In the vast corpus of D. H. Lawrence's poetic output, "Dream-Confused" occupies a peculiar and haunting position—a brief lyric that captures the disorienting moment between sleep and waking, between physical presence and absence, between consummation and loss. Written during a period when Lawrence was deeply engaged with questions of consciousness, sensuality, and the authenticity of human experience, this poem operates as a psychological drama compressed into eighteen lines. It reveals Lawrence's distinctive ability to inhabit states of uncertainty while simultaneously exploring the relationship between cosmic phenomena and intimate human experience. The poem's interrogative opening and its gradual movement toward resolution mirror the speaker's journey from confusion to a kind of melancholic acceptance, creating a meditation on the ephemeral nature of erotic connection that feels both deeply personal and universally resonant.

The title itself establishes the poem's central concern: the state of being dream-confused suggests not merely confusion about whether one is dreaming, but a more profound disorientation in which the boundaries between different states of consciousness have become permeable. Lawrence, throughout his career, was fascinated by what he called "blood-consciousness"—a mode of knowing and being that existed beneath or beyond rational thought. This concept, which he explored extensively in his prose works and essays, suggests that humans possess forms of awareness that operate independently of the intellect, rooted instead in the body and its instincts. "Dream-Confused" can be read as a poetic enactment of this philosophy, presenting a speaker whose rational faculties struggle to make sense of an experience that belongs primarily to the realm of sensation and emotion.

The poem opens with a question that immediately establishes uncertainty as its governing mode: "Is that the moon / At the window so big and red?" This interrogative beginning places the reader alongside the speaker in his state of bewilderment. The moon, that ancient symbol of femininity, changeability, and romantic longing, appears here with unusual characteristics—it is "big and red," suggesting either the harvest moon or perhaps the distorted perception of someone not fully awake or not fully rational. The specificity of this description grounds the poem in visual reality even as it questions that reality. Lawrence's choice to break the line after "moon" creates a momentary suspension, a hesitation that enacts the speaker's own uncertainty. Is he observing an actual phenomenon, or is his perception colored by his emotional and physical state?

The second question follows immediately, deepening the disorientation: "No one in the room, / No one near the bed——?" The repetition of "no one" emphasizes the absence that haunts the speaker, while the double dash at the end of the line creates a pause that suggests both incompletion and the straining of ears and senses to confirm what the eyes report. This absence becomes the poem's emotional center—someone was here, someone is no longer here, and the speaker finds himself in that desolate space between presence and absence. The mention of the bed immediately sexualizes the scene, suggesting not merely companionship but intimate physical contact. In Lawrence's worldview, sexual experience represented one of the primary means through which individuals could transcend the alienation of modern existence and achieve authentic connection with another person and with the life force itself.

The third question introduces sound to accompany the visual uncertainty: "Listen, her shoon / Palpitating down the stair?" The archaic term "shoon" for shoes adds a folksy, almost fairy-tale quality to the poem, as if the speaker were not entirely in the modern world but had slipped into some older mode of perception or storytelling. More significantly, the word "palpitating" transfers the quality of a heartbeat to the sound of footsteps, creating a synesthetic effect that blurs the boundaries between different sensory experiences. Is he hearing her shoes on the stairs, or is he feeling his own heart pound? Or has the sound of footsteps taken on the rhythm and emotional quality of his own physical response? This confusion of inner and outer, self and other, represents exactly the kind of merged consciousness that Lawrence saw as both the promise and the danger of erotic love.

The alternative possibility—"Or a beat of wings at the window there?"—introduces a supernatural or mythological dimension to the poem. Wings might suggest a bird, but in the context of nocturnal visitation and erotic encounter, they evoke older myths of divine or demonic lovers, of succubi and incubi, of Leda and the swan. Lawrence was deeply read in classical mythology and anthropology, and he understood how myths encoded psychological truths about human experience. The possibility that what the speaker experienced might have been a visit from some otherworldly being rather than a flesh-and-blood woman suggests the numinous quality that sexual experience could possess—the sense that in moments of genuine erotic connection, something more than merely personal is activated, some larger force or principle enters the bounded space of individual identity.

With "A moment ago," the poem shifts from questioning to assertion, from uncertainty about present perception to apparent certainty about recent past. "She kissed me warm on the mouth" provides our first concrete detail about what occurred before the speaker's awakening. The adjective "warm" takes priority over mere physical description, suggesting that temperature, that quality of life and blood, matters more than other characteristics. The mouth as the site of kissing emphasizes both intimacy and the exchange that occurs in such contact—the mingling of breath, the tasting of another person, the penetration of boundaries that normally separate self from other. For Lawrence, the mouth held particular significance as a locus of both speech and physical intimacy, representing the dual capacity of humans to communicate through language and through direct bodily contact.

The poem then makes its most striking move, establishing a connection between the cosmic and the personal: "The very moon in the south / Is warm with a bloody glow." The word "bloody" carries multiple resonances here. Most obviously, it suggests the red color already established in the opening line, but it also evokes blood itself—the blood of life, of menstruation, of defloration, of sacrifice. Lawrence frequently associated authentic living with what he called "blood-being," a mode of existence in which the body's wisdom and the instinctual self took precedence over the merely mental or spiritual. The warm, bloody moon becomes an objective correlative for the speaker's own state—flushed, heated, marked by an experience that has left its trace both physically and emotionally.

The notion that "The moon from far abysses / Signalling those two kisses" represents one of Lawrence's characteristic moves—the establishment of correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm, between celestial phenomena and intimate human gestures. The moon is not merely a backdrop or a symbol of the woman's departure; it becomes an active participant in the erotic drama, a cosmic witness or even accomplice that "signals" the kisses. The word "abysses" suggests profound depth, perhaps the depth of space but also metaphorical depths—of unconsciousness, of ancient time, of the collective unconscious that Jung was theorizing during the same period. The plural form implies multiple depths, multiple darknesses from which the moon emerges. And the fact that there are specifically "two kisses" that the moon signals suggests a reciprocity, an exchange rather than a one-sided action. Both parties participated in this intimate moment; both gave and received.

This cosmological sympathy, this sense that human passion registers in the larger universe, reflects Lawrence's rejection of the mechanistic worldview he associated with modern industrial civilization. For Lawrence, the cosmos was not dead matter moving according to impersonal laws but rather a living reality that participated in and responded to human experience. This view aligned him more with Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Shelley than with the modernist contemporaries with whom he is often grouped. Yet Lawrence's romanticism was distinctly sensual and physical rather than ethereal or idealized. The moon's "bloody glow" grounds the cosmic in the bodily, refusing any easy separation between spirit and flesh.

The final stanza brings the poem to its resolution, though not necessarily to consolation: "And now the moon / Goes slowly out of the west." The temporal marker "And now" returns us to the present moment of the poem's opening, but the speaker's relationship to that present has changed. He is no longer questioning what he sees but observing a process, a movement. The moon's passage across the sky provides an objective correlative for the internal process that follows: "And slowly back in my breast / My kisses are sinking, soon / To leave me at rest."

This internalization of the kisses creates a remarkable image. The kisses that were exchanged with another person are now located "in my breast," suggesting that the experience of connection has been taken inward, incorporated into the speaker's own being. Yet this incorporation is not permanent; the kisses are "sinking," moving downward within him as the moon sinks toward the western horizon. The parallel structure links inner and outer movement, suggesting that the fading of external phenomena corresponds to or causes the fading of internal experience. The promise or threat—depending on how one reads the speaker's tone—is that the kisses will "soon" leave him "at rest."

That final phrase, "at rest," carries profound ambiguity. Does it mean peaceful repose, the calm that follows emotional and physical intensity? Or does it suggest a return to the deathlike state of being unawakened, unstirred by passion? Throughout his work, Lawrence maintained a complex relationship with the idea of peace or rest. On one hand, he valued moments of stillness and equilibrium; on the other hand, he feared the deadness that could masquerade as peace, the resignation that modern life imposed on individuals who had lost contact with their vital selves. The sinking of the kisses might represent healthy integration of experience, or it might represent the sad necessity of returning to ordinary consciousness after an encounter with something extraordinary.

The poem's movement from confusion to this ambiguous rest traces a psychological arc familiar in Lawrence's work—the pattern of intensity followed by subsidence, of connection followed by separation. This pattern reflects his understanding that authentic erotic experience necessarily involves both merger and separation, that the achievement of genuine contact with another person paradoxically emphasizes the fundamental solitude of each individual consciousness. The speaker in "Dream-Confused" has experienced a moment of connection so profound that it has temporarily dissolved his ordinary sense of reality. As that experience fades, he returns to himself, but he is not quite the same self who existed before the encounter. The kisses may sink and leave him at rest, but they have been internalized; they have altered him.

Lawrence wrote this poem during a period of intense productivity and personal upheaval. His relationship with his wife Frieda was marked by both passionate connection and stormy conflict, and many of his love poems from this era reflect the turbulence of that relationship. "Dream-Confused" might be read as capturing a moment within such a relationship—the morning after intensity, when the partner has departed and the speaker must reorient himself within ordinary reality. Yet the poem transcends its biographical origins to speak to a universal experience: the disorientation that follows intense intimacy, the sense that one has touched something profound and potentially transformative, but cannot quite hold onto it in the light of day.

The poem also participates in a long literary tradition of aubades—poems set at dawn, often dealing with lovers parting. Yet Lawrence subverts the conventional aubade by making the parting itself uncertain. We never quite know whether the woman was actually present or whether the entire encounter occurred in dream. This uncertainty allows Lawrence to explore the phenomenology of desire itself, the way that longing and memory can seem as real as physical presence, the way that consciousness in its half-waking state cannot always distinguish between wish and reality, between past and present, between psychological truth and empirical fact.

Moreover, the poem enacts through its very structure and movement the process it describes. The opening questions create confusion in the reader's mind; we share the speaker's disorientation. The middle section provides apparent clarity—she was here, she kissed him. But this clarity immediately opens onto cosmic speculation about the moon and its signals, expanding the personal into the universal. The final movement returns to observed phenomena but transformed, internalized. The reader's experience of the poem thus mirrors the speaker's experience within the poem—a movement from confusion through intensity to a kind of resolution that is not quite resolution, an ending that feels more like suspension than closure.

The emotional impact of "Dream-Confused" derives largely from its honesty about the transience of connection and the isolation of individual consciousness. Lawrence does not offer easy consolation or romantic idealization. The kisses sink away; the moon sets; the speaker returns to solitude. Yet the poem does not feel entirely desolate. There is something quietly accepting in that final phrase "at rest," something that acknowledges the necessity of cycles—of approach and withdrawal, intensity and calm, connection and separation. The poem suggests that the value of erotic encounter lies not in its permanence but in its intensity, not in what it permanently changes but in how it briefly dissolves the boundaries of self.

In the context of Lawrence's larger project as a writer, "Dream-Confused" represents an exploration of consciousness that complements his more explicit theorizing in essays and novels. Where those works argue for particular views of sex, psychology, and modern life, this brief poem simply presents an experience in its complexity and ambiguity. It demonstrates Lawrence's belief that poetry could access truths that prose could only approximate, that the condensed language and sensory immediacy of lyric verse offered unique insights into human subjectivity. The poem refuses to resolve its central ambiguity—was she really there?—because that ambiguity itself contains the truth Lawrence wishes to convey: that in states of heightened consciousness, the usual categories by which we organize experience break down, and that this breakdown is not a failure of perception but potentially an access to deeper realities.

Ultimately, "Dream-Confused" endures as a powerful exploration of liminal states—between sleep and waking, between presence and absence, between self and other, between earth and cosmos. Its eighteen lines contain a complete psychological and emotional journey, rendered through imagery that grounds abstract experience in concrete sensation. Lawrence's achievement in this poem lies in his ability to make uncertainty feel not like a deficit but like a condition of truth, to present confusion not as something to be overcome but as something to be inhabited and explored. The poem invites readers into that space of uncertainty and allows them to feel both its disorientation and its strange beauty—the beauty of experience that exceeds our capacity to fully understand or possess it, but that leaves its mark nonetheless, sinking slowly into the breast until it leaves us, changed, at rest.

Nora Hopper Chesson’s “A Dead Girl To Her Lover” belongs to that haunting borderland where lyric love-poetry, Irish folk belief, and the Gothic imagination meet. It speaks in the voice of a drowned young woman who calls from beneath the sea to the lover she has left behind. Yet the poem is far more than a conventional lament for interrupted romance. Its dead speaker remains passionately conscious: she hears winds, senses tides, remembers songs and footsteps, observes the erasure of her tracks on the shore, and finally sends her voice outward toward the beloved’s boat. Death has not extinguished desire. Indeed, Chesson’s unsettling achievement is to make longing seem intensified by death, released from the ordinary constraints of body, distance, propriety, and time. The poem moves with the beauty of a song, but its beauty is inseparable from danger. The speaker’s final invitation to her lover is tender, intimate, and potentially fatal.

Chesson wrote at the turn of the twentieth century, when English-language poetry was deeply interested in death, haunting, folklore, and the survival of older regional cultures within modern life. Born Nora Hopper in 1871 and associated through family background, imaginative allegiance, and literary subject matter with Ireland, she became one of the many writers drawn to the cultural energies of the Irish Revival. Her work frequently turns toward Irish place-names, folk idioms, legendary creatures, and the distinctive atmosphere often called the Celtic Twilight: a literary mode in which landscape appears alive with memory and in which the visible world seems permeable to supernatural presences. Chesson’s early death in 1906 gives her poetry an inevitably poignant biographical aura, though the force of this poem does not depend upon treating it as personal confession. Its speaker is a crafted dramatic voice, shaped by ballad tradition and mythic imagination rather than simply by authorial autobiography.

The poem’s setting on or near Achill, the island off the west coast of County Mayo, is especially meaningful. Achill had become a powerful imaginative location in Irish cultural writing: remote, sea-bound, exposed to Atlantic weather, and associated in popular consciousness with an older Gaelic life. Its cliffs, sands, waves, and changing light made it an ideal site for writers seeking what modern industrial life seemed to threaten or displace: elemental nature, local memory, and contact with legend. When the speaker says that “Achill sands” have not preserved the fading trace of her footsteps, the phrase does more than establish scenery. It registers disappearance in a culturally resonant landscape. The shore is a place where a human being may leave a mark, but the tide inevitably takes it away. The dead girl’s lost track becomes an image of mortality, of vanished embodied presence, and perhaps of the fragility of human memory itself.

The opening begins not with sight but with hearing: “I hear the hill-winds.” This choice immediately complicates the speaker’s condition. Though drowned, buried under water, and cut off from the living world, she remains acutely receptive. Sound crosses boundaries that bodies cannot. The hill-winds call through “long gray twilights and white morns,” carrying news of a world still governed by daily recurrence. Twilight and morning indicate time’s passage, but they are perceived from a realm in which time no longer promises change or renewal. The living world moves through evening into dawn; the speaker remains fixed beneath the sea. Chesson thus establishes a central contrast between cyclical natural time and the arrested time of death. The tides rise and fall, the winds come and go, the beloved’s boat travels onward, while the drowned woman cannot return.

The sea is the poem’s most commanding symbol because it is never only one thing. It is a grave, a barrier, a source of beauty, a medium of communication, and an emblem of the vast impersonal natural order. “Over my head the waves are brawling”: the verb gives the waves an almost quarrelsome violence. These are not gentle waters that cradle the dead; they are loud, active, and indifferent. The sea separates the speaker from her lover with physical finality. Yet it also connects her to the coast, the wind, the tides, and the boat upon which he travels. The same water that destroys the human body carries the rhythms of the world she still loves. This doubleness makes the poem more complex than a simple elegy. Nature is not presented as a consoling refuge. It is magnificent and musically alive, but it is also the power that has obliterated the speaker’s path and holds her beyond recovery.

Chesson’s diction darkens and beautifies death through a palette of gray, white, dark, pale, green, and blue. The “long gray twilights” and “white morns” give the upper world an almost spectral brightness, while the dead girl’s own “dark head” is covered by “dark water.” Such repetitions are not merely decorative. They create a submerged visual logic in which color conveys both atmosphere and emotional distance. The speaker’s underwater bed is made of “pale sea-wrack,” a phrase that transforms washed-up marine vegetation into the bedding of a drowned bride or sleeping maiden. The adjective “pale” conventionally suggests death, but it also makes the sea-floor scene strangely delicate. Chesson’s art lies in allowing the grave to appear lovely without ceasing to be terrible. The poem does not sentimentalize drowning; rather, it discovers a melancholy lyricism in the imagery through which drowning is imagined.

The speaker’s language gives the poem the intimate quality of an address overheard across an impossible distance. She repeatedly asks questions: “how will I answer or come to you?”; “where’s the charm that shall bid it back?”; “is the day of our meeting near?” These questions are not requests for information. They dramatize helplessness. A “charm” might, in folktale, command the waters to withdraw or reverse enchantment, but none appears. The question therefore invokes magic only to emphasize its absence. The dead girl lives in a world full of marvels—merrows sing, strange fishes hover, winds may perhaps bear a voice—but no supernatural intervention arrives to restore her to ordinary life. Folklore here does not offer easy rescue. Its beings and possibilities deepen the sense that the speaker has crossed into a realm governed by unfamiliar laws.

The “merrows” are especially important to the poem’s cultural texture. In Irish folklore, the merrow is a sea-being, often imagined as a mermaid or merman, associated with enchantment, seduction, and the dangerous allure of the ocean. Chesson does not develop an elaborate narrative about these creatures; their brief appearance is more effective than a longer explanation would be. “Wild merrows sing, and strange fishes hover / Above my bed.” The underwater world possesses its own music and spectators, but neither grants companionship. The merrows’ song is “wild,” not comforting, and the fishes hover above the speaker in a way that may suggest watchfulness, indifference, or a reversal of ordinary human perspective. The drowned girl has become an object beneath their gaze. The scene recalls the fairy lore of Ireland while also participating in a broader nineteenth-century fascination with beautiful, fatal women of the water: sirens, mermaids, drowned maidens, and seductive spirits who draw men toward ruin.

That broader tradition invites comparison with the ballads and supernatural lyrics that shaped Victorian and late-Romantic poetry. Poems of fatal love often feature a woman whose death leaves her as ghost, revenant, or enchantress, and whose continued attachment to a lover becomes dangerous. Chesson adapts that tradition with remarkable economy. Her speaker is not simply a passive victim of death; she has agency of a disquieting kind. She speaks, remembers, summons, and desires. Her final words imply that the sea-bed “might yet hold two.” The conditional phrase “might yet” introduces uncertainty, but not innocence. The speaker may be yearning for reunion in a spiritual sense, or she may be luring her living lover to drown beside her. The poem deliberately refuses to settle the question. Its emotional power arises from the fact that the invitation can sound like ultimate devotion and like a death-wish at the same moment.

This ambiguity is sharpened by the poem’s use of endearments in Irish. “Avourneen deelish” represents an Anglicized form of an Irish phrase meaning, approximately, “my faithful darling” or “my dear beloved.” “Mo bouchal” means “my boy,” while “Moirin” is an affectionate diminutive associated with Mary. These expressions make the address sound tender, local, and orally rooted. They are not exotic ornaments added to an otherwise generic romance; they establish the lovers’ shared linguistic world. The dead girl calls herself by the pet-name through which she wishes to be remembered, and she names her beloved through a language of intimacy that is at once personal and communal. For readers outside that linguistic tradition, the phrases also create a slight threshold of unfamiliarity, reminding us that the poem is speaking from a culturally particular coast rather than from an abstract landscape of mourning.

At the same time, the use of Irish-inflected language reflects a characteristic tension within Revival writing. English-language poets sought to evoke Gaelic speech, folklore, and feeling, sometimes preserving cultural memory and sometimes translating it into forms accessible to an Anglophone literary audience. Chesson’s poem does not claim to reproduce a Gaelic oral song. Instead, it creates a literary lyric haunted by the sound of Irish endearments. The effect is emotionally persuasive because the phrases appear precisely where the speaker’s loneliness becomes most direct. “Your Moirin’s lonely”: the simple statement follows the richer, stranger sounds of the terms of affection and makes them emotionally legible through context. The result is a poignant mixture of linguistic music and plain grief. Love survives in a name, but the named speaker is physically unreachable.

Repetition throughout the poem creates an atmosphere of persistence without progress. The speaker hears the winds at the beginning, and later the “hill-winds” are again “coming” and “going.” The tides rise and fall; the speaker dreams, wakes, and listens; the beloved’s footfall is desired but never heard. Such recurring movements imitate the natural processes of the shore while exposing their emotional cruelty. The sea continually changes, but it changes in patterns. The dead girl’s longing similarly returns to itself. She cannot arrive at fulfillment, and she cannot entirely relinquish hope. The repetition of “I hear,” “I listen,” and “I send” emphasizes that her remaining life, if that word may still be used for her condition, is concentrated in acts of perception and attempted communication. She has no bodily movement toward her lover. Her voice alone seeks passage.

Sound is therefore the poem’s deepest formal and emotional principle. The wind calls; the waves brawl; merrows sing; a lost song is remembered; a hoped-for footfall becomes the object of listening; and the dead girl sends her own voice “on their wings.” The poem imagines sound as less confined than the body. The voice may travel where the speaker cannot, perhaps entering the lover’s consciousness as an unexplained call from the sea. Yet sound is also poignantly insubstantial. It may be carried away, altered, unheard. The phrase “wanting a song that I used to hear” is particularly moving because it identifies memory as an ache of audition. The dead girl does not only miss her lover as an abstract person; she misses the ordinary acoustic life of love: songs, steps, familiar tones, perhaps the human voice that once made the world inhabitable.

The poem’s emotional trajectory shifts from recognition of separation to increasingly urgent appeal. At first, the speaker asks how she can answer or return. She acknowledges the waves overhead and declares that she will “never come back.” This is a stark acceptance of death’s finality. Yet the later sections complicate that declaration. She dreams of reunion, listens for the beloved, asks whether their meeting day is near, and finally calls to him directly as his boat moves offshore. The poem does not contradict itself so much as enact grief’s divided consciousness. The speaker knows that she cannot return to life, but desire refuses to obey knowledge. Bereavement, whether experienced by the dead in fantasy or by the living in reality, often produces precisely this tension between final fact and continuing attachment. Chesson turns that psychological truth into a supernatural drama.

The beloved is notably less individualized than the speaker. We know him chiefly through what she misses and imagines: his “footfall kind and dear,” his boat, his relation to the shore, and the names she gives him. This relative vagueness is artistically apt. The poem is not concerned with his biography; he functions as the distant locus of all the speaker’s desire for lost human nearness. His boat is both a realistic image of coastal life and a symbolic vessel. It is “blowing / Out where the green sea meets the blue,” an image that places him at a threshold between near water and open water, between the inhabited shore and the dangerous expanse. He is not yet dead; he is mobile, exposed, and potentially within reach of the sea’s claim. The speaker’s call may be a warning, a plea, a temptation, or all three.

The closing image of two bodies sharing the underwater bed should not be reduced to Gothic sensationalism. It brings together several of the poem’s central concerns: erotic union, burial, loneliness, and the fearful persistence of attachment. A bed conventionally signifies rest, marriage, sexual intimacy, and domestic shelter. Here it is a grave on the sea-floor. By imagining that it “might yet hold two,” the speaker transforms a symbol of love’s union into a figure of death’s enclosure. The effect is chilling because it forces readers to feel the emotional logic of the desire even while recoiling from its consequence. The dead girl wants not merely to be remembered; she wants the division between herself and her lover abolished. In the world Chesson creates, the only absolute union available may be the union of shared death.

There is also a philosophical dimension to the poem’s vision of love. It asks whether love’s endurance beyond death is necessarily consoling. Many elegiac traditions praise continuing attachment as proof that affection transcends mortality. Chesson offers a darker possibility: love that cannot end may become a form of captivity. The speaker’s fidelity is moving, but it binds her to the shore she cannot walk and to the lover she cannot touch. She has not entered peaceful oblivion or a serene heaven; she remains in a state of desire. The poem therefore questions sentimental assumptions about reunion after death. To survive as longing may be less a blessing than an ordeal. The sea, endlessly restless above her, becomes an apt emblem of this condition: desire has movement, noise, and force, but no final resting place.

Yet “A Dead Girl To Her Lover” remains beautiful because Chesson gives this ordeal such musical tenderness. Its natural images are vivid without becoming merely scenic, its folklore is suggestive rather than burdensome, and its supernatural premise reveals recognizably human emotions. Readers need not believe in merrows or in voices borne from the ocean to understand the sensation of listening for someone who will not come, or of feeling that a loved one’s absence has altered every familiar landscape. The poem’s achievement is to make private grief immense enough to inhabit winds, tides, islands, twilight, and open water. It recognizes that love may make the world luminous, but it also understands how love, when severed by death, can make that same world seem full of summonses from the unreachable. Chesson’s lyric remains memorable because it lets beauty and dread speak in the same voice, and because it knows that poetry is uniquely capable of making us hear that voice across the waters.