A soul has just been stripped of everything, and the speaker urges it out into sun and air. The opening lines are all motion and tenderness—leaves turned by wind, grass parting to make a path—as if the natural world is inviting this newly bare self forward. The speaker’s tone is almost coaxing: dance, float, bathe in light, do not stop under that grey tree. There is real warmth in the images of golden rain and shimmering hillside, but also a quiet sadness at the edges. The “bleak thing under the tree” stays unnamed, so it reads as grief, an old life, or the body left behind. The mood is luminous and weightless, yet shadowed—like sunlight you can only keep if you move and refuse to look back.
Dispossessed — Summary
Tender and tremulous green of leaves Turned up by the wind, Twanging among the vines-- Wind in the grass Blowing a clear path For the new-stripped soul to pass...
The naked soul in the sunlight... Like a wisp of smoke in the sunlight On the hill-side shimmering.
Dance light on the wind, little soul, Like a thistle-down floating Over the butterflies And the lumbering bees...
Come away from that tree And its shadow grey as a stone...
Bathe in the pools of light On the hillside shimmering-- Shining and wetted and warm in the sun-spray falling like golden rain--
But do not linger and look At that bleak thing under the tree.