It is a strange idea to think of people being openly queer in the 1800’s; not that there is anything strange about being queer, but typically these individuals are blotted out of history lessons. Even with Shakespeare’s sonnets, I was completely unaware that the majority were dedicated to a man. It is interesting to think that there have always been around the same amount of queer individuals, but they were too afraid to admit it to any one, and if they did, it was typically met with scrutiny and much worse. When I picked Robinson’s poem, I was excited to see just how the poem would be classified as queer and did a general search for it: nothing came up. In fact, the only place I could find the poem was by the link provided to a picture of an old book. After reading the poem, I can see clear queer markers, but without knowing the poet was a woman, I would not have bated an eye. However, knowing that this is a lesbian relationship that is being written about, I can better evaluate it. Starting off, the poem is dark, the narrator is calling to the night and death to come to her. She comments on the dreams that fill her “large with promise” of something lost and for death that “hope for every thrall.” She is resenting the dreams that give her hope but also longing for the death that promises everyone, even her who is a slave to love, freedom. The first time I realized she was talking about a woman was at line 5, “…to her for whom I wake and call.” Here it is clear that the lost love is in fact another woman. She then goes on to write about their “vanished love” and how, in death, she hopes her love remembers her. For me, I assumed that the poem would be more of a lament of forbidden love rather than lost. There is a sort of stigma in the media we are fed that only features queer love when it is being torn apart of hesitantly flustering. This poem speaks about it in a real manner that makes the reader relate it to every other type of relationship. After all, Lin-Manuel Miranda did tell us that “Love is love is love,” and Robinson proves this centuries before by writing about it so realistically and nonchalantly.
I really like your analysis of this poem! I think it’s interesting how you and several other people commented on the fact that your poets introduced the gender of their love interests late into the poem, as a sort of “big reveal.” Since they were written in the Victorian Era, I can definitely understand many people would view that as a mind-blowing reveal of the theme of queerness. I also find it interesting how Robinson refers to death throughout the poem. In the beginning, the night is full of it, then she says that her lover will save her from it, and then she speaks directly *to* death, saying that her love interest could not stand hearing Death’s name. This could be to show how love has power over death.