Few poets could hear the silence after a note as sharply as Leonora Speyer. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1872, she was a concert violinist before she became a poet, and that musical training lives in the very texture of her verse. “Answer” appears in Fiddler’s Farewell, the collection that won her the 1927 Pulitzer Prize. Written in an era when modern poetry prized compression and the music of the spoken line, the poem draws on her double life as a performer and writer. It stages a brief, intense dialogue between a wounded speaker and Love itself, turning an accusation into a revelation.
The opening line arrives as a cry: “Love, you have broken my wings — I cried—” The dash breaks the sentence as a wing might break, and the long i vowel in cried, sky, high, and fly creates a keening upward movement. The short exclamatory lines—“And oh, the sky! / Never, never to lift me high!”—feel like gasps rather than measured speech. The speaker sees only loss. The repetition of “never” sounds like a door closing. Yet Love answers with the paradox that reorganizes the whole poem: “Only the broken-winged can fly.” Ordinary flight would not have taught this truth. The broken wing forces a different relationship with the sky—not mastery, but perhaps grace.
The second stanza moves from wings to song, from physical movement to the hidden self. “Love, you have shattered the songs of me” makes music more than something the speaker does; it is something the speaker is. The cry of pain is just as absolute: “Never, never to sing again!” Love’s reply is once more a paradox, but now sharper: “Singing lives on when song is dead. / Listen! — Love said.” The command “Listen!” stops the complaint and turns attention toward what remains when the audible song stops. The near-rhymes of me, pain, again, dead, and said keep the ear restless, never quite allowed to settle. Speyer the violinist would have known that a rest in a score is not empty; it is shaped silence. The end of one kind of singing may be the beginning of a deeper attention.
What the speaker hears in that attention fills the final stanza. It is only four lines, softer and more assured than the earlier outbursts: “There is a sky for a broken wing, / That I have found; / And in the stillness after song, / There is a Sound!” The capitalization of “Sound” turns it into something almost sacred—less a noise than a presence. The rhyme of “found” and “sound” quietly binds discovery to hearing. The speaker no longer laments the lost sky or the lost song; both have been replaced by a sky and a sound that could only be perceived through fracture.
The central idea of “Answer” is not that suffering is good, but that fracture can open a perception unavailable to the untouched. Love does not deny the breaking; it renames it. The poem’s title is itself significant: the entire lyric is a response, a corrective to self-pity. Its three stanzas move from accusation to paradox to calm possession. That movement is the poem’s meaning—loss becomes a threshold rather than a wall.
What makes “Answer” significant is its economy and its daring. In just a few lines, Speyer fuses personal anguish, musical insight, and spiritual paradox without explaining them away. Its brevity is part of its point: like a musical phrase, it lingers because it knows when to stop. The result is a lyric that does what it describes: it leaves the reader in a stillness after the poem’s last line, listening for what might sound there.