Then when we hear the second line, initially it seems that it might be a sensible sequel to the first line. When the speaker saw that the search was proving fruitless, that the object of search was simply not turning up-- well, naturally he'd take some kind of preventive action, so he wouldn't have to come home to a chorus of taunts and jeers. But what does this action consist of? Why, losing his own self, of course! And then, peculiarly enough, coming back. The grammar is clear: , with the colloquial omission of : 'having lost, came'. This spectacularly counterintuitive strategy has one great advantage: he is now immune to being taunted. For since he himself is not really 'there', who is there to listen to the taunts? Thus, with a jolt, we now re-experience the first line. What we thought was a rhetorical question is now also a literal one-- indeed, who would listen, since the returned seeker is not really there? Perhaps the taunt will fall flat for want of an audience, or perhaps it won't even be spoken at all. Or alternatively, perhaps the taunt would have been made on the road, by the other 'people of the search', and by going 'back', the speaker has confessed his failure and escaped their jeers. There's even a more enjoyably radical reading, if we take 'he/she/it' [] to refer to the speaker's own self. Perhaps he went out in search of his own lost, strayed, or stolen self, but he couldn't find it anywhere; having recognized that he had well and truly lost it, he had to return without it. Thus he may, alas, be subjected to taunts for having lost it, but what choice does he have? He simply can't find it anywhere! One way or another, the verse obviously enjoys playing with paradox . There's also the clever phonetic almost-doubling of . graphics/emptiness.jpg