Buildings above the leafless trees
 Loom high as castles in a dream,

 While one by one the lamps come out
 To thread the twilight with a gleam.

 There is no sign of leaf or bud,
 A hush is over everything--

 Silent as women wait for love,
 The world is waiting for the spring.

A quietly beautiful little poem, and one that is deceptive in its simplicity
- the uncomplicated and unstartling progression of images and explicit comparisons mask its economy and precision (I almost hesitate to use so clinical a word), the subtle, seamless blending of each image into a continuous whole.

The imagery from the start is reassuringly familiar, imbued with the soft, dreamlike atmosphere of dusk. Teasdale makes explicit use of common, evovcative symbols - ‘castles in a dream’, the lamps lighting one by one, the twilight itself - to draw the reader into a sense of calm, so that by the time she says ‘a hush is over everything’, we share in that hush, making the conclusion - the one startlingly original note in the poem - doubly effective.

Links

This week’s theme: poem #462

Teasdale biography: poem #113

— Martin

p.s. ‘thread the twilight with a gleam’ - beautiful phrase, that.