Before the day has properly begun, a speaker walks into a shop, flips through art magazines, and feels judged by the man behind the counter. That is nearly all that happens, yet the poem is oddly tense. Nothing here tells us when or why it was written, so everything depends on the words themselves, and they work like a half-remembered dream: sharp in detail, hazy in logic.
The opening stanza sets the scene outdoors. Dawn is a "red-knit furrow", a phrase that makes the sky into both woven cloth and ploughed earth, something stitched or cut open. Against it stand "marble blocks of black", the night's leftover shadows turned into heavy, cold stone. (The printed text reads "unMt" here, which looks like a misprint for "unlit", and the sense of darkness still hanging on fits that reading.) Then the street itself "looks up with careful eye", so the setting is watching before any person is. A "Turkish beggar / Walks his way", and the short last lines make him seem to drift past, self-contained and unreachable. He is the only figure who owns nothing, which matters when the poem turns to buying.
Indoors, the mood becomes eerie. The shop's bell is a "ghost-bell", as if the place were haunted by earlier customers. The speaker reads "the artist magazines", then the poem stalls on a doubled line: "It's six o'clock. / It's six o'clock." The repetition can be heard two ways. It might be the speaker's dazed surprise at how early it is, or it might be the clock itself stuck, trapping us in one suspended moment. The flat, ordinary phrasing against the strange bell makes the scene feel both realistic and slightly unreal.
The final stanza is where unease takes over. The shopkeeper is "the watcher from the counter", defined only by his gaze, and he sits "in horsehair broodings". Horsehair suggests old, stuffed, slightly prickly furniture, and the word fuses chair and mood, so his brooding seems as stiff and upholstered as the seat. Then comes the poem's most puzzling image: "A camel burns near Tigris eyes". A camel and a river are far from a city shop, so the line may be the speaker's fantasy, set off by the beggar and the magazines, or a way of describing the watcher's dark, intense stare. "Tigris" also sounds close to "tigers", which would add a predatory flicker, though that is a suggestion rather than something the text confirms. Whatever the image means, the next line is a nervous defence: "Though I've sinned no major sin." Nobody has accused the speaker of anything. The guilt comes from being looked at, and the casual word "major" hints that smaller sins may be lurking.
The last line, "I purchase those I come to like", is calm and confident after so much strangeness, and it is also ambiguous. "Those" could mean the magazines, but the word is more personal than "them" or "these", and it may point to any objects, or even people, that the speaker wants. Buying becomes the speaker's answer to being watched: if looking is judged, owning is a kind of control. Set beside the beggar who walks away empty-handed, the line also has a slightly uncomfortable edge.
The form supports this slipperiness. There is no rhyme and no regular beat. Three five-line stanzas of uneven, often short lines read like glimpses rather than a song, and the repeated "six o'clock" is the nearest thing to a refrain. Sound still matters: the hard, clustered "marble blocks of black" is nicely heavy, while "horsehair broodings" lingers over its soft, murmuring syllables.
The title, "Window to Let", may be the key. A window to let is a space offered for hire, and a window is also a frame for looking through. The poem keeps swapping who looks and who is looked at: the street, the watcher, the speaker, the reader. What makes it worth reading is that it never explains itself. It gives us a small, vivid act of browsing and lets us feel how a simple wish to look at beautiful things can shade into guilt, desire, and the wish to possess.