Robinson’s sonnet dramatizes a heartbroken lover’s conversation with her own sighs and tears. She first addresses the sigh as a herald that steals out to broadcast her lover’s fears and pangs. That sigh, she says, gives her chest a timid grace but cheats her of daytime joy and peaceful rest. Her tears are lucid, eloquent, yet they sit unheeded on fading cheeks—as fragile as dew on a flower battered by storms. Instead of comforting her, these outward signs of grief only deepen her sense of powerlessness. Midway through, her tone shifts sharply from tender self-pity to defiance. She commands the sigh to hush and the tear to freeze, since their feeble powers are at the mercy of the Fates. If tears must fall again, she would rather they bring complete forgetfulness, like the mythological river Lethe. The closing couplet lays blame on love itself: when hope feels near, love plays the tyrant, and the person who runs away ends up chaining the lover’s soul even more tightly. The mood is theatrical and melancholy, mixing delicate natural imagery with a bitter, almost luxurious despair.
Sonnet XXXVIII: Oh Sigh — Summary
Oh Sigh! thou steal'st, the herald of the breast, The lover's fears, the lover's pangs to tell; Thou bid'st with timid grace the bosom swell, Cheating the day of joy, the night of rest! Oh! lucid Tears! with eloquence confest, Why on my fading cheek unheeded dwell, Meek, as the dew-drops on the flowret's bell By ruthless tempests to the green-sod prest. Fond sigh be hush'd! congeal, O! slighted tear! Thy feeble pow'rs the busy Fates control! Or if thy crystal streams again appear, Let them, like Lethe's, oblivion roll: For Love the tyrant plays, when hope is near, And she who flies the lover, chains the soul!