Nothing happens in "November," and that is the point. Douglas Bowman's poem has no main verb, no punctuation and no sentence to carry us from one thought to the next. It sets out six fragments, one under another, the way you might notice things one at a time while standing outside at night. Together they describe a month by what has gone missing from it.
The structure rests on a small suffix. Three words end in *-less*: "Moonless," "starless," "dreamless." They fall on the first, third and fifth lines, and between them come the things that remain: "sleet on dead leaves," "black blank woods," and finally "sleep of a child." The poem alternates between taking away and showing what is left, and what is left is never much. The direction of travel matters too. The first absence is in the sky, the sleet then falls to the ground, the second absence looks up again, and the woods close around us. Then "dreamless" turns inward, into the mind. The poem moves from the outermost darkness to the innermost.
Sound does a great deal of work in a text this short. "Sleet on dead leaves" is full of hissing s and l sounds, so you can almost hear ice ticking on dry litter. "Black blank" is a tight pairing: two words that differ by a single letter and both end on a hard click, so the line shuts like a door. The repetition also enacts its meaning, because "blank" adds almost nothing to "black," just as blankness adds nothing. There is no rhyme and no regular beat. Instead the short lines and white space make the reader pause where punctuation might have been, and those pauses feel like silence.
The most puzzling moment is typographical: "starless } wind/chimes." The brace seems to bind the missing stars to the sound beside them, as if the two were a single event. The slash then splits "wind/chimes" two ways. Read as "wind chimes," it names a hanging object tinkling in the dark. Read as "wind" and "chimes," it is the wind itself that chimes, or two separate sounds sitting side by side. The poem does not choose, and the doubt is part of its pleasure. Apart from the sleet, this is the only sound in the poem, a thin bright note in a world otherwise drained. It may also suggest chiming hours and a long night passing, though that is my inference, not something the text says.
Then comes the ending. After "dead," "black" and "blank," we reach "sleep of a child," a phrase that normally signals safety. But "dreamless" has already pulled it back. A child's sleep is usually imagined as crowded with dreams, and here it has been emptied. Two readings compete. In one, the child's deep sleep is the only warmth in the poem, a small life sheltered from the weather and unaware of it. In the other, dreamlessness completes the chain of removals, so that the child's sleep becomes one more blank, with a faint echo of the "dead leaves" earlier. The poem gives no sign of which to prefer, and the lack of a verb or any comment from a speaker keeps both possible.
The title does quiet but necessary work. "November" is the only place the season is named, and it tells us how to read everything else: this is the stretch of the year when growth has stopped and winter has not yet fully arrived. Nothing in the poem explains who the child is or where the woods are, and the poem is stronger for leaving those details out.
What makes "November" worth reading is how much it asks of its reader while giving so little. In fewer than twenty words it builds a landscape, a soundscape and a mood, and it ends on an image that comforts and chills at once. It shows that a poem can create atmosphere by subtraction, letting each "-less" remove another source of light or hope until only a sleeping child is left in the dark.