The poem’s last stanza warns that the plight of the woman may lead to suicide, increasingly seductive and potentially as inevitable as the crashing ocean waves or the trees bowing to autumn. The suggestion echoes the typical fate of women in 19th-century fiction locked into illicit or otherwise damaging relationships. Realist writers of the time often gave female characters regarded as problems, social misfits, or threats to the social order the same ending: death by suicide. In Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), jilted Emma Bovary takes arsenic; in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1879), Anna throws herself under a train after her lover’s desertion; in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), Eustacia Vye drowns trying to swim to her lover; in Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867), Thérèse takes poison to escape an abusive marriage; in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart overdoses, crushed by unfair social opprobrium.

Robinson explores a different sort of response to romantic misery: His female character chooses to live stoically alone rather than surrender to her despair. Her decision to endure her unhappy relationship speaks to a wider experience because it lacks the tragic melodrama of self-destruction. Resignation, the poem argues, is its own kind of heroism. To contemporary readers, Robinson’s character retreating to her home might seem flawed, even cowardly. But for her era, she exhibits courage. She will live without illusions; the man in her life won’t change and the town will “vibrate with her seclusion” (Line 32), but she will persevere.