In “After Raphael,” the speaker describes her grief and the process she goes through as she deals with it. She begins by wondering if it is possible to talk about grief and loss without confronting the danger of love. She goes on to explain that she lost her father first, and then her mother. The speaker describes this time of grief as a “strange storm,” after which her parents were “ruined down / From the boughs.”

The speaker says, “I am sick of not loving and not / Sleeping well, of wanting spleen.” Her description of her grief is that she has no one to love, that she is not sleeping well, and that she gravitates toward feeling melancholy. (The ancient Greeks believed in the four bodily humors, one of which was associated with the spleen and responsible for...