John Gould Fletcher, born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1886, found his early poetic voice in London’s Imagist circle before the First World War. "Irradiations II" comes from his 1915 collection Irradiations, a sequence of free-verse impressions shaped by French Symbolism and by the Imagist call for hard, clear images and musical rhythm. Fletcher later won a Pulitzer Prize, but these early poems matter for what they do to the short lyric: they compress a mood into a handful of sensory flashes and let that mood move like light over water.
At the opening, the speaker watches a river at evening, where "Gaunt sails—bronze boats of the evening—" drift beneath clouds that "die / Softly" like "dim swans." The scene is beautiful but subdued, even funereal. Immediately the poem turns inward: the speaker admits he is "afraid to traverse the long still streets of evening" because of "the ghosts that stare at me / From the shadows." Instead of braving that haunted space, he retreats indoors to wait for "my wandering dream." That dream takes feminine shape: she is "fluid yet, and formless," her hair moved by wind that "whispers like dim violins," her eyes glinting like a "sudden movement / Over the surface of a dark pool." By the final lines she approaches down the same "lost streets of the evening," and the speaker pleads for darkness and stillness so he can "touch the lips of my new love with my lips."
At the center of the poem is a transformation. The streets that seemed full of ghosts become, in the dream, the path of a beloved. Fear does not vanish; it is reshaped into longing. The "immutable silence" of the evening, which earlier felt menacing, now lives "in her feet" as she comes closer. The dream-woman is never fixed: she remains "fluid yet, and formless," less a person than a presence made of wind, water, shadow, and dusk. Fletcher suggests that desire can absorb the unknown and make it intimate, even while it stays mysterious.
The construction reinforces that liminal mood. Free verse lets the lines lengthen and contract like breath or shifting light, and there is no regular rhyme to close off the movement. Instead, repeated sounds and words hold the poem together. "Softly" is given its own line, slowing the opening fall of evening. The word "dim" appears twice, attached first to the swan-like clouds and then to the violins of the wind in her hair, so the whole experience shares one muted, half-seen quality. The word "still" also returns: the streets are "long still," and later the speaker tells his heart to "be still." These threads make the poem feel less like an argument than an incantation. Fletcher’s imagery moves from the river to the street to the interior room, then back out into a dream version of the street, joining outer and inner landscapes. That movement matters because the dream is not an escape from the evening but a reimagining of it.
What makes "Irradiations II" significant is that it shows Imagism’s spare, picture-driven style carrying genuine emotional weight. The poem does not explain the speaker’s fear or name the dream-woman; it presents her through glints, whispers, and silence. At the same time, Fletcher’s rhythms and repetitions create a musical drifting that suits the twilight state between waking and dreaming. The final command—"Let no lamps flare"—is both a plea for the dark and a wish to keep the dream from dissolving. In that darkness the speaker finds not emptiness but the possibility of a kiss, and the poem turns the hour of ghosts into an hour of fragile, self-created tenderness.