D. H. Lawrence’s “Sigh No More” takes its title from a song in Shakespeare’s *Much Ado About Nothing*, where women are urged to stop sighing because “men were deceivers ever.” Lawrence, writing in England during the First World War and publishing the piece in his 1916 collection *Amores*, turns that Renaissance resignation into something more restless and personal. The poem stages a quarrel between faithful grief and worldly knowledge, and refuses to let either one have the final word.
The poem begins in a wood filled with noise and colour, yet the speaker is already irritated: the cuckoo and coo-dove’s “ceaseless calling” is a “meaningless monotony” that is “palling” his morning pleasure. May-blossom and blue bird’s-eye flowers are falling and “scrawling / Messages of true-love down the dust of the highroad.” That verb, “scrawling,” matters. These are not neat love letters; they are accidental, messy signs, quickly trampled. Lawrence keeps the scene beautiful but undermines it with words like “litter” and “dust,” so the natural world seems to mock the very promises it appears to write.
The central contrast is between the she-dove’s faithful grief and the speaker’s harder knowledge. He hears her “gentle grieving” and knows she is “still believing / Love will yet again return to her and make all good.” But he immediately counters that belief: there “must ever be deceiving / Of the mournful constant heart.” While the dove “weaves her woes,” her lover is already singing “within another wood.” The rhyme of “deceiving,” “weaving,” and later “heaving” links love’s betrayal to physical sighing and to the body’s rhythms, as if grief is something instinctive but also unhealthy when sustained too long.
Lawrence builds the poem from a tight, almost hypnotic pattern. Each four-line stanza uses three rhyming lines followed by a looser final line, often with a half-rhyme that echoes later—“wood” returns in “good” and “hood.” The second line is an indented repetition—calling, falling, grieving, deceiving, stalling, heaving. That repeated word does not simply decorate the stanza; it acts like an echo in the wood, pressing the sound deeper into the reader’s ear. The rhythm is flexible, sometimes close to speech, but the chiming rhymes keep tugging it back toward song. This tug-of-war mirrors the speaker’s own ambivalence: he wants to dismiss the dove’s sorrow, yet he keeps hearing it.
The cuckoo shifts the poem’s mood. It “shouts” boisterously, “forestalling, / Stalling” a melancholy walk, and leads the speaker down “intricate enthralling / By-paths where the wanton-headed flowers doff their hood.” Here Lawrence’s imagery grows almost flirtatious; the flowers are “wanton-headed” and uncover themselves like seductive figures. The poem’s final movement is crucial. The speaker follows that laughter, but then feels it “heaving, / A sigh among the shadows,” and retrieves only “a decent short regret for that which once was very good.” The title says sigh no more, yet a sigh returns—brief, controlled, and rooted in loss rather than illusion.
What makes the poem significant is its modern refusal of both cynicism and sentimentality. Lawrence does not pretend that love is faithful or that nature kindly consoles. He lets the wood be gorgeous, deceptive, and slightly ridiculous all at once. The elaborate music of the rhymes makes that honesty feel alive rather than bitter. It is a lyric that turns against its own prettiness while still using every tool of sound and image to make an argument.