D. H. Lawrence’s “Perfidy” reads like a short film of suspicion made from streetlight and shadow. Published in the 1916 collection *Amores*, during the anxious early years of the First World War and a period of intense upheaval in Lawrence’s own relationships, the poem turns a lover’s vigil into a moody urban scene. Lawrence is often remembered as a novelist, but here his poetic control of sound and image turns a private wound into something almost mythic: the night itself seems to watch a betrayal unfold.
The word “perfidy” names treacherous disloyalty, yet the poem is less interested in accusation than in the slow collapse of trust. The speaker begins at the threshold of a house that rings “hollow” when knocked, and the word echoes backwards into his body: “Hollow re-echoed my heart.” That double emptiness—the unanswering house and the speaker’s own hope—is the poem’s true subject. He walks out beneath “low-hung lamps” that stretch down the road, imagining the “soft, melodious feet” of the woman he longs to meet. But the golden lamps soon go out, the last car drags the night behind it, and he is left wandering with “a flutter of hope and of dark-shut doubt.” Lawrence makes hope and doubt not opposites but twins, both hidden in the same dark street.
The poem’s shape is deliberately restless. Most stanzas run to five lines, but rhymes surface and sink: “door” returns in “more,” then “feet” meets “meet,” and later “out,” “about,” and “doubt” circle back as if the speaker cannot escape his own uncertainty. The opening line, “Hollow rang the house when I knocked on the door,” carries four hard stresses that imitate the sound of knocking, while the repeated words “knock” and “hollow” make the moment echo. In the final stanza, the expected five-line pattern overflows as the woman appears from a “shameful” car, hidden in shadow, runs to the silent door, and shuts it fast. The extra length feels like a held breath released too late.
Imagery does the emotional work. Streetlight functions as a gauge of feeling: the “low-hung light of her eyes” promises intimacy, while the “dying lamp of my love” marks its failure. The city, more than the woman, seems alive—brown ponies stop at a dim-lit trough, a dark van drums down the distance, and “city stars so dim and holy” draw near as if searching the streets. The beloved is never given a voice or a face; she is only movement and shadow, and finally a door “quickly cast” shut. That closing door leaves “the street aghast,” giving the pavement, lamps, and night a shock the speaker himself cannot speak.
The significance of “Perfidy” lies in its refusal to explain. Lawrence does not confirm the betrayal with dialogue or evidence, only with a furtive car, a hurrying figure, and a shut door. The reader remains as stranded as the speaker, caught between jealousy and possible misreading. Few poems capture so economically how suspicion feels: not as a single blow, but as a city darkening around a love that no longer answers when knocked upon.