Death, in Rachel Habraken's «The Easterly Winds», doesn't kick the door down. He coaxes. He "quietly coaxed / And convinced" a loved one to leave, and the speaker, left behind in the landscape they once shared, is still working out how to live with that. Beneath the grief is a quieter tension: the speaker resists the same pull that took the other person, yet also hopes to be warned when it comes for them.
The poem begins with a run of cleft sentences: "It was death… It was he… It was your unguided decision." They sound like someone going over the facts of a case, trying to fix responsibility. Death is first a lowercase abstraction, then "he," then, in the last line, a capitalised "Him," as if the speaker's fear has given him a name and a face. The third "It was" turns the blame in a surprising direction. The loved one's "unguided decision / To go without my knowledge" is a small accusation inside the mourning. Death may have persuaded, but the person still walked away without saying goodbye. Grief and resentment sit side by side, which feels truer than grief alone.
The imagery of wind and travel carries the poem's main idea, that death is a pull and not a blow. The "weird easterly winds" are probably "weird" in the older sense of fate, though the poem never says so. The departed goes "on your winding way" and does not look back. The line itself is long and loose and wanders as it goes. After it comes the sharp little line "Between us." The poem gives that gap its own space, and the shortness is what makes it feel like a gap. Even the separation is described as "a natural division" brought on by time, which makes it sound inevitable, almost reasonable, and so harder to argue with.
Habraken sets this against the "strangely beautiful lands / In which our childhood passed." The hills are "irregular and forgotten," and the speaker wanders them alone. Looking back is the poem's quiet pivot. The departed does not look back, and the speaker says, "I cannot look back at you how I used to." The line could mean that memory has changed, that the person is no longer there to be seen, or that looking east now means looking toward death. The poem leaves all three open. The speaker's "tempting tug" is resisted "with all my heart," which tells us the wind is tempting, not simply frightening.
The cliffs may be the most interesting image. They are "bulking," they "scourged their way through time," and yet they "sheltered our careless days." Scourging is a harsh verb for a protective thing. The cliffs have survived by being battered, and the poem suggests that shelter and violence are not opposites. They have also watched "every messenger and thief," a phrase that sorts visitors into those who bring news and those who take things. Death, the speaker implies, is one of these figures, and it is hard to say which. The mild idiom "comings and goings" makes the cliffs sound like neighbours at a window, which gives them a faintly human, watchful quality.
The ending is the most poignant part. The speaker does not hope for escape. They hope the cliffs "will forewarn / Of Him when he comes for me." The grammar says death is certain. All that remains to be hoped for is notice. "I can never hope enough" suggests a hope that is endless and that can never be satisfied, since no warning could ever be enough.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines vary in length, and the syntax is plain and spoken, closer to someone thinking aloud than to a formal elegy. That suits a poem about loss that is not dramatic, where the one who left did so softly and the one who stayed keeps walking the same hills.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it gives a familiar subject a calmer, more unsettling face. Death is not a monster or a thief but a persuader the dead followed willingly, and the living still feel the wind that persuaded them. The poem has no consolation to offer, only a speaker holding their ground and keeping watch.