The Convent Threshold

In this poem, the speaker describes the difficulty in deciding whether to join a convent to fulfill her spiritual decision to repent. She struggles to give up her physically-pleasing past life with her lover to devote her life to God. The poem’s speaker has not committed to joining a convent but stands at a threshold between her old life and this new life. The word “threshold” both literally describes the physical structure at the bottom of a door that must be crossed to enter the building and metaphorically describes the spiritual divide between the speaker’s old life and new life.

The poem is filled with contrasting language to further support the threshold image. While the threshold is a liminal space between two worlds, the speaker makes it clear that she cannot remain in the threshold if she wants redemption. In her first dream, it “was not dark, it was not light” (Line 111). As she stood between these places, she was neither condemned nor saved.

Throughout the poem, the speaker continuously crosses thresholds between natural spaces and supernatural or spiritual spaces. She crosses over the threshold in prayer and in her dreams. In the final stanza, she imagines that she and her lover “stand safe” (Line 143) in a threshold that leads to heaven.