Till her calm grey eye
Expands to a sky
And the clouds of her hair
Like storms go by?
Then the lips that you have kissed
Turn to frost and fire,
And a white-steaming mist
Obscures desire:
So back to their birth
Fade water, air, earth,
And the First Power moves
Over void and dearth.
Is that Love? no, but Death,
A passion, a shout,
The deep in-breath,
The breath roaring out,
And once that is flown,
You must lie alone,
Without hope, without life,
Poor flesh, sad bone.
The entire last stanza takes a turn for the worst. This is where Graves' post war depression shines through the poem. The stanza is all about dying alone, and decaying in a grave. He asks if what he, or the subject of the poem, really had was love, while in reality it was killoing him the whole time. The amount of cynicism in this stanza is tangible. The line “the breath roaring out” makies me think of a man’s last breath roaring across a barren waste land. 
