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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  D. H. Lawrence

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

A Woman and Her Dead Husband

D. H. Lawrence

AH stern cold man,

How can you lie so relentless hard

While I wash you with weeping water!

Ah face, carved hard and cold,

You have been like this, on your guard

Against me, since death began.

You masquerader!

How can you shame to act this part

Of unswerving indifference to me?

It is not you; why disguise yourself

Against me, to break my heart,

You evader?

You’ve a warm mouth,

A good warm mouth always sooner to soften

Even than your sudden eyes.

Ah cruel, to keep your mouth

Relentless, however often

I kiss it in drouth.

You are not he.

Who are you, lying in his place on the bed

And rigid and indifferent to me?

His mouth, though he laughed or sulked,

Was always warm and red

And good to me.

And his eyes could see

The white moon hang like a breast revealed

By the slipping shawl of stars,

Could see the small stars tremble

As the heart beneath did wield

Systole, diastole.

And he showed it me

So, when he made his love to me;

And his brows like rocks on the sea jut out,

And his eyes were deep like the sea

With shadow, and he looked at me,

Till I sank in him like the sea,

Awfully.

Oh, he was multiform—

Which then was he among the manifold?

The gay, the sorrowful, the seer?

I have loved a rich race of men in one—

But not this, this never-warm

Metal-cold—!

Ah masquerader!

With your steel face white-enamelled,

Were you he, after all, and I never

Saw you or felt you in kissing?

—Yet sometimes my heart was trammelled

With fear, evader!

Then was it you

After all, this cold, hard man?

—Ah no, look up at me,

Tell me it isn’t true,

That you’re only frightening me!

You will not stir,

Nor hear me, not a sound.

—Then it was you—

And all this time you were

Like this when I lived with you.

It is not true,

I am frightened, I am frightened of you

And of everything.

O God!—God too

Has deceived me in everything,

In everything.