On the Threshold

O God, my dream! I dreamed that you were dead;
Your mother hung above the couch and wept
Whereon you lay all white, and garlanded
With blooms of waxen whiteness. I had crept
Up to your chamber-door, which stood ajar,
And in the doorway watched you from afar,
Nor dared advance to kiss your lips and brow.
I had no part nor lot in you, as now;
Death had not broken between us the old bar;
Nor torn from out my heart the old, cold sense
Of your misprision and my impotence.

Credit

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 5, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“On the Threshold” was originally published in A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (T. Fisher Unwin, 1889).

Author

Amy Levy

Amy Levy was born in London on November 10, 1861, the second of seven children in a middle-class Jewish family. Levy attended Brighton High School for Girls, a school founded by women’s rights advocates that would be a catalyst for Levy’s outspoken, feminist views. While there, she wrote “Xantippe,” a dramatic monologue from the perspective of Socrates’s wife.

Date Published

01/01/1889