Dora Sigerson Shorter, born in Dublin in 1866, wrote during the Irish Literary Revival, when folklore, spiritualism, and the idea of hidden worlds gave poets a language for experiences that ordinary realism could not contain. “Pre-Existence” belongs to that moment. It turns a sudden flicker of recognition between two people into a memory from before birth. The poem is not a proof of reincarnation; it is a study of what it feels like to remember a love that the other person may not share.
The opening lines move quickly from ancient time to yesterday: “We have met, you and I, long ago, / Yesterday when I saw you I knew.” That word “knew” rather than “thought” or “hoped” is central. The speaker is certain. What follows is a visionary moment in which the city vanishes and the sky becomes an “orient blue.” The imagery shifts into an otherworldly garden of “strange flowers and strange perfumes” and “strange birds without song.” The repeated adjective “strange” suggests a place just beyond recognition, vivid to the eye but eerily silent. In that hush the speaker makes an absolute claim: “O I loved you as woman ne'er loved.” The archaic “ne'er” turns the line into a vow, linking this love to a time before modern speech.
Shorter’s construction deepens the mood. The poem is arranged in two eight-line verse paragraphs, with a loose ballad pulse that usually gathers three or four stresses per line. Occasional rhymes such as “knew” and “blue,” “part” and “heart,” “goodbye” and “I” chime like a half-remembered song. The refrain-like phrase “you and I” threads through the poem, but its meaning changes. In the opening it is proof of an old union; by the close it is almost a tiny elegy for that union, repeated by someone who must now carry it alone.
The turn comes when the speaker asks, “O say, do you wish to forget? / Does no answer awake in your heart?” Memory is linked to the heart, not the intellect, and the verb “awake” implies that the other person’s past may only be sleeping. That possibility makes the silence more tender than cruel. The speaker then looks forward: “Perhaps in the future 'tis writ / That we meet once again.” The word “writ” gives the future the authority of fate or scripture, yet the interjection “Ah, goodbye!” undercuts any certainty.
The ending is quiet but devastating: “You forget, but I sigh for that past / Where we met and we loved, you and I.” The word “sigh” is the poem’s emotional centre. It is not a protest; it is the sound of love turning into memory. What makes “Pre-Existence” significant is its insight into unequal remembering. Love at first sight is reframed not as a new beginning but as a return, and the poem dares to imagine that two souls may meet across time while only one is ready to remember. That loneliness, expressed through the dreamlike blue and the silent birds, gives the poem a power that outlasts its Victorian mysticism.