At the Window: a poem by D. H. Lawrence

"While slowly the house of day is closing its eastern shutters..." (Dead Wood)

For today’s installment of Dead Wood (a gift from the Public Domain,) I give you a perfectly captured moment. A face with “dark-filled eyes” at the window, looking out into a cold autumn evening. He’s waiting for… well, we don’t know. And maybe he doesn’t know either. You can just sit a while with the language in this poem, the delicacy of its images. That eternal, unresolved question. I think it’s one of the loveliest I’ve read from D.H. Lawrence. -TM

Photo by allison christine on Unsplash

At the Window

The pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind as it mutters
Something which sets the black poplars ashake with hysterical laughter;
While slowly the house of day is closing its eastern shutters.

Further down the valley the clustered tombstones recede,
Winding about their dimness the mist’s grey cerements, after
The street lamps in the darkness have suddenly started to bleed.

The leaves fly over the window and utter a word as they pass
To the face that leans from the darkness, intent, with two dark-filled eyes
That watch for ever earnestly from behind the window glass.

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DEAD WOOD provides excerpts from the years before ideas became “content”. Some editions are serious and thought-provoking. Some are ludicrous or silly. Some are chosen just because they happened to strike us as particularly interesting.

If you have an excerpt of “Dead Wood” you’d like to suggest, email Juke at tonyajuke@gmail.com