The Gaoler by Helen Gray Cone (1882)
"The Gaoler" by Helen Gray Cone is a lyric poem that meditates on the inescapable nature of the self, personified as a gaoler, or jailer, who accompanies the speaker from birth and cannot be evaded. The poem opens with the speaker's longing for freedom and solitude, expressing that these are joys entirely unknown to her. From the moment of birth, she has been assigned to a keeper who never sleeps, placed under his watch by the governing forces of existence itself. Despite every effort and stratagem she has employed, this keeper refuses to leave her side. He is silent, he smiles, and he stays, unmoved by her passionate protests and tearful declarations that she loathes him and everything about him. The keeper is no external figure. The speaker reveals the central and haunting truth of the poem when she observes that the dark face of her gaoler is her own. He is present at the close of every night as the last thing she sees, he walks freely through her dreams, and when she wakes he remains beside her. The self is both prisoner and prison, and the identity of the two cannot be separated during mortal life. Seeking escape through the natural world, the speaker appeals to the winds and the sea, calling out to them for help because they seem free. She imagines fleeing, but feels the hand of the gaoler on her shoulder, drawing her back. From hills and lifting stars, from every elevation she might use to gain perspective or distance, he returns her to her bars. He need only murmur her name to recapture and tame her, for the name itself is the self reasserting its claim. The poem then addresses what others whisper about the end of this arrangement. It is said that the gaoler and the speaker will die in the same hour, just as they were born together, and that in death the speaker will lie in selfless peace while he too will find surcease and a quiet bed. The logic is that death dissolves the self, and therefore the self can no longer bind the one it has imprisoned. Self does not bind the dead. Yet the speaker does not fully accept this account. She holds a different hope, one that stirs within her with conviction. She anticipates a future moment when consciousness will be flooded with a splendour beyond her present power to conceive, a brilliance exceeding the freedom of winds and sea, surpassing the grandeur of stars and hills. In that great day she believes she will at last escape entirely and permanently. She will no longer feel any pull toward what would call her back to the self. The gaoler will dissolve like wisps of cloud at sunrise, passing away and vanishing completely, while she, liberated from him at last, will live on. The poem thus moves from the oppressive permanence of the self through failed earthly escapes to a spiritual resolution in which death is not the extinction of both prisoner and jailer but the genuine liberation of something within the speaker that outlasts and transcends the ego that has confined her. Cone frames selfhood as bondage and the soul's ultimate hope as freedom from precisely that identity which has defined mortal life. The gaoler who shares her face is not her truest self but an encumbrance she will one day shed, while the consciousness that remains will be fully and finally her own.
By Helen Gray Cone · First published 1882