Two people part, and the speaker refuses to soften it with a single comforting lie. Coventry Patmore's "A Farewell" opens on a split between "will" and "heart" ("With all my will, but much against my heart"), and the whole poem lives in that gap. The reasons for the parting are never given. We are not asked to judge the separation, only to watch two people carry it out. Patmore is best remembered for *The Angel in the House*, a long poem celebrating married love, so it is striking to find him here writing about love at the moment it is interrupted.
The poem's shape follows its feeling. It begins in a full ten-syllable line, then breaks into fragments: "We two now part." "My Very Dear," "Is dead,". These short lines read like a voice catching. The rhymes are irregular, and some come back only after a long delay. The most telling pair is "say / away." The speaker declares, "We will not say / There 's any hope, it is so far away," and the rhyme itself pushes hope into the distance. Many lines later the same sound returns in "Perchance we may, / Where now this night is day." What was forbidden to say at the start has become possible, and the poem lets its rhyme make the change before the argument does. Even "Go thou to East, I West" enacts what it describes. It has no verb in its second half, and the comma divides the line the way the road divides the lovers.
The imagery is quiet but precise. Grief becomes "the one darling of our widowhead," a "nursling" the two share like a child. Since they are parting, not bereaved, "widowhead" is a metaphor, and it suggests that grief is the only thing they still hold in common. The poem imagines this grief dying, and the result is not blankness but clear sight. Now tears are "dews" that blur their eyes, so they cannot "see the peach-bloom come in evening skies." The beauty is already there, and sorrow is what hides it.
Then there is the pair of "feet." At first the lovers walk "with faint, averted feet," reluctant and half turned away. Near the end the phrase returns as "faith of still averted feet." Only one word changes, from faint to faith, but the same steps are now an act of loyalty. Staying apart has become the way of keeping faith. This is where the poem's central conceit appears. If one person goes east and the other west, then on a round world they are "making full circle of our banishment" and must "Amazèd meet." Separation, followed far enough, turns into a route back. The poem never says whether that meeting happens in this life. "Termless feast" and the strange "Where now this night is day" suggest something beyond ordinary time, but that is an inference, and Patmore leaves it open.
The final sentence is the poem's longest and steadiest. The lines settle back into the full measure of the opening, and the phrasing balances opposites: "bitter journey to the bourne so sweet." A "bourne" is a destination or boundary. The last image is the most surprising. The reunion is a feast, but it is "seasoned" with "tears of recognition never dry." Tears returned, though only a few lines earlier the poem pictured eyes clear of them. These are different tears, shed in joy, and they work like salt, giving the happiness its flavour. The ending says that the pain of parting will not be erased by reunion. It will become part of it.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not offer easy consolation, and it does not wallow either. Its feeling is held in check by form, by the plain statement that "the sad road lies so clear," and by the refusal to promise anything. Yet it also allows a small, hard-won hope, "Perchance," built from nothing more than the shape of the earth and the faithfulness of walking on.