Rhapsody On A Windy Night

The speaker lives in two different worlds of time. As they walk the streets at night, they are aware of the passage of linear time, or clock time. Hours pass, one by one, and are marked at the beginning of all but one of the stanzas, from midnight to 1:30, 2:30, 3:30, and 4:00 in the morning. These make up the basic movement of the poem within normal time. As the speaker walks, the streetlamps light their way, and they observe the landscape—a woman in a doorway, a cat scavenging in the gutter, the moon. By the time they get home, it is not far off morning, and a new day awaits.

However, the moon, with its “lunar incantations” (Line 4), undermines the passage of clock time. It not only stimulates the speaker’s memories but removes them from any expected context or order, their “divisions and precisions” (Line 7). These memories crop up as images in response to street scenes. The images are without context or meaning; they are shaken up “[a]s a madman shakes a dead geranium” (Line 12). They are, however, interconnected, and convey an ominous and disorienting ambience. They give a clue to the speaker’s consciousness and convey their subjective reality, their own form of disembodied time.