Winifred Welles’s “Sympathy” opens in a room of gentle hands—milk and bread offered, a stroking touch, a voice insisting the speaker must rest. Yet inside that scene another kind of life is unfolding. Remembrance “beats like black wings” in the speaker’s head, and “wolfish grief is clawing” in her breast. The central idea is not that comfort is hypocritical, but that it can miss the person it aims to reach. The opening line’s “milk and bread” sounds soft and familiar; the line that follows, with its thudding b’s in “beats like black wings,” lets another rhythm intrude. The speaker thanks her visitors so quietly that she seems soothed, and no one notices the scream she is swallowing. Sympathy, the title suggests, is under pressure: it gives food and rest, but not a language for the violence of grief.
Formally, the poem is a fourteen-line lyric, sonnet-like in scale but arranged as two quatrains and a sestet. The first eight lines rhyme ABAB CDCD, and their evenness matches the polite, controlled surface of the sickroom. Then line nine snaps that surface: “Oh crucify me! Nail my hands and feet!” The sestet’s rhyme scheme, EFGEFG, does not so much close the poem as keep reopening it, pairing “feet” with “sweet” and “knife” with “life.” The meter is mostly iambic pentameter, but the imperatives, caesuras, and heavy stresses in the final section break the rhythm, just as the speaker’s inner state breaks the performance of calm. The rhyme of “seem” and “scream” in the second quatrain is especially precise: a single initial consonant separates appearing comforted from letting the truth out.
Imagery splits the poem between nurture and predation. Milk, bread, stroking, and rest belong to the world of care, but remembrance is “black wings” and grief is “wolfish”—creatures that cannot be quieted with a meal. The speaker’s body becomes the site of an inverted plea. She asks those around her to crucify her, to nail her hands and feet, to turn a knife “heart-deep” and release her blood and breath. This is not a literal request; it is a demand that inner pain be made physical and therefore visible. “Pain would be good and suffering seem sweet” sounds almost like a love lyric, and that disturbance is deliberate. The word “Remembrance” hints at a specific loss, yet the poem keeps that loss unnamed, letting grief itself fill the space.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to console. It does not move from despair toward acceptance or gratitude. Instead it shows how isolation can deepen precisely when people are kindest. The line “keep your love for those who still love life” is both a release and a withdrawal: the speaker frees her visitors from any duty toward her, but she also places herself beyond their reach. The final paradox, “do not feed me who am starved to death,” turns the opening generosity upside down. She has been offered food, but she is starving in a way bread cannot touch. That is the poem’s hard wisdom: sympathy, when it treats grief as tiredness or hunger to be soothed, may only widen the distance it hopes to close.