VIII

AND YET I FEAR^*

*Written when Rhys was in her mid-eighties, “And Yet I Fear” is her finest unpublished poem. Clearly influenced by one of her favourite poets, Emily Dickinson, Rhys salutes death as a massive hidden power; a welcome force that will sweep her up into the universe, to become one with the wind and the stars and “sweet” eternity. Closing on a Shakespearean image of death at sea, this remarkable fifteen-line poem (it would be interesting to know who typed it out for her) suggests that incapacitating old age, rather than death, was what Rhys feared.