Louise Morey Bowman, a Canadian poet writing in the early twentieth century as Canadian verse shifted from Victorian decoration toward a more compressed modern lyric, often made natural forces carry psychological weight. In “Wind,” the title force is never simply weather. It arrives first as a “black-winged beast” clawing at the speaker’s casement window, then reappears in memory as a sensuous companion on a cliff-top tryst. The poem’s central drama is this double vision: the same wind that now makes the speaker “toss and shudder and long for light” once touched her lips “like a pungent wine.” By the final line, the reason for the change becomes clear—yesterday is “long years ago,” and the beloved who shared that day is gone. The wind, then, becomes the shape grief takes: violent, winged, and on-rushing.
Bowman builds that pressure through rhyme and rhythm that refuse to settle. The first stanza pushes forward in hard triple rhymes—“tonight,” “light,” “might,” then “seems,” “gleams,” “dreams”—as though the poem itself is beating against the window. Dashes and parenthetical cries, such as “(Oh the great, black wings on-rushing!)”, break the syntax and mimic the storm’s sudden surges. The second stanza begins more tenderly, with rhymes that stretch across longer phrases: “yesterday,” “sea-pine,” “wine.” Yet even this softer music is interrupted by the gasp, “Ah-h-h ! The rush of that black-winged Beast !” The irregular line lengths and exclamations keep the reader suspended between lyric calm and animal panic. Then, after all that musical turbulence, Bowman closes with two plain lines: “Yesterday was long years ago / And my own true Love was there.” The stripped-back statement lands like a quiet confession after the storm.
Imagery turns the poem on a threshold. The “casement window” is both a real window and a fragile boundary between the speaker’s present loneliness and the remembered world. Once it opened to “moonlight gleams,” “rustle of leaves,” and “tiptoe dreams”; now it shuts out “a wild Thing” in a “mad death rout.” The capitalized Thing suggests a force beyond ordinary weather, almost mythic. Against that darkness, the remembered landscape glows with sensory richness: “lichened turf” marries sea and earth, “bayberry bushes of frosted green” guard a “tryst of a king and queen,” and “sun-warmed strawberries formed the feast.” These details idealize the past as royal and fertile. But Bowman does not let the memory stay purely sweet—the wind that day also “tore rose petals in wanton play.” The word “wanton” slips between playfulness and cruelty, hinting that the wind’s destructiveness was present even in joy; it was love that made that wildness feel like part of the feast.
What makes “Wind” significant is how economically it turns a nature lyric into an elegy. The wind is not a tidy symbol of the speaker’s mood; it is an active, contradictory character—beast, lover, and destroyer in one. The poem suggests that memory and loss transform the very texture of the world: the same force that once seemed like wine on the lips now feels like talons at the glass. In that sense, Bowman’s storm is not outside the self but is the sound of grief pressing against the present. Her blend of gothic exclamation and tender recollection gives the poem an emotional torque that remains startling, especially for a poet of her era who was exploring a modern psychological landscape through a distinctly lyric voice.