The Healing Journey

September 7, 2025

Ruth Stone, who worked for a time at Wesleyan University Press, has been called the “poet of grief,” largely inspired by the death of her second husband, Walter. Stone’s poetry has been compared to Emily Dickinson’s. Another poet, Sandra Gilbert, said Stone’s poetry “is at least part a product of the pain and loss she’s had to confront, the perilous life she’s lived at the edge of comforts most other people of letters take for granted in our society.”

Walter Stone, a writer and poet, committed suicide and left his wife, Ruth, with three children to raise. For the rest of her life, for almost 50 years, grief overshadowed her poetry.

Athena Kidegaard, writing in Bloom magazine, said: “Walter Stone’s death and Ruth Stone’s response to it—to the loss and to her grief—in poetry strikes many readers as the first fact about her work. It is clear that the love between Ruth and Walter was, as e.e. cummings wrote, “more thicker than forget.” Stone, who never remarried, moved to Vermont and died in 2011, having written 13 books of poetry.

Loss

By Ruth Stone

I hid sometimes in the closet among my own clothes.
It was no use. The pain would wake me
Or like a needle it would stitch its way into my dreams.
Whenever I turned
I saw its eyes looking out of the eyes of strangers.
In the night I would walk from room to room slowly
Like an old person in a convalescent home.
I would stare at the cornices, the dull arrangements of furniture.
It all remained the same.
It was not even a painting.
It was objects in space without any aura. No meaning attached.
Their very existence was a burden to me.
And I would go back to my bed whimpering.

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