Anne Bradstreet stands as a monumental figure in the landscape of early American literature, not merely because she was the first poet to be published in the New World, but because her work offers a profound window into the interior life of the seventeenth-century Puritan woman. Her poem, "In my Solitary houres in my dear husband his Absence," is a testament to the complex negotiation between human affection and divine devotion that defined her spiritual existence. To read this poem is to enter a private chapel constructed of words, where the boundaries between the domestic sphere and the sacred realm dissolve. It is a work of intimate supplication, crafted during a time of physical separation from her husband, Simon Bradstreet. Yet, to view it simply as a lament of loneliness would be to overlook its theological sophistication and its emotional resilience. The poem operates as a meditative prayer, navigating the treacherous waters of attachment, ensuring that love for a spouse does not usurp the primacy of love for the Creator. Through a careful examination of its historical context, its linguistic textures, and its philosophical underpinnings, one can appreciate how Bradstreet transforms a moment of personal vulnerability into a universal exploration of faith, dependence, and the ordering of the human heart.

To fully grasp the weight of this poem, one must first inhabit the world from which it emerged. The Massachusetts Bay Colony of the mid-seventeenth century was a society governed by a rigorous theological framework where every event, from the changing of the seasons to the absence of a spouse, was viewed through the lens of Divine Providence. For the Puritan, nothing happened by chance; all occurrences were either trials of faith or manifestations of God's will. In this context, solitude was not merely a physical state but a spiritual condition ripe for examination. When Simon Bradstreet traveled on political business, leaving Anne behind to manage the household and the children, the resulting silence was not empty. It was filled with the imperative to pray. For a woman in this era, whose public voice was largely circumscribed by patriarchal structures, the private prayer closet offered a rare space of agency and expression. Bradstreet's poetry often inhabits this liminal space, functioning as both a personal diary and a public declaration of faith. In this specific text, the "Solitary houres" are not wasted in despair but are consecrated as a time for communion with God. The historical reality of the era, characterized by high mortality rates, dangerous travel, and the constant threat of disease, amplifies the urgency of her verses. When she speaks of "losse and sicknes," she is not employing hyperbole; she is referencing the ever-present shadows that haunted colonial life. Thus, the poem is grounded in a tangible reality where separation could easily become permanent, making the act of trusting God with a husband's safety a profound exercise in surrender.

The central tension of the poem lies in the hierarchy of love. Bradstreet opens with a direct address to the Divine, establishing an immediate intimacy. She does not approach God as a distant monarch but as a listener who "hear'st my dayly moan" and sees her "dropping teares." This imagery of weeping is significant. In the stoic ideal of the time, particularly for women who were expected to be helpmeets and pillars of stability, the admission of tears is a vulnerability. However, Bradstreet frames this vulnerability not as a weakness of faith, but as evidence of a relationship. She posits that her troubles are "Thee before," suggesting that the very act of suffering drives her closer to the Divine. This aligns with the Puritan concept of affliction as a means of grace. Yet, the poem quickly moves to the crux of its emotional conflict: the love for her husband. She admits openly, "Tho' husband dear bee from me gone, / Whom I doe love so well." There is no attempt to diminish her earthly love. She does not claim to be indifferent to his absence. Instead, she introduces a comparative theology. She acknowledges a "more beloved one / Whose comforts far excell." This distinction is vital. Bradstreet is not rejecting marital love; she is ordering it. In the philosophical tradition of ordered love, to love a created thing more than the Creator is to risk idolatry. By affirming that God's comforts excel those of her husband, she protects herself from the devastation that would come if her entire emotional ecosystem relied solely on Simon's presence. This is a sophisticated emotional strategy. It allows her to miss him deeply without being destroyed by that missing. It is a balancing act between the warmth of human connection and the stability of divine assurance.

As the poem progresses, the literary devices employed serve to deepen the sense of intimacy and physical presence. Bradstreet makes extensive use of apostrophe, the direct address to an absent or imaginary person, in this case, God. This device transforms the poem from a meditation into a conversation. She notes that "With Thee my Soul can talk / In secrett places." Here, the concept of privacy is redefined. The "secrett places" are not physical rooms but states of spiritual communion found "Where I doe kneel or walk." This suggests that the sacred is not confined to the meetinghouse but permeates the domestic and natural world. The physical acts of kneeling and walking ground the spiritual experience in the body. Bradstreet's poetry is often noted for its lack of abstract etherealness; she brings heaven down to earth. When she speaks of her "weaknes... Of Body and of mind," she is acknowledging the somatic reality of her faith. She is not a disembodied spirit praying; she is a woman with aching limbs and a weary mind seeking sustenance. This embodiment makes the poem accessible and deeply human. The reader feels the weight of her fatigue and the sincerity of her reliance. The language is plain, devoid of the ornate metaphors found in some of her metaphysical contemporaries, yet it carries a heavy emotional load. The simplicity of the diction mirrors the Puritan aesthetic of plainness, where truth is valued over ornamentation. However, within this plainness, there are moments of striking metaphorical power.

One such moment occurs when she states, "I'll on thy mercyes roll." This verb, "roll," is active and tactile. It evokes the image of casting a heavy burden onto another. It implies that her worries have weight and substance, and that the act of faith is a physical transfer of that weight to God. This imagery resonates with the biblical tradition of casting cares upon the Lord, but in Bradstreet's hands, it feels immediate and personal. It suggests a dynamic relationship where God is an active participant in bearing the load of her daily existence. Furthermore, her assertion that "In Thee Alone is more than All" serves as the theological anchor of the poem. It is a statement of sufficiency. In a world where material security was fragile, the claim that God constitutes "more than All" is a radical assertion of value. It reorients the economy of the soul. If God is the sum of all value, then the temporary absence of a husband, while painful, does not constitute a total loss. This perspective does not negate the pain, but it contextualizes it within a larger framework of abundance.

The emotional climax of the poem arrives when the abstract devotion turns into a specific petition. After establishing her trust and acknowledging God's supremacy, she makes her request: "Bring back my husband, I beseech." This moment is crucial for understanding Bradstreet's honesty. She does not remain in the realm of abstract submission. She wants her husband back. She reminds God of past faithfulness, noting, "As thou didst once my Sonne." This reference to the recovery of a sick child adds a layer of biographical specificity that grounds the poem in the history of her family's survival. It functions as a rhetorical strategy, appealing to God's consistency. If God has acted mercifully before, He can do so again. This reveals a woman who is not passively accepting her fate but is actively engaging with the Divine through the logic of covenant. She reminds God of His own nature and past actions as a basis for her current hope. Yet, even in this request, she maintains her theological framework. She asks for his return so that they may "serve Thee better than before." The reunion is not desired merely for personal happiness but for the enhancement of their collective worship. The marital relationship is sublimated into a partnership for divine service. This reflects the Puritan view of marriage as a spiritual covenant as much as a romantic or social one. The return of the husband is framed as an opportunity for joint gratitude, where "both of us thy Kindnes, Lord / With Praises shall recount."

The concluding stanzas introduce a profound layer of self-reflection regarding human frailty and the nature of grace. Bradstreet writes, "But give me, Lord, a better heart, / Then better shall I bee." Here, she confronts the paradox of Puritan spirituality: the inability of the human will to generate true goodness without divine intervention. She recognizes that her ability to pay her "vowes" is contingent upon God first altering her internal state. This is a deep theological insight. She is not promising to be good in exchange for her husband's return; she is acknowledging that she cannot even be good enough to make that promise without God's help. The poem ends on a note of conditional dependence: "If thou assist me, Lord, / I shall Return Thee what I owe." This creates a circle of grace. God must give the heart that allows the human to give back to God. It avoids the trap of transactional religion where humans bargain with the Divine. Instead, it posits that even the bargaining chip—the vow, the praise, the better heart—is itself a gift from God. This humility prevents the poem from becoming presumptuous. It leaves the reader with a sense of the speaker's total reliance. The "frailty" she mentions is not just physical weakness but the moral and spiritual fragility of the human condition. By exposing this frailty, she invites the reader to recognize their own dependence.

From a comparative perspective, Bradstreet's work in this poem shares affinities with the metaphysical poets of England, such as George Herbert, particularly in the way she treats prayer as a conversation and struggles with the dynamics of submission. However, Bradstreet's voice is distinctively shaped by her gender and her location. While Herbert often wrestled with his role as a priest, Bradstreet wrestles with her role as a wife and mother in a wilderness setting. Her domestic concerns are not distractions from the spiritual but are the very material out of which the spiritual is forged. When she mentions her children and friends, stating that without God they are "no Joy, but woe," she is making a radical claim about the source of human happiness. It suggests that human relationships, even the most sacred ones like parenthood, are insufficient anchors for the soul. This can be read as a harsh sentiment to the modern ear, which often prioritizes human connection as the ultimate good. However, within her framework, it is an act of protection. If one finds ultimate joy in a mortal being, the inevitable loss of that being leads to despair. By routing the joy through God, the relationships are preserved even in absence or death. This philosophical stance offers a form of emotional resilience that allowed many Puritans to endure the hardships of colonial life.

The emotional impact of the poem endures because it does not resolve the tension between love and faith by eliminating one or the other. Bradstreet does not stop loving her husband to love God more. She holds both truths in suspension. The "Solitary houres" are filled with the memory of the husband and the presence of God. This duality creates a rich emotional texture. The reader senses the ache of the empty space beside her, even as they feel the fullness of the spiritual presence she describes. It is a poem of absence that speaks to presence. The silence of the house is answered by the voice of prayer. This resonance speaks to anyone who has experienced separation, grief, or the feeling of being alone in their struggles. Bradstreet validates the feeling of loneliness while offering a pathway through it. She does not dismiss the "dropping teares"; she collects them and offers them up. In doing so, she sanctifies human sorrow.

Furthermore, the poem serves as a historical document of female intellect and spirituality. In an era where women's theological contributions were often marginalized, Bradstreet claims the authority to interpret her own experience and address God directly. She constructs a theology of the home. The "secrett places" where she finds God are likely the corners of her own house, the paths she walks while managing her estate. By locating the divine in the midst of her domestic duties and solitary waiting, she elevates the everyday life of a colonial woman to the level of sacred history. Her "dayly moan" becomes a liturgy. This reclamation of the domestic sphere as a site of spiritual significance is one of her most enduring legacies. It suggests that holiness is not found only in the pulpit or the printed sermon, but in the quiet, anxious hours of a wife waiting for her husband's safe return.

The language of debt and payment that permeates the final section of the poem also warrants close attention. She speaks of "vowes which I doe owe" and returning "what I owe." This economic metaphor reflects the communal and covenantal nature of her society. Life was viewed as a series of obligations and mercies. However, as noted earlier, she subverts this economy by admitting she cannot pay without assistance. This nuance prevents the poem from becoming a mere ledger of transactions. It becomes a plea for the capacity to be grateful. There is a profound humility in asking God for the ability to thank God. It acknowledges that gratitude itself is a discipline that requires divine strengthening. This insight adds a layer of psychological depth to the poem. It recognizes that in times of deep distress, the ability to feel thankful is often the first thing to vanish. By asking for a "better heart," she is asking for the restoration of her own emotional and spiritual capacity.

In the final analysis, "In my Solitary houres in my dear husband his Absence" is a masterpiece of devotional literature that transcends its specific historical moment. It captures the universal human experience of waiting and the struggle to maintain hope in the face of uncertainty. Bradstreet's achievement lies in her ability to weave the threads of personal longing, theological conviction, and honest vulnerability into a cohesive whole. She does not offer a facile comfort. She does not claim that the pain of absence is nonexistent. Instead, she offers a framework for enduring it. The poem stands as a testament to the power of faith to structure emotional life without negating human feeling. It reminds the reader that solitude can be a space for encounter, and that absence can deepen the appreciation of presence. Through her polished yet accessible verses, Bradstreet invites us into her private sanctuary, allowing us to witness the quiet courage of a woman who anchors her soul in the divine while keeping her heart open to the human. Her voice, echoing across the centuries, continues to resonate with an enthusiasm for life and a reverence for the mysteries of grace, proving that the solitary hours, when filled with such honest reflection, can yield a harvest of enduring beauty. The poem remains a beacon for those who seek to reconcile the demands of the heart with the aspirations of the spirit, offering a timeless assurance that in the architecture of faith, there is room for both the tear and the prayer.

Charlotte Smith’s “Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes” is a compact yet extraordinarily searching meditation on the unstable relation between desire and suffering. At first glance, the poem seems to be a conventional address to Hope, imagined as a benevolent force capable of restoring beauty and easing pain. Yet Smith rapidly complicates that expectation. Hope is invoked with passionate urgency, adorned with the language of classical beauty and seasonal renewal, but it proves evasive, even deceptive. By the conclusion, the speaker turns toward “pale Misery,” not in a simple gesture of surrender but in a paradoxical recognition that misery, unlike hope, may at least be dependable. This movement from invocation to disappointment, and from longing to bleak consolation, gives the poem its distinctive emotional force. Smith transforms a familiar moral subject—the need to preserve hope amid hardship—into a far more unsettling inquiry: what happens when hope itself becomes another source of pain?

The poem belongs to the world of late eighteenth-century sensibility and early Romanticism, a literary moment intensely concerned with inwardness, vulnerability, memory, nature, and the authority of feeling. Smith was among the most important poets in shaping the revival of the English sonnet during this period. Her sonnets, especially those gathered in Elegiac Sonnets, helped make the form a vehicle for personal reflection, political disquiet, melancholy landscape, and psychological tension. Although later literary histories sometimes placed male Romantic poets at the center of innovation, Smith’s work was crucial to the emotional and formal atmosphere from which writers such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Keats emerged. Her poetry demonstrates that Romanticism did not merely celebrate exalted feeling or communion with nature; it also gave expression to exhaustion, disappointment, social precarity, and the difficult persistence of consciousness under pressure.

Smith’s biographical circumstances lend the poem a powerful, though not limiting, context. Born in 1749, she experienced a marriage marked by financial instability and personal distress. Her husband’s debts resulted in imprisonment, and Smith herself was compelled to write extensively in order to support her children. She became a remarkably successful novelist as well as a poet, but literary productivity did not free her from chronic financial anxiety, illness, and domestic strain. It would be reductive to treat the speaker of this poem as simply identical with Smith, since lyric poetry creates a crafted voice rather than a transparent diary. Nevertheless, Smith’s familiarity with prolonged hardship helps explain why the poem does not offer easy consolation. Its speaker does not face a temporary disappointment that might be cured by a cheerful change of mood. She confronts what feels like an enduring condition: fear, anxiety, pain, and the apparent disappearance of renewal.

The opening cry, “Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!” immediately establishes Hope as an addressed presence rather than a mere abstraction. This is an apostrophe, a rhetorical device in which the speaker turns toward someone absent, inanimate, dead, divine, or conceptual. Apostrophe is especially fitting here because it dramatizes need. The speaker does not calmly define hope; she calls for it, as though speech itself might summon the force she lacks. The phrase “soother sweet” creates a momentary softness through its gentle sounds and its emphasis on consolation. Yet the sweetness is shadowed by “human woes.” Hope exists, in this formulation, because suffering exists. It is not a decorative virtue but a remedy imagined by those in pain. From its first breath, therefore, the poem joins comfort and anguish so closely that neither can be understood without the other.

The speaker’s question, “How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!” gives Hope an elusive, almost wild quality. To “lure” something suggests that it cannot be commanded. Hope does not respond automatically to moral effort or pious desire; it must somehow be enticed into the speaker’s “haunts forlorn.” The word “haunts” is richly suggestive. It denotes habitual places, but it also carries ghostly associations. The speaker’s world seems less like a home than a place inhabited by sorrow, memory, and perhaps the spectral remains of happiness. “Forlorn” intensifies this isolation, evoking abandonment and emotional desolation. Smith’s diction thus externalizes an inward state: the speaker’s surroundings appear to have taken on the color of her affliction. In this respect, the poem participates in a central Romantic practice, in which landscape and feeling become intertwined. Yet nature here is not expansively healing. It is a damaged emotional terrain into which Hope may or may not enter.

The images that follow draw upon one of poetry’s most enduring symbolic clusters: roses, thorns, paths, and seasons. The speaker asks whether Hope will “renew the withered rose” and “clear” a “painful path of pointed thorn.” The rose conventionally signifies beauty, pleasure, youth, love, or fragile life; its withering therefore signals depletion rather than merely passing sadness. To renew the rose would be to restore not simply external loveliness but the speaker’s own capacity for pleasure and vitality. The thorn, by contrast, is sharp, resistant, and enduring. It transforms life into a path that wounds the traveler as she moves through it. Smith’s use of these familiar emblems is powerful because she refuses their usual consoling balance. In many moral traditions, the thorn accompanies the rose, suggesting that pain is the price of beauty. Here, however, the relationship is more brutal: the flower fades, while “all the thorns remain.” Joy is perishable; pain seems durable.

Hope is then personified in a manner that draws upon classical mythology and pastoral convention. The speaker calls her a “sweet nymph,” “in smiles and softness drest,” and compares her to “the young hours that lead the tender year.” This language initially creates an atmosphere of graceful promise. The nymph belongs to a poetic world of springs, woods, fountains, and youthful divinities; the “young hours” suggest the first gentle stages of spring, when time itself appears to usher in freshness. Smith’s phrase “tender year” makes seasonal change feel vulnerable rather than triumphant. Spring is not yet fully vigorous; it is delicate, newly born, and exposed to injury. Such tenderness is profoundly appropriate to the poem’s emotional situation. The speaker does not demand an overwhelming miracle. She longs for an early, fragile sign that life might become bearable again.

Yet the classical and pastoral beauty surrounding Hope is sharply undermined by the word “flatterer.” After summoning Hope as “Enchantress,” the speaker recognizes that this enchanting figure “flies, and will not hear.” Hope is not a stable companion but a dazzling visitor who disappears when most needed. “Flatterer” is a particularly incisive accusation. A flatterer tells us what we wish to hear, offering pleasure without truth. Hope may promise restoration, but the speaker’s experience has taught her that such promises can intensify suffering when they fail. This turn prevents the poem from becoming an uncomplicated hymn to optimism. Smith understands that hope can be psychologically dangerous when it rests on illusion, postpones recognition of harsh realities, or continually raises expectations that the world refuses to fulfill. The emotional movement is not from despair toward faith but from yearning toward disillusionment.

The poem’s urgency is heightened by its punctuation and exclamatory address. Exclamation marks accompany the appeals to Hope and the sudden acknowledgments of loss, creating the impression of a mind unable to settle into detached reflection. Questions, commands, cries, and abrupt declarations give the voice dramatic mobility. The speaker pleads, imagines, rebukes, and then laments. Such shifts make the poem feel almost theatrical, as though Hope and Misery are competing figures on an inward stage. Smith’s personifications should not be mistaken for ornamental abstractions. They give visible shape to forces that might otherwise remain diffuse. Hope can smile, dress itself in softness, flee, and refuse to listen; Misery can become a beloved companion. These figures make the speaker’s emotional life social and relational. She is not merely experiencing feelings; she is engaged in painful relationships with them.

The declaration “A prey to fear, anxiety, and pain” introduces a vocabulary that is unusually direct and psychologically exact. The speaker is not simply sad. She is “a prey,” a phrase that implies helplessness before predatory forces. Fear looks toward anticipated danger; anxiety inhabits uncertainty and agitation; pain names suffering in its immediate reality. Together, these terms form a temporal and emotional triad: dread of what may come, distress in the present, and injury that may be physical, mental, or both. Smith’s language has a striking modernity here. Long before contemporary psychological terminology became widespread, she captures the exhausting condition in which the mind is besieged by apprehension and cannot secure relief. The question “Must I a sad existence still deplore?” is consequently more than a conventional lament. It asks whether suffering has become the defining substance of life itself.

Nature, which in much Romantic poetry offers renewal, becomes in Smith’s hands an emblem of exclusion. “Lo! the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain,” the speaker observes, and the command “Lo!” asks the reader to witness this painful fact. The line possesses the concentrated force of an aphorism. It imagines existence as structurally unequal: beautiful things pass away, whereas the instruments of hurt persist. This vision is reinforced by the statement that “For me the vernal garland blooms no more.” A garland is associated with festivity, honor, marriage, poetry, and seasonal celebration. Its “vernal” character links it to spring, rebirth, and communal joy. But the phrase “for me” is essential. The poem does not necessarily claim that the world has ceased to bloom for everyone. Rather, the speaker experiences herself as shut out from the world’s recurrent promises. Spring may occur in nature, but she cannot participate in its meaning.

This sense of exclusion carries particular resonance in relation to women’s experience in Smith’s period. Eighteenth-century ideals of femininity often celebrated sweetness, patience, endurance, domestic affection, and emotional sensitivity. Smith’s poem draws upon the language conventionally associated with female beauty—smiles, softness, flowers, garlands, tenderness—only to reveal how insufficient such imagery can be in the face of real suffering. The feminine figure of Hope is charming but unreliable; she is invited into the speaker’s desolate space yet fails to remain there. Meanwhile, the speaker’s voice is anything but passive. She calls, questions, judges, and finally makes a grim choice. In a culture that often expected women to perform cheerful resignation, Smith creates a female lyric consciousness that openly articulates despair without turning that despair into moral failure. The poem’s honesty is quietly radical. It refuses to pretend that endurance always feels ennobling.

The final appeal to “pale Misery’s love” is among the poem’s most arresting gestures. The phrase is deliberately paradoxical. Misery is “pale,” suggesting sickness, deathliness, emotional depletion, or the bloodless complexion of grief. Yet this figure is also associated with “love.” The word may imply that misery loves the speaker, clings to her, or is her own love because it has become familiar. The speaker asks Misery to become her “cure,” a startling inversion of ordinary expectations. If Hope cannot heal, perhaps the acceptance of misery can. This does not mean that pain is genuinely desirable. Rather, the speaker recognizes that certainty—even painful certainty—may feel less unbearable than the repeated betrayal of expectation. “And I will bless thee, who though slow art sure” gives Misery the grim virtue that Hope lacks: reliability. Misery arrives slowly, perhaps through accumulated disappointments, but once it arrives it does not deceive.

Philosophically, the conclusion can be read as an exploration of negative consolation. Human beings often need not only happiness but intelligibility and predictability. When circumstances are volatile, the mind may become exhausted by hope’s alternation between promise and absence. Misery, in Smith’s poem, offers no joy, but it offers a terrible kind of stability. The speaker’s turn resembles the logic of tragic wisdom: one may stop being wounded by false promises when one relinquishes the expectation that they will be fulfilled. There are affinities here with stoic acceptance, though Smith’s tone is much more emotionally exposed than classical Stoicism usually allows. There are also anticipations of later Romantic and Victorian explorations of melancholy, where sorrow becomes not merely an interruption of life but a lens through which life is perceived. Smith does not preach despair; she records the mind’s attempt to survive when conventional consolations have failed.

Comparisons with other poets illuminate Smith’s singular achievement. Thomas Gray’s elegiac writing, for instance, often finds dignity in obscurity and mortality, while Wordsworth frequently seeks restorative power in remembered nature. Smith shares with such poets an interest in solitude, loss, and the natural world, but her landscapes are less securely consolatory. She also anticipates John Keats’s fascination with the intimate relation between beauty and transience. Keats often discovers that joy is inseparable from its own passing; Smith’s speaker confronts an even harsher formulation, in which beauty departs and suffering remains. The poem also participates in the broader eighteenth-century tradition of melancholic verse associated with writers such as Edward Young and William Cowper. Yet Smith’s voice is distinctively compressed, immediate, and personal. Her grief does not become a grand philosophical abstraction. It remains close to the body, the path, the thorn, the fading flower.

The poem’s emotional impact arises from this combination of lyrical beauty and refusal of false reassurance. Smith writes with an exquisite delicacy—nymphs, smiles, roses, young hours, vernal garlands—yet each lovely image is vulnerable to disappearance. Her art does not soften pain by denying it; rather, it gives pain memorable form. The reader feels the ache of calling for help that does not come, the weariness of finding one’s hopes repeatedly disproved, and the unsettling relief that can accompany resignation. Such feelings remain intensely recognizable. Modern readers may hear in the poem an account of depression, chronic stress, bereavement, illness, or social hardship, though it should not be confined to any single diagnosis or circumstance. Its deeper subject is the precariousness of emotional trust: how can one continue to believe in renewal when experience seems to teach the opposite?

“Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes” endures because it confronts that question without evasion. Smith’s speaker begins by imagining hope as a healing visitor from the world of spring and beauty. She ends by addressing misery as the companion most likely to remain. Between those poles, the poem stages an unforgettable drama of longing, disappointment, and reluctant self-knowledge. Its poetic power lies in the precision with which it allows contradictory impulses to coexist: the speaker still calls for Hope even as she distrusts her; she rejects consolation yet desires cure; she blesses Misery not because suffering is good but because betrayal is worse. Smith’s sonnet is thus not a simple poem of despair. It is a fiercely lucid poem about what despair does to the desire for hope. In its tenderness, severity, and emotional intelligence, it remains a remarkable instance of poetry’s capacity to make private anguish intellectually and imaginatively resonant.