A woman sits under an oak on a recreation ground, reading a letter. As the wind moves through the buds, she drifts out of herself, carried across an empty space to a dry desert landscape full of stirring, earth-coloured figures and the sound of machinery. It is a bleak, inhuman place: nothing has a face, nothing speaks, only a mechanical whirring. Then she returns to the ordinary park scene, but it no longer feels familiar. She is like a stranger, unsettled by the children playing and almost pained by the bright tulips and the green evening light. The letter has clearly taken her somewhere troubling—perhaps toward news of war or hardship—and the return to normal life feels jarring and lonely. The mood is one of shock, distance, and quiet alienation.
Reading a Letter — Summary
She sits on the recreation ground Under an oak whose yellow buds dot the pale blue sky. The young grass twinkles in the wind, and the sound Of the wind in the knotted buds in a canopy.
So sitting under the knotted canopy Of the wind, she is lifted and carried away as in a balloon Across the insensible void, till she stoops to see The sandy desert beneath her, the dreary platoon.
She knows the waste all dry beneath her, in one place Stirring with earth-coloured life, ever turning and stirring. But never the motion has a human face Nor sound, save intermittent machinery whirring.
And so again, on the recreation ground She alights a stranger, wondering, unused to the scene; Suffering at sight of the children playing around, Hurt at the chalk-coloured tulips, and the evening -green.