Note: This will make most sense to fans of Josephine Tey’s “Daughter of Time”.
That day they rode away, I rather thought
they’d all return to me in God’s good time.
Men work while women wait, as we’ve been taught.
My Richard was, for all the wars he’d fought,
The picture of a strong man in his prime
that day they rode away. I rather thought
my son might be a trifle overwrought,
but hid it well. His calmness was sublime.
Men work while women wait. As I’d been taught,
I lived to see the ones I loved all caught
in all the web of politics. That grime –
The day they rode away, I never thought
what I had done. In bearing I had brought
them to a world where birth was counted crime.
Men work while women wait, as we’ve been taught.
If I had known the future then, I’d sought
a way to keep our honor from that slime.
The day they rode away, I never thought.
Men work while women wait. So we’ve been taught.
Historical Note: Cecily Neville, the Rose of Raby, was the wife of Richard, Duke of York, and the mother of Edward IV and Richard III of England – not to mention Edmund, the son mentioned in the poem, and George, Duke of Clarence, who’s most famous for dying by being drowned in a butt of malmsey. By the time she died, her husband and all her sons were dead, two grandsons had been vilely murdered (by her own son’s orders or by his usurper, take your pick) and some historians claimed her own son had accused her of adultery, making her older sons illegitimate. Her granddaughter was married to the man who had wiped out her family. Later, her son Richard was to be viewed as the most evil king England ever had, thanks to later accounts by Sir Thomas More and the play by William Shakespeare. Josephine Tey, in The Daughter of Time, makes a convincing case that Richard was a good man whose name was befouled by his successor, Henry VII. (But I don’t know how accurate her facts were and I don’t believe face-reading is a guarantor of innocence. Others including Horace Walpole have made the same argument, but as far as I can tell modern historians are far from unanimous but tend to lean toward believing Richard really did murder the Princes in the Tower.
Whatever Richard’s guilt or innocence, his mother’s story is a tragedy.
Your metaphor feels sadly mixed. Don’t women labor, while men wait and worry? Especially in this context:
>…In bearing I had brought
>them to a world where birth was counted crime.
>Men work while women wait, as we’ve been taught.
If we could ask Cecily Neville what she had done in a given year, before it all fell apart for her, I doubt she would have said she was waiting for her husband, or waiting for her son. The men of her family fought and traveled, and she waited for them…but she worked as she waited. Men fight, while women stay home and raise children. Bearing a child, raising him, educating him…none of that is the kind of “work” that goes into history books. (I mean, it didn’t go into history books when Tey was in school. The concept of history seems to be expanding.)
Actually, Cecily Neville often did travel with her husband – just not to war. I think what I had in mind was the poem Three Fishers –
For men must work, and women must weep,
And there’s little to earn, and many to keep,
Though the harbor bar be moaning.
in which the men also all die. But I was also trying (apparently not quite achieving) irony, with “as we’ve been taught”. I’m far from denigrating the work that goes into child-rearing, and I’m sure running her household wa a ful-time job. But how often do we see the attitude of “so what did you do while I was [at work / at war / off running the world] all day?
I was not sufficiently clear (as it was coming up on 2am EDT when I wrote my previous comment.) It was the childbirth sense of “labor” that made the poem collapse for me. Did you mean it ironically, with the image of a man fretting outside the birthing room opposing that of a woman waving goodbye?