In Exile
Is it love that drifts your head toward your white, cool shoulder, heat-smitten rose too tense for the white throat? Is it love that paints the eyelid ledge with iris; the weariness of days I dare not know you suffered? Is it love that hurts or thought?
Has sleep conquered love? Have you spent your love on the white cytisus ridges, the Nereid-blue water, the wing-dip of the hills?
Are my own limbs but a sheath for your intensity, my love.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 7, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“In Exile” appeared in Bryher’s second poetry collection, Arrow Music (J. & E. Bumpus, 1922). About the poem, Susan McCabe, a professor of English at Southern California University, writes in her essay “H.D. and Bryher: a modernist love-story,” “‘In Exile’ wonders if she, Bryher, was not just a buffer for her lover’s violent poetic vision: ‘Are my limbs but a sheath for your intensity, my love.’ In a sense, Bryher sheathed and buffered, gave a second skin to H.D. as much as she identified with the sometimes ‘violent’ passions she protected. Perhaps not Mr. and Mrs. Reciprocal as Stein called herself and Alice, but there was a queer romance in the making that would endure in imagination for forty odd years.”
Bryher
Annie Winifred Ellerman Bryher was born in Margate, England, on September 2, 1894, the daughter of multimillionaire Sir John Ellerman.