Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
A bleak poem. The stumbling, stuttering abjection of the semi-colon is utterly resonant. Loss and grief fragments us and we disunify. We lose our ‘I’ , our path. The haunting ‘call’ of the voice reaches out beyond the physical limits of the poem, somewhat grotesquely taunting the poet with what he yearns to hear but cannot. Should he pretend that he has access to the lost voice or should he admit ‘reality’, the solitary companionship of the leaves? The quiet devastation of the present particple and the isolating landscape of the wind and the thorn. Resonates.