Ernest Rhys. The Woman of Sorrows. Harriet Monroe, ed. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912-22

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912–22.

The Woman of Sorrows

By Ernest Rhys


TO bed I went for rest, no rest there to find:
Day might sleep, nor I; midnight waked my mind.
Oh a heavy wall has sorrow, a gloomy hedge has care:
They kept me close, kept me fast; held and bound me there.

The wind in the keyhole, it whimpered bitterly,	5
And I got up to open to my crying baby.
I’m not ashamed to cry myself, but I’m too proud to pray
To have the only things I’ve left rolled up and put away.

That was a babeless woman—Helen of Troy:
She never knew the sorrow, and never half the joy.	10
I pity the poor women that childing never knew,
And the nestling of the babe, that crying hungry grew.

Would you take from my bosom the feeling of my child?
As soon take the curlew, crying from the wild.
Oh my sorrow for my babe is become my baby.	15
The one they have taken, the other cannot be.

When you see the dog cast for the ewe in the snow;
When you watch the mother-thrush, with her nest broke below;
Or look in the eyes of the dead that cannot look,
You may think of my baby and the breast it forsook.	20