Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell. Whatever she saw, or wherever she travelled in her trance on that strange night she kept her own secret; never whispering a word to Memory, and baffling imagination by an indissoluble silence. She may have gone upward, and come in sight of her eternal home, hoping for leave to rest now, and deeming that her painful union with matter was at last dissolved. While she so deemed, an angel may have warned her away from heaven's threshold, and, guiding her weeping down, have bound her, once more, all shuddering and unwilling, to that poor frame, cold and wasted, of whose companionship she was grown more than weary. I know she re-entered her prison with pain, with reluctance, with a moan and a long shiver. The divorced mates, Spirit and Substance, were hard to re-unite: they greeted each other, not in an embrace, but a racking sort of struggle.Anonymous
About This Quote
In the poem "A Death in the Family," by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a woman named Death is separated from her lover, and she spends a night with him, but her spirit is not yet reunited with him. Because of this separation, Death is sad and feels alone. In the morning, she goes back to her home and begins to tell her story to others. The story she tells reveals that she has been separated from him for a long time, and she says, "O my love!...
can you not hear me?" In the last lines of this poem, she says that there is a place that Death has been going to all of her life, a place where "the marble eyes" of the dead meet the eyes of the living. Death does not want to go back to her home because she misses her lover.
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