Jennie M’Grew is remembering the moment she saw a true omen. She lists the usual ghost-story images first—a hooded figure in a dark stairway, yellow eyes in a bedroom, the sound of huge wings—and brushes them all aside. For her, the real sign came in broad daylight. By a country road on a still, sunny afternoon, with ragweed blooming along a fence and a harvested field nearby, she saw something small and black against the sunlight, like a dark blot rimmed with an iris. That, she says, is what appears to someone with second sight, and she saw it.
The mood is unsettling because the scene is so ordinary and quiet. Instead of gothic darkness, the poem gives us a bright rural landscape interrupted by one unexplained, ominous detail. The speaker sounds calm but certain, as if she can’t forget the moment the everyday world showed her something wrong.