Hazel Hall’s “Cowardice” turns inward to examine a quiet emotional fright that has little to do with external danger. Hall was an American poet in Portland, Oregon, writing during the early twentieth century, when lyric poetry increasingly made the inner life its subject. Her own circumstances made that inward turn necessary: illness had left her unable to walk, and she wrote from a life largely shaped by physical confinement. In “Cowardice,” that inward attention becomes unnerving. The speaker begins not with a physical storm but with a sudden inner disturbance: “Discomfort sweeps my quiet as a wind / Leaps at trees and leaves them cold and thinned.” She insists that she no longer fears the “mastery / Of winds,” because she holds her “indifference dear.” Yet the poem turns on the line “And yet this is a fear —,” and from there it follows the fear backward into memory.
The form supports that shift. Three six-line stanzas create a meditative shape, and many lines carry a loose iambic pulse, but the first two stanzas end on shorter confessions that break the flow: “And yet this is a fear —,” then “Robs my new hour of rest.” The third stanza closes with a full, unbroken line—“I find that I am but a coward still”—as if the admission has finally grown too large to compress. The rhyme, too, is mostly couplet-based, as in “wind” and “thinned,” “days” and “ways,” which suggests order, but the off-rhymes and the dash leave something unresolved. The imagery makes the inner world physical. The wind, the stripped trees, and the leaves belong to nature, but here they map the speaker’s emotional vulnerability. Old fears are described as “discarded” objects, yet they still return. The speaker does not fear the wind itself; she fears “old discarded fears, of days / That cried out at irrevocable ways.” The word “cower” connects her present body to her past shame: she cowers not before a threat but before her own memory of cowardice.
The poem’s central idea emerges most fully in the final stanza. The speaker thought time and pride had buried old wounds, “All the old scars, like broken twigs in snow.” That image is crucial because snow covers without healing; the broken twigs are still there beneath whiteness, waiting. She also admits she wanted “to luxuriate in rich decay,” to become like a detached, far-seeing tree on a hill that could observe life from a distance. But the memory of one old day shatters that fantasy. The word “startled” exposes the surprise and shame of recognizing oneself. Instead of wisdom, she finds that she is “but a coward still.” The poem refuses the comfortable narrative of growth. It suggests that identity is not simply a project we complete; old versions of the self, especially the ones marked by failure, can return and claim the present.
What makes “Cowardice” significant is its honesty about emotional regression. It does not present a speaker who overcomes fear or reframes the past. Instead, Hall captures the moment when pride is shown to be a thin covering, like snow over broken twigs. Her own circumstances matter here: a poet so familiar with bodily limitation understood that physical stillness does not guarantee inner peace, and that past helplessness can be more haunting than present danger. The poem’s compressed lyric form gives that insight the force of a small storm. With its wind, leaves, snow, and hill, “Cowardice” turns a private failure into a landscape—and then asks the reader to recognize that the old scars may not have healed after all.