Leonora Speyer, an American poet and concert violinist, wrote “Friends” in the 1920s; it appeared in her 1926 collection *Fiddler’s Farewell*, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Speyer often moved between musical and literary circles, and her poems tend to carry a musician’s ear for cadence. This sonnet, for all its formal grace, is really a heated refusal: the speaker stands at the edge of mourning and tells Grief, personified as an intimate companion, that she will not let her in.
The central argument unfolds as a list of rejected intimacies. Grief “shall not” sit at the table, share salt, break bread, walk, weep, dream, or wake with the speaker. These domestic verbs turn mourning into a would-be housemate, someone who might become dangerously close. The octave builds a kind of ritual denial, climaxing in the image of Grief’s “somber eyelid’s red” and the declaration that “Tears are but chains and I, I would be free!” In the sestet, the speaker explains why: grief would make her “a laggard of my will,” a “puny thing of anguished need,” and finally “a memory.” To surrender to grief would be to die still loving the lost person, frozen in longing. So the poem turns toward an alternative friend—“the wingless, tearless thing the heart calls strength.”
The poem is a sonnet, but it does not feel stiff because Speyer leans on the energy of anaphora: the repeated “shall not” hammers the refusal, and the midline exclamation “She shall not be” sets a defiant pitch. The metre is mostly iambic pentameter, giving the poem a steady pulse that feels like willed control, though the exclamations break that control. The octave rhymes *bed*, *bread*, *dead*, and *red* against *be*, *me*, and *free*, with “company” working as a deliberately awkward near-rhyme that keeps the verse from becoming too neat. The sestet shifts to a different sound pattern, with the strong half-rhymes “length” and “strength” reinforcing the final choice.
Speyer’s imagery is deliberately domestic and bodily. Salt and bread suggest shared meals; bed and path suggest the whole span of a life, from sleep to movement. Grief whispers “of the dead,” an eerie phrase that makes mourning sound like gossip from the other side. The “somber eyelid’s red” is a precise, almost clinical detail: it catches the swollen, sleepless eye of someone who has been crying. Calling tears “chains” flips the usual idea of tears as release and instead presents weeping as bondage. In contrast, strength is not personified as a woman but as a “thing,” a word that is striking in its coldness. Strength has no wings and no tears; it offers no flight, only endurance. That choice is harsh, but the speaker makes it with full awareness.
What makes “Friends” significant is its unromantic view of mourning. Written after the First World War and in a period of modernist experimentation, the poem nevertheless uses a traditional form to assert a modern kind of emotional self-protection. It refuses the idea that grief must be welcomed as a noble companion. Instead, it argues that survival sometimes requires choosing a less beautiful, less comforting ally. Yet the final image of “strength” as a “wingless, tearless thing” also carries a quiet cost: the speaker may be free of chains, but she is also cut off from the release of tears. The poem’s power lies in that tension—between remembering love and refusing to let that memory consume the living self.