The speaker mourns a love in which she can never be physically present. While other women offer her lover visible eyes, welcoming hands, a breast to rest on, and lips to kiss, she can give him only sound. The repeated contrast between what he can see or touch and what she must be gives the poem its ache: she feels reduced to something disembodied, a voice that reaches him but cannot hold him. By the second stanza, the word “voice” sharpens into “cry,” suggesting that her love is not just distant but painful, perhaps desperate or unheard. The short, songlike lines and the exclamations create a mood of yearning and quiet anguish. There is no resolution; she simply states her fate as though it is as fixed as death.
A Cry — Summary
Oh, there are eyes that he can see, And hands to make his hands rejoice, But to my lover I must be Only a voice.
Oh, there are breasts to bear his head, And lips whereon his lips can lie, But I must be till I am dead Only a cry.