The Two Locks Of Hair - Analysis

A freedom that sounds rehearsed

The poem’s central claim is that the speaker’s chosen freedom is partly a performance meant to outrun grief—and that it fails. He opens as A Youth, light-hearted and content, presenting a traveler who wanders easily, setting up life Arab-like with a tent that is pitched and then furled again. The speed of those actions matters: the world is treated like a campsite, not a home. But the confidence of light-hearted quickly feels like a stance he must keep taking up, as if stillness would let something catch him.

The dream of a home is also the memory of a loss

What interrupts the wandering is a recurring dream of domestic life: once a wife was locked in his heart, and he rocked a blessed child. That word locked is quietly ominous. It suggests tenderness—something kept close—but also confinement, like a room he cannot stop returning to. The dream isn’t simply nostalgic; it is structured like a miniature life, complete with sweet repose, and therefore it sets up a cruel contrast with what follows. The comfort is real enough to be mourned, which is why waking up isn’t relief so much as a second loss.

The violent waking: trying to exile the past

The poem’s hinge is the abrupt command: I wake! followed by Away that dream,--away! The tone turns sharp, almost scolding, as though he could discipline memory into silence. Yet his very complaint admits defeat: the dream stayed Too long, and now it returns by night and day. The speaker wants to be the kind of man who can fold up his tent and move on, but the mind won’t obey travel logic. Instead of distance, he gets repetition.

The grave and the child: an ending that won’t stay ended

When he says, The end lies ever in his thought, the poem reveals what the dream has been carrying all along: not just an imagined family, but the scene of its extinction. He names a grave so cold and deep where The mother beautiful was brought, and then the most devastating line arrives almost quietly: Then dropt the child asleep. It’s a euphemism that refuses to say death directly, which makes it feel both tender and unbearable—as if he cannot bear the blunt word, or cannot grant the child any harsher verb than dropt. The tension here is stark: he calls the earlier life blessed, yet the ending is fixed, replaying with an inevitability that makes blessing feel like bait.

The two locks: proof against denial

After declaring, the dream is wholly o'er, he claims to bathe his eyes and see clearly, and he resumes wandering light and free. But the poem immediately contradicts that regained clarity by introducing the physical relics: Two locks of hair, one brown from the mother and one blond from the child. These locks are small, portable—like the traveler’s tent—but they do the opposite of what travel is supposed to do. They make grief carryable. In other words, he can leave places, but he cannot leave evidence. The locks are not just reminders; they are like keys to the locked chamber of the heart, reopening what he tries to shut.

Color that changes the sky, grief that changes the wish

The ending shows how completely these tokens govern his inner weather. Seeing the lock of gold makes the evening-red go pale; the world’s color drains, as if the child’s hair bleaches the sunset into mourning. Seeing the dark lock produces an even starker result: I wish that I were dead. The contradiction comes to a point here: he has insisted on being light and free, but the objects turn freedom into a thin surface over a death-wish. The speaker can live like a nomad, but the smallest, most intimate fragments—hair, color, touch—undo the pose. The poem ends not with release from the dream, but with the admission that what remains is stronger than wandering: a grief that has found something to hold onto.

A question the poem won’t let him avoid

If the locks are wondrous fair, why do they destroy him? The poem suggests an uncomfortable answer: their beauty is exactly what makes them lethal, because it preserves the mother and child as still-perfect while he continues moving, aging, and surviving. The relics don’t merely recall the dead; they accuse the living.