Judith Wright

Woman’s Song

love death rhymed verse somber intimate

Woman’s Song - meaning Summary

Love Between Sleep and Day

A speaker addresses a beloved at dawn, urging them to wake and inhabit her as sunlight breaks. The poem frames waking as inevitable and painful: day severs night’s binding, and the speaker alternately loses and finds the beloved while recognizing external forces — death, duty, desire — will claim them. It combines erotic intimacy with acceptance of separation, exploring how love contends with time, bodily limits, and mortality.

Read Complete Analyses

O move in me, my darling, for now the sun must rise; the sun that will draw open the lips upon your eyes. O wake in me, my darling. The knife of day is bright to cut the thread that binds you within the flesh of night. Today I lose and find you whom yet my blood would keep – would weave and sing around you the spells and songs of sleep. None but I shall know you as none but I have known; yet there’s a death and maiden who wait for you alone; So move in me, my darling, whose debt I cannot pay. Pain and the dark must claim you, and passion and the day.

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