In Winifred Welles’s “Gesture,” the speaker describes herself as closed and still: her arms are quiet, “furled like a banner” and “enfolded like a seed.” The opening creates a sense of waiting, but also a gentle, contained self-sufficiency. There is no pain yet, only a private, folded calm. She imagines that love will release her into motion and beauty—arms springing open, loosening like a petal, opening like a wing. Those similes all suggest softness, grace, and natural unfolding.
The final stanza breaks that expectation. Love has come, and her arms are lifted, but not to sway or toss. Instead they “strain out wide and wounded,” like arms on a cross. The shift is from inwardness to exposure, from hoped-for blossoming to painful sacrifice. The poem ends in a stark, almost reverent stillness, where desire becomes suffering and the speaker is left open, not in joy, but in agony.