Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.
A Woman and Her Dead HusbandD. H. Lawrence
A
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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—!
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!
After all, this cold, hard man?
—Ah no, look up at me,
Tell me it isn’t true,
That you’re only frightening me!
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.