Song (Coleridge version)

She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps, and lovers crowd around her, but her heart belongs to the dead. This is one of the most quietly devastating poems in English: a woman who has lost her soldier to war, returned home to find herself pursued by new suitors who cannot understand why she remains untouched. Hartley Coleridge, son of the great Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote this brief lyric with a restraint that makes it cut deeper than any wail of grief. The poem moves from her present loneliness to the grim arithmetic of war, asking who can know what fate holds in store for those left behind. There is no melodrama here, only the terrible patience of a woman waiting for a man who will never return, her youth fading in a house full of people who do not know her loss. It is a poem about the way grief isolates, about the cruelty of being surrounded by happiness when yours has been taken from you.