Sara Teasdale’s eight-line lyric “A Cry” examines a love in which the speaker possesses no physical place. The poem sets up a bitter inventory: there are eyes he can see, hands that can make his hands rejoice, breasts to bear his head, lips where his lips can lie. All these belong to others, or to a possible other life. Against them, the speaker defines herself twice: “Only a voice” and then “Only a cry.” The central idea is not merely jealousy but a deeper self-erasure: she experiences herself as sound rather than body, as an urgent, immaterial presence that can be heard but never held.
The construction is tightly balanced. Two quatrains follow the same pattern: three longer tetrameter lines, then a short final line that falls away. In the first stanza, the rhyme scheme is abcb—see/be, rejoice/voice. In the second, it repeats with head/dead, lie/cry. That formal repetition makes the comparison between the two stanzas feel inevitable. The final line in each stanza, “Only a voice” or “Only a cry,” is metrically isolated, much as the speaker is isolated. The line shrinks from four stresses to two, so the poem’s own body seems to become thinner, reduced to a bare phrase.
The imagery works through body parts standing for whole forms of intimacy. The lover sees, touches, rests, kisses. The verbs and nouns are full of physical contact. “Rejoice” is the poem’s one explicitly joyful word, and it belongs to his hands, not to her. The speaker, by contrast, is given no body parts at all. She is a voice, then a cry. A voice is still human and can speak; a cry is closer to pain, less articulate, more desperate. The move from “voice” to “cry” is a move downward, from communication to raw expression. The phrase “till I am dead” in the second stanza turns this state into something permanent. It is not a temporary separation that might end; it is an identity she expects to carry until death.
Key words carry the emotional weight. “Only” appears in both final lines and is the poem’s sharpest qualifier. It does not say she is absent, but that she is less than what others can be. “Must be” repeats the idea of compulsion: this is not her choice but her condition. The opening “Oh” of each stanza sounds like a sigh or lament, as if the speaker is already halfway between speech and cry. The word “lover” is singular, while the other body parts are multiple and anonymous, which deepens the sense of a crowd of possible rivals. She is not competing with one woman; she is competing with the whole tangible world.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to explain. Teasdale never says why the speaker must be only a voice or a cry—distance, secrecy, shame, death, or unrequited longing could all lie behind it. That absence of explanation keeps the poem from becoming a simple anecdote. Instead, it becomes a study of what it feels like to be reduced to one function, one sound. The poem itself is the cry: it does not describe the speaker’s condition so much as perform it. By the time the final line arrives, the reader is left not with an image of a woman but with the sound of her desperation. The form, with its repeated shape and abrupt final lines, gives that cry a shape. It turns self-pity into something almost austere, and that restraint makes the pain feel sharper.