Lawrence sets two kinds of violence side by side. Outside the house, an ash tree lashes in the wind, its branches like whips that shriek and slash the air. Inside, two adult voices rise in anger: one high and whistling with delirious rage, the other low and booming, heavy as a lash. That deeper voice beats down and drowns out the first, leaving a “silence of blood” under the continuing noise of the tree. The speaker seems to be a child, and the memory is charged with fear and helplessness. The house offers no comfort, and the natural world outside only echoes the brutality within. The repeated whipping imagery makes the whole scene feel violent and unsafe. The mood is nightmarish and claustrophobic, as if the child is trapped between two whips — the storming tree and the adult rage.
Discord in Childhood — Summary
Outside the house an ash-tree hung its terrible whips, And at night when the wind arose, the lash of the tree Shrieked and slashed the wind, as a ship's Weird rigging in a storm shrieks hideously.
Within the house two voices arose in anger, a slender lash Whistling delirious rage, and the dreadful sound Of a thick lash booming and bruising, until it drowned The other voice in a silence of blood, 'neath the noise of the ash.