A flight of stairs, some overhanging branches, a stump in the sun: Pamela Hobart Carter begins "Monochrome" with the least threatening scenery imaginable. The poem is about how easily such a place can be turned into somewhere to avoid, and how long the avoidance can last after the reason has gone.
The first two couplets read like a calm, almost photographic description. "Branches overhang / stairs which lead // to a grassy place, a stump washed in sun." The verb "washed" is gentle, and the picture is bright. Yet the title promises the opposite, since "monochrome" means a single colour, and the poem slowly drains toward it. The turn comes with "Seen from afar the flight / became a woman draped // in black." "Flight" is a rich word here. Most plainly it is the flight of stairs we have just met, but it also means escape, which is exactly what the speakers go on to do. The line break leaves the stairs hanging for a moment before they change. The verb "became" matters too. Nobody claims to have *found* a woman; a shape altered itself under the watchers' eyes. Judging by the opening image, the dark figure may come from stairs and branches seen together at a distance, though the poem never explains. It leaves us with the familiar trick of the eye that finds a figure in shadow.
Once she exists, she grows. She is "larger than the maples," an exaggeration that shows fear at work, since the more the speakers look, the bigger she gets. Then the poem reaches for storybook language: she guarded the trees "like a ghost / a treasure buried and dangerous." The simile feels borrowed from tales of hidden gold, which suggests the speakers are building a story out of a glimpse. The phrase "buried and dangerous" pulls in two directions, because treasure draws us in and danger pushes us away. It is tempting to read the sunlit grass beyond the stairs as the treasure, a pleasant place that fear has put out of reach. That is an inference, but the poem's first image of the stump "washed in sun" supports it.
The form helps the effect. The poem is free verse, unrhymed, in tidy two-line stanzas that stack like steps. Enjambments such as "which lead / to" and "draped / in black" carry the reader down the page the way the stairs would carry a walker. The lines are short and quiet until the end, and then the pace changes. "We walked the long way around in terror" is the longest line so far, and it is literally a detour. The statement is flat, with no exclamation mark and no description of what terror felt like. The final line is longer still: "Years later we forget why we avoid those stairs." The verbs move from the past tense of the story to the present tense of habit. The pronoun "we" is shared throughout, so the fear belongs to a group, not to one person.
That last line is the poem's quiet shock. The speakers have forgotten the reason but kept the behaviour, so the avoidance now runs on its own. The poem itself becomes an act of remembering, since it tells us what the speakers can no longer say. The only "ghost" that lasts is the habit of staying away.
This is why the title fits so well. A monochrome picture has lost its range of colour, and the memory here has been reduced in the same way. The sun, the grass and the maples fade, and what remains is a black figure and a long way round. Carter does not say whether the woman was ever there, and the question hardly matters. What the poem makes us notice is how many ordinary places, a staircase or a corner of a street, might be avoided for reasons nobody can now name. It is a short poem, but it makes the reader ask which of their own detours began with a shadow.