A thawed city street at dusk glows with muddy puddles and silvery pools. The wind has dropped, the snow is gone from the curbs, and homebound crowds walk through soft, golden light. It is a quiet, ordinary end-of-winter scene, but it suddenly opens into something much stranger. The speaker is caught by a question that feels ancient and unbidden: has he lived before in unknown earlier worlds? Or does something inside him—his body, this “husk”—hold a whole kennelled crowd of unnamed selves, querulous ghosts that wake, sigh, and sleep again? The poem moves from the busy, familiar city into the eerie interior of identity. The mood is suspended between the comfort of the golden twilight and the unsettling sense that beneath the everyday self are hidden lives and unremembered memories.
March Twilight — Summary
Black with a batter of mud Stippled with silvery pools Stands the pavement at the street-end; And the gutter snow is gone From cobble and runnelling curb; And no longer the ramping wind Is rattling the rusty signs; And moted and soft and misty Hangs the sunlight over the cross-streets, And the home-bound crowds of the city Walk in a flood of gold.
And suddenly out of the dusk There comes the ancient question: Can it be that I have lived In earlier worlds unknown? Or is it that somewhere deep In this husk that men call Me Are kennelled a motley kin I never shall know or name,-- Are housed still querulous ghosts That sigh and awaken and move, And sleep once more?