Fog settles over a town and turns ordinary people into tall, gray, filmy ghosts moving up and down the streets. The speaker watches this hushed, half-dissolved world with a kind of quiet wonder, where even a line of poplars looks vague and blurred with spring. Then the view shifts to an old garden, wet and dripping. For one bright moment, scarlet tulips flare against the fog’s torn edge—like a single thin musical note—before they are put out. The feeling is eerie but not frightening; it is attentive, tender, and slightly mournful. Reese creates a mood of soft erasure and sudden color, as if the fog blurs the world and makes any surviving brightness more vivid and fragile. The speaker seems caught between wanting to hold onto that red flare and knowing the fog will close over it again. Everything here is brief: a glimpse of wet sky, a note of red, then gone.
The Fog — Summary
The great ghosts of the town Up and down, Each a gray, filmy thing, Go by.
Sudden a brief, wet sky! — A file of poplars vague with spring.
Drips the old garden there; See, its torn edge about, Scarlet, remote, Tulips flare, The length of one thin note! — And are put out.