The Gardener 65 Is That Your Call Again - Analysis

A call that feels like love and like theft

The poem stages devotion as a kind of late-hour summons that the speaker both longs for and resents. From the first lines, the voice is tired and tender at once: The evening has come, and Weariness clings around me not like a burden but like the arms of entreating love. That simile is crucial: fatigue is intimate, almost affectionate, yet it also traps. When the speaker asks, Do you call me?, the question is less about hearing than about consent—whether answering is chosen or compelled.

The cruel mistress: desire that won’t let go

The addressee is named with startling bluntness: cruel mistress. This is not a gentle beloved; she is a power that claims time. The speaker insists, I had given all my day to you, and the complaint sharpens into a boundary: must you also rob me of my night? The word rob makes the relationship feel extractive, as if love (or duty, or inspiration, or God) takes more than it gives. Yet even in protest, the speaker keeps addressing her directly, which suggests the bond is not optional; it’s the kind of attachment that survives indignation.

Night as the last private refuge

The poem’s central tension is the speaker’s claim to solitude against the mistress’s claim to him. Night is described as a human right: the loneness of the dark is one's own. He imagines an end to everything, a limit where giving and answering should stop. But the mistress’s voice does not respect that limit; it cut through and smite him. The violence of smite makes the call feel almost punitive, as if being chosen is also being struck. The tone here is wounded and defensive, like someone trying to protect a small, necessary silence.

Unpitiless beauty: stars, flowers, and sleep denied

To argue for rest, the speaker builds a whole evening world that should be sufficient without him. He asks whether there is music of sleep at her gate, whether silent-winged stars do not climb above her pitiless tower. The images are both soothing and cold: sleep has music, stars have wings, but the tower is pitiless—beauty housed in something unyielding. Even the flowers are imagined in surrender, drop on the dust in soft death. That phrase gives the speaker a model of letting go: nature rests, dims, falls. The implied accusation is that the mistress refuses this natural rhythm, demanding wakefulness in a world designed to sleep.

The turn: from resistance to chosen surrender

The poem pivots when the speaker stops asking for mercy and begins issuing permissions: Then let the sad eyes watch and weep; Let the lamp burn in the lonely house; Let the ferry-boat take workers home. These lines widen the scene, setting his private struggle against a social evening—the labourers released, houses lit, ordinary lives closing. And yet he does not join them. Instead, he accepts the cost: I leave behind my dreams. The final line, I hasten to your call, is not blissful; it is urgent and somewhat bleak. He moves quickly, but not because he’s unburdened—because the summons has authority.

A sharper question the poem won’t answer

When the mistress is called unquiet, the poem hints that her restlessness might be the real engine here: she cannot sleep, so he cannot sleep. If her tower is pitiless, is the speaker’s haste an act of love, or an agreement to be used? The poem ends with motion, not resolution, as if the speaker’s deepest habit is to answer—even when answering costs him the one thing he asked to keep: the loneness of the dark.