similes to create gentle images of reunion with his mother: ‘As a pigeon lets itself off from a cathedral dome/ To be lost in the haze of the sky; I would like to come/ And be lost out of sight with you, like a melting foam.’ We can envisage a pigeon in a big city like London, flying up from a cathedral dome and gradually becoming more and more indistinct until it seems to disappear. Like Hamlet, he wants to melt away. There is no violence or visible desire for death here, just a simple wish to take the same intangible form his mother has taken in death. She has disappeared; now he wishes to disappear, too.
In the third stanza Lawrence articulates just how very tired he is: ‘For I am tired, my dear’. The fatigue he describes is universal. Grief is exhausting, and missing someone is one of the most draining emotions you can experience. Lawrence echoes the simile he used in the second stanza when he writes: ‘if I could lift my feet,/ My tenacious feet, from off the dome of the earth/ To fall like a breath within the breathing wind/ Where you are lost, what rest, my love, what rest!’ Although his feet are determined to cling to the dome of the earth, meaning he is alive and is compelled to live on no matter how difficult it may be, he wishes he could just float away on the wind. He doesn’t know exactly where his mother’s spirit is now, but he seems to have a sense of her presence around him. He feels that if his soul and hers could be together, then he could know true rest, peace and contentment.
