Lawrence’s speaker addresses someone who has gone, and with them took a “missal book” of vivid, flamboyant hours—the bright, rich world of turrets, golden skies, and ladies in bright tissue. What remains is a drained late-autumn or winter landscape: shorn fields, rubble, stunted houses, and a blue-grey twilight. The speaker watches the last color fade, with dim lamps glowing like poppies and stars emerging as night mows down the day. Everything seems covered in grey dust and coldness. The mood is quiet, mournful, and weary. Sitting alone, the speaker reads the grey evening like a blind man touching shadows, afraid to find the final words wounded by sunset—as if the day, and perhaps the relationship or vitality itself, is bleeding out. It’s a poem about loss and the feeling of living on in a world gone grey.
Grey Evening — Summary
When you went, how was it you carried with you My missal book of fine, flamboyant hours? My book of turrets and of red-thorn bowers, And skies of gold, and ladies in bright tissue?
Now underneath a blue-grey twilight, heaped Beyond the withering snow of the shorn fields Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is reaped And garnered that the golden daylight yields.
Dim lamps like yellow poppies glimmer among The shadowy stubble of the under-dusk, As farther off the scythe of night is swung, And little stars come rolling from their husk.
And all the earth is gone into a dust Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold, Covered with aged lichens, pale with must, And all the sky has withered and gone cold.
And so I sit and scan the book of grey, Feeling the shadows like a blind man reading, All fearful lest I find the last words bleeding With wounds of sunset and the dying day.