The Lament of the Mormon Wife: A Poem

In this moving narrative poem, a wife looks back on the tender courtship and marriage that once seemed to promise lifelong devotion. Her husband was gentle and loving, and she followed him willingly from a peaceful Northern village into an unfamiliar religious world, trusting his convictions and his vows.

Over the years, however, another woman enters their home, and the “shadow” of plural marriage falls across the speaker’s life. Now isolated in a lonely attic, she remembers lost happiness, a child who died young, and the successive wives who have each endured the consequences of her husband’s changing affections. Told in mournful, intimate verse, the poem explores betrayal, religious authority, female solidarity, and the stubborn hope that love might yet return. Its quiet imagery—fading hair, sickly sunsets, distant children, and empty rooms—gives the speaker’s lament both personal tenderness and broader social force.