In Winifred Welles’s “Two Songs of Bitterness,” a speaker ranks three loves and gives first place to Eunice, the one who is dead. The poem’s central insight is that grief does not simply keep the dead in memory; it turns them into a storehouse for every lost possibility, so that living attachments begin to look thin by comparison. The two songs enact that insight twice: first through comparison, then through confession.
Within the first song, Ruth is introduced as “a bowl of crystal,” transparent and overflowing with laughter, “clear as the dew on a cobweb, / Or green water over white sand in a brook.” Mary is dearer: she has “color and story,” soft cloths, silver footsteps, a golden touch. These are living women, tangible and luminous. Yet the speaker turns away from them to a paradox: “Oh sweet as wine is laughter with the loving, / And speech with the living good as bread, / But only with a ghost can I feast in silence.” The food metaphors make living contact sound nourishing, and still the silence of the dead is the real feast. The phrase “With Eunice, who is dearest, being dead” lands on that final blunt word as both explanation and wound. The ranking from dear to dearer to dearest gives absence the victory.
The second song shifts into short, tightly rhymed couplets that sound almost like a child’s chant. The speaker lists everything she “could not be” or could not finish: “The princess that I could not be, / The fairy that was not for me, / The game begun and never ended, / The castle dreamed, the play pretended.” These are imagined selves, games, and stories. Then the losses widen: “The note unsung, the word unspoken, / Whatever I have lost and broken. / My doll, my heart, my promises.” The trinity of “doll, heart, promises” compresses childhood, feeling, and commitment into three small nouns. “All these things Eunice is” is the crucial line: the dead one is not like these losses; she is these losses. The speaker has entrusted her entire unlived life to a ghost.
The final turn imagines not a heavenly reunion but a grave. “When I lie down with her to rest, / I’ll find my dearest and my best / Safe in her dust beneath the sod.” What is “kept fair and clear and written plain” is precisely the lost self the speaker gave to Eunice. Only in that dust will she “believe again / In elves and knights and love and God.” That list fuses fairy tale, chivalric ideal, human affection, and religious faith—everything grief has made unreachable in the present. The consolation, if it is consolation, is postponed until death.
The formal movement reinforces the bitter logic. The first song’s longer, looser quatrains sound like adult reflection; the second song’s insistent couplets sound like an incantation or a spell, moving from loss to imagined recovery. The word “clear” repeats from Ruth’s transparent living presence to the “fair and clear” writing in Eunice’s dust, as if only death can make life legible. The poem’s significance lies in this honesty: it admits that mourning can become a preference. The living women can be seen and touched, yet the speaker chooses silence and dust. That is not easy grief but bitterness, and the poem refuses to soften it into comfort. By showing the dead as a magnet for every broken promise and abandoned self, Welles reveals why such loss can empty the present so completely. The final faith is real, but it rests on dying—a truth the poem leaves with us quietly, like a closed book.