Arthur Stringer (1874–1950), a Canadian-born writer of novels, poetry, and early screenplays, wrote “March Twilight” in the early twentieth century, when cities were expanding rapidly and poets were beginning to loosen strict rhyme and meter in favor of sharper images and freer speech. The poem belongs to that modern shift: it turns away from the conventional nature lyric and finds its mystery in a thawing street, a home-bound crowd, and the sudden stirring of an inner unknown.
The first stanza is built from close-looking. Stringer catches the pavement “black with a batter of mud” and “stippled with silvery pools,” as if the street were a rough canvas covered in scattered light. The phrase “batter of mud” suggests something worked over, slapped and churned by traffic and weather, while “stippled” gives the puddles an almost painterly delicacy. Winter is losing its grip: the gutter snow is gone “from cobble and runnelling curb,” and the wind no longer rattles the rusty signs. That word “runnelling” turns the curb into something carved by water, a small channel alive with melt. Then the poem’s light changes. Sunlight hangs “moted and soft and misty” over the cross-streets, and the city workers walk home in a “flood of gold.” The stanza moves from grit to glow without losing the grit; the gold is not clean or angelic but hazy, dusty, full of March moisture.
The rhythm follows this movement loosely. There is no regular rhyme scheme, and the lines break unpredictably, like someone noticing details one by one. Yet the sounds are carefully layered: “batter,” “mud,” “stippled,” “silvery,” “runnelling,” and “ramping” create a textured music of b, s, and r sounds. The present participles—runnelling, ramping, rattling—keep the scene active even in its quiet thaw. The poem feels like watching light shift across a familiar intersection until the ordinary becomes strange.
That strangeness arrives with the second stanza. “Suddenly out of the dusk” comes what Stringer calls “the ancient question.” A sunset street has provoked a metaphysical jolt. The speaker wonders whether he has lived “in earlier worlds unknown,” or whether somewhere deep in “this husk that men call Me” are hidden selves he cannot name. The body becomes a husk, a dry outer covering, and inside it are “kennelled a motley kin” and “housed still querulous ghosts.” The word “kennelled” is especially striking: these inner selves are not noble ancestors but restless, animal-like presences kept in a kind of pen. They sigh, awaken, move, and sleep once more. The poem offers no answer to the ancient question. It lets the question hang, just as the moted sunlight hangs over the cross-streets.
What makes “March Twilight” significant is its quiet fusion of city observation and psychological depth. At a time when poetry often sought the sublime in nature, Stringer locates a threshold in the slush and gold of a March evening. The poem does not need a grand landscape or a dramatic event; a home-bound crowd and a puddle-stippled pavement are enough to open the self onto its own strangeness. In unrhymed, image-driven lines, Stringer suggests that the modern city, for all its mud and noise, can still trigger the oldest question: who, exactly, lives inside us?