Jimenez

Margaret Jimenez

The Agony of Lost Love

As I read “The Shadow in the Rose Garden” by D. H. Lawrence, I felt a sense of

overwhelming sadness for the agony and despair this young woman protagonist experienced in

this story. The anguish that enveloped her as she discovered she had forever lost her one true

love is wrenching, to say the least.

This young woman’s desire to return to the Rose garden behind the Rectory, a place she

once knew intimately and which holds for her such dear and splendid memories of joy and

happiness, is for her, the path to seeking the truth about what happened to her lost love.

Although she is now married and seemingly bound forever to another man, she is not in love

with him. She still needs to know what has become of that man who had evermore stolen her

heart. What had become of her one true love?

She thought she had lost him once to death, which is distressing enough but what she

discovers is something much more frightening. The man she seeks, still loves and yearns for, is

still alive but she has indeed lost him, to another more terrible kind of death. Their love is dead,

destroyed forever by the lunacy that now binds him. He is, in fact, a stranger to her now. In

that garden she realizes is that he is, but, a shadow of his former self.

As she sits in that place of cherished memories, it becomes the place of her encounter

with this man, her former lover. He arrives, sits with her and asks her a question, “I don’t

disturb you – do I?” but she does not answer. Instead, as the writer puts it, “She was mute and

helpless.”

Therefore, her former lover asks again, “May I smoke?” and again,

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She could not answer, but it did not matter, he was in another world. She

wondered, craving, if he recognized her – if he could recognize her. She sat pale

with anguish. But she had to go through it.

What torment, what agony she must have felt at that moment! To know that he no

longer recognized her! He looked at her vacuously but he no longer saw the woman of his

dreams. He no longer recognized the woman who had once fulfilled his passionate desires. She

is lost to him forever as he is to her, trapped in the mind of a mad man. I imagine that inwardly,

she reeled at the shock of her discovery but outwardly, the writer states that she sat “in a frozen

kind of suspense”.

I could sense her frustration at the banality of her daily existence. I could sense her

despair at being trapped in a loveless marriage to a man she cannot even bear to look at. I could

feel how strongly she desired to be with the one who once held her heart but is now rendered

helpless and lost to her by his mental incapacity.

I certainly sympathized with her longing to be loved, truly and passionately. I know I

have wanted the experience of my true love to last forever. I wish I could say that I have found

that one person who fulfills all my ideals for love, passion and companionship. I wish I could

say that my husband completes me; however, after almost 16 years of marriage, what I have

learned is that true love does not depend on fervent desires and warm sentiments. My own

personal experience has taught me that the foundation of true love is one of mutual respect and

a commitment or willingness to work at the relationship through good and bad times. I am

grateful that my true love is not lost to me. For whatever faults my husband possesses I feel

fortunate that I have him and that he loves me through thick and thin and is committed.

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I know that love’s emotions do wane after time so I feel much compassion for our

heroine because she has not only lost her lover while her affection for him still burned deeply in

her heart but also now she finds herself trapped in a loveless marriage. Why she wed, I do not

know. Perhaps she was resigned to the fact that her lover was lost to her forever and so her

hope for true love was now gone too. However, entering into this loveless marriage did nothing

to dissipate her feelings for her former love. As intensely as she loves one man, she despises

the other.

She tells her husband about her former lover and as she does so you feel how hard her

heart is towards him and how intense her pain and suffering. It is a tragedy beyond words to

feel as she does. She is truly grieving. This whole circumstance causes a breach between her

and her husband that is irreparable. She knows nothing within her can take away the bitterness

and the madness. Madness, as in what inhabits the mind of her former lover, and madness, as in

the rage that wells up within her husband. This is her lot in life but finally she realizes that her

acceptance of true love’s “demise” and her feelings towards her husband and marriage “must

work itself out.”

At the end of the story, the writer tells us, “They were both shocked so much, they were

impersonal, and no longer hated each other.” It is torturous to realize that the love you once

cherished with all that is within you is now lost forever. This is truly the agony of lost love.

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