ig-tree,
in front of their house, and the writhing vines, sympathize with
her heart and her spirit:--

"My heart shrivels up and my spirit shrinks curled."

But there is to them two, she thinks, no real outward want,
that should mar their peace, small as is their house,
and poor their field. Why should the change in nature bring change
to the spirit which should put life in the darkness and cold?

"Oh, live and love worthily, bear and be bold!
Whom Summer made friends of, let Winter estrange."

IV. `Along the Beach'.--It does not appear that she
anywhere in the poem addresses her husband, face to face.
It is soliloquy throughout. In this section it does appear,
more than in the others, that she is directly addressing him;
but it's better to understand it as a mental expostulation.
He wanted her love, and got it, in its fulness; though an expectation
of all harvest and no dearth was not involved in that fulness of love.

Though love greatens and even glorifies, she knew there was
much in him waste, with many a weed, and plenty of passions
run to seed, but a little good grain too. And such as he was
she took him for hers; and he found her his, to watch the olive and
wait the vine of his nature; and when rivers of oil and wine came not,
the failure only proved that he was her whole world, all the same.
But he has been averse to, and has resented, the tillage of his nature
to which she has lovingly devoted herself, feeling it to be a bondage;

"And 'tis all an old story, and my despair
Fit subject for some new song:"

such as the one with which she closes this soliloquy,
representing a love which cares only for outside charms
(which, later in the poem, we learn she has not) and looks not deeper.

V. `On the Cliff'.--Leaning on the barren turf, which is dead
to the roots, and looking at a rock, flat as an anvil's face,
and left dry by the surf, with no trace of living thing about it
(Death's altar by the lone shore), she sees a cricket spring gay,
with films of blue, upon the parched turf, and a beautiful butterfly
settle and spread its two red fans, on the rock. And then there is
to her, wholly taken up, as she is, with their beauty,

"No turf, no rock; in their ugly stead,
See, wonderful blue and red!"

and they symbolize to her, Love settling unawares upon men,
the level and low, the burnt and bare, in themselves
(as are the turf and the rock).

VI. `Reading a Book