Analysis Of Miss Jennings's 'You Could Not Come And Yet You Go'

Jennings makes a very touching play with imagined opposites and the sad paradox of “You could not come and yet you go.” The poet speaks for itself, yet Miss Jennings’ comments on the poem contain their own revelation .In her book Let’s Have Some Poetry! She states: “If I write too quickly about something that concerns me deeply, either I cannot finish the poem or else I write a very bad one” (Jennings, Let’s Have Some Poetry 24) She goes on to explain that she had written about her sister’s still born child and close to the time of the event although “I was deeply afraid that the finished poem might be sentimental.” Yet it became a favorite for many readers for her work, and she continues with an explanation of how the poem seemed wholly “given”
When she talked to that person he was not the same person as earlier. He bore no secrets and his face bore a new shine. She had never seen him so open before.
In the concluding stanza Jennings shifts from her relationship to the man to another lady who steeps in. This is about Jennings description of the person when he passed away. She observes the lady peacefully offering flowers on his grave. She further says that she offered the flowers just to please the viewers. She says: “How tenderly she put flowers on his grave/ But not as if he might return again/ Or shine or seem so close:/ Rather to please us were the flowers she gave”(69)
Jennings through the last three lines of the poem tries to tell us about a relationship between the man and the lady. From the earlier stanzas it seems that the man has borne a secret which he did not reveal to anyone during his life. It is only three days before his death that he has revealed it to the poet and in the last stanza it seems that the beloved or the lady did not feel much on the death of the man. It was just for the sake of the society that she had come to the grave and gave flowers without any mourn grievance or memory of the lost person. It seems that Jennings want to convey that it is during the realization of death or may be after death many hidden truths are revealed which a person might not be able to tell during his
Her references to her relationship with him which are repeated in a vague and evasive manner reflect that she feared and admired him. She writes: “My relationship with my father was a strange one,” In my extreme childhood, he was a remote and much revered figure. As I grew older and saw more of him, he became rather a frightening person (“Autobiography”). In the poems and elegies she wrote after his death, she confronts the ambivalence of her feelings about him. In the final lines of one of the poem “For My Dead Father,” she creates an image which evokes a sense of their troubled relationship. “There was love now I see of a strange kind,/ We could move about in each other’s mind”( 261