Each Scar Ill Keep For Him - Analysis

Keeping pain as proof of devotion

The poem’s central move is oddly tender and fiercely controlled: the speaker decides to keep her wounds as evidence of loyalty, but to rename them so they sound like treasure rather than injury. The opening line, Each Scar I’ll keep for Him, reads like a vow. These scars aren’t simply remembered; they’re preserved for someone else, as if the beloved’s return will require an accounting of what absence cost. That devotion isn’t sentimental here—it’s practical, almost legalistic: she will present her body and its marks as the record of time spent waiting.

From scar to gem: the speaker’s chosen translation

The startling substitution—Instead I’ll say of Gem—shows the speaker actively translating suffering into value. A scar becomes a gem: hard, enduring, and precious. The phrase In His long Absence worn suggests a piece of jewelry rubbed smooth by constant contact, which turns waiting into a kind of daily labor. Even A Costlier one implies she’s upgrading the description, insisting that what happened to her is not just damage but expense—something paid. Yet there’s a tension in that glossy renaming: calling a scar a gem doesn’t erase the hurt; it reveals how badly she wants the beloved to see her endurance as meaningful, not merely sad.

The turn: scars can be displayed; tears threaten to overflow

The second stanza pivots from the manageable solidity of scars to the fluidity of grief: But every Tear I bore. That But matters. Scars can be kept, counted, even shown off as proof; tears are harder to control because they keep happening, and because they suggest vulnerability rather than toughness. The speaker’s tone shifts from proud presentation to anxious calculation. It’s as if she can curate her wounds into gems, but she can’t quite domesticate sorrow in the same way.

A competition of grief—and an attempt to protect him from it

When she imagines him returning, she doesn’t picture comfort first; she pictures measurement: Were He to count them o’er. The beloved becomes an auditor of her pain. But then comes the poem’s most surprising claim: His own would fall so more. The speaker insists that if he truly counted her tears, he would cry even more than she did. This reverses the expected roles—she is not only the sufferer; she is the one who anticipates his suffering and tries to manage it. Devotion here includes a kind of guardianship: she can bear her tears, but she cannot bear the thought of causing his.

I’ll mis sum them: love as deliberate falsification

The last line, I’ll mis sum them, lands with quiet audacity. The speaker plans to falsify the record—not because she’s fickle, but because she believes the truth would injure him. It’s an intimate kind of deception: she will undercount her tears so he won’t have to produce his. The contradiction is sharp: earlier she wants to keep every scar for him, but now she wants to miscount the tears for him too. The poem suggests that love can demand both exposure and concealment—showing the hardened evidence (scars-as-gems) while hiding the softer evidence (tears) that might undo the beloved.

A harder question the poem won’t answer

If the speaker is willing to alter the arithmetic of her grief, what does she fear more: his pity, his guilt, or the possibility that he might not return at all? The poem’s careful bookkeeping—count, sum, and then mis sum—makes absence feel like an account that can never quite balance. Even her devotion is forced into numbers, and the numbers, at the end, must be made wrong.