A walk through a wet city at night begins as something close to beautiful and ends as a confession. In twelve short lines Thomas W. Morris moves from glowing streetlamps to a picture of a family: a father "imprisoned," a mother "a grey stone," and a speaker who walks "alone." The central idea is that the speaker cannot separate the outer world from the inner one. Even a pretty sight, lights in the rain, pulls him back toward what he carries.
The opening is full of heat set against cold. The streets are "cold," yet the lamps are "fuses of light" that "kindle the night." The word *fuse* does a lot of work. It suggests a line of burning points stretching down the street, and it also carries a faint threat, since a fuse is something lit that leads to a blast. The warmth, though, sits only on the surface. Underneath is "concrete," a hard, lifeless material, and it is the first of several in the poem.
The next moment is the most delicate. "The rain on my glasses" turns the lamps into "stars," so for a second the city is lifted into the sky. Then comes "though," and the poem swerves. The "sudden hollowing vision" is an unusual phrase. The vision is not hollow but *hollowing*, an action in progress that empties the speaker as it arrives. What he sees is "those rusty brown bars." The poem doesn't say where the bars come from. Judging by the imagery, rain-smeared light might stretch into vertical lines, so the stars and the bars are the same sight seen a moment apart. The rhyme backs this up. "Stars" and "bars" are bound together by sound, which puts beauty and confinement one syllable apart. The colours shift too, from glowing light to the dull brown of rust. The grammar wobbles slightly here, because "rain" is followed by the plural "turn." Whether or not that was intended, it fits a moment in which the speaker's footing gives way.
The sound of the poem follows the same path. The first quatrain moves at an easy, rolling pace, with lines like "I walk these cold streets" falling into a gentle three-beat tread that matches a steady walk. The rhymes are mostly tidy: "light" and "night" chime cleanly, and "streets" and "concrete" echo each other more loosely. In the middle the long line "though a sudden hollowing vision" stretches out as if the speaker is stumbling. Then the rhythm goes blunt. "My father imprisoned, / my mother a grey stone" has no real action in it. The first line offers only a participle, with no "is," and the second simply equates the mother with a stone. Nothing is explained or softened. After the lilting walk, the sudden flatness feels like a door closing.
The ending is built from repetition with one small change. Line 11 returns to the first line word for word, but line 12 does not echo the first line's second half. Instead of the open "through the fuses of light," we get "I walk them alone," and the word "alone" lands last, rhyming with "stone." That rhyme links the mother's hardened silence to the speaker's isolation, so that her state and his seem to come from the same source. The refrain also makes the poem circle back on itself. A man walking the same cold streets again is a little like someone pacing a cell, so the speaker, too, is boxed in, though by memory rather than by bars. Notice how many hard things surround him: concrete, bars, stone. The only soft element is the rain, and it only distorts what he sees.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. We are never told why the father is imprisoned, or whether the word is literal or figurative, and the mother's stoniness is left unexplained. That gap is where the feeling lives. Morris trusts a small, ordinary detail, rain on spectacles, to carry a large grief, and he uses the single word "though" to show how quickly wonder can turn into pain. For students of poetry it is a compact example of how a turn in thought, a change of rhythm, and a final rhyme can do the work of a much longer explanation.