Nothing in "Disquiet" is called frightening, yet the poem leaves a reader on edge. Its eight lines never say who is uneasy or why. The scenery carries the feeling instead. The poem starts with pipe smoke and grasslands, which sound lazy and comfortable, and ends with a shed that foams like an animal. Its central idea seems to be that restlessness lives under calm surfaces, in humble, worn-out places where nobody thinks to look.
The first stanza blurs landscape and body. "Grizzled" usually describes grey hair or a stubbled beard, so when the smoke curls "'round the grizzled horizon," the skyline becomes an old, weathered face. The smoke is grey too, so the colours and textures run together. Then "the grasslands grow / upon a spinster's back," and the land merges with a human figure. Is this a woman or a ridge of hills? The poem doesn't say. "Spinster" is an old-fashioned word that suggests someone left alone, and grass growing on her back suggests she has been still for so long that things have taken root. The verbs "curls" and "grow" are slow and unhurried, so the whole stanza feels like idleness.
It is also an unfinished thought. The stanza opens with "When" and never reaches its main clause. There is no punctuation at all, so only the gap between stanzas holds the reader in suspense. The answer comes in the first words of the next stanza: "there's a ragman's shed." A ragman deals in scraps and cast-offs, and a shed is a flimsy, low building, so everything about the place is small and shabby. But the verbs turn sharply. The shed "foams and bristles," words we normally attach to a frenzied horse, a rabid dog or a cat with its fur raised. The comparison is stated outright in "like a heated beast." "Heated" could mean overheated, furious, or even in heat, and the poem lets all of these simmer together.
The last line, "whose captor chafes its heart," raises the most questions. A captor means the beast is held against its will, but the poem never says who holds it. It might be the ragman, or it might be something less definite. "Chafes" is an interesting choice too. To chafe is to rub something raw, but it can also mean to rub for warmth, as you would chafe cold hands. Whether or not the poet intended it, both meanings fit here, since the heart is both irritated and kept hot.
The poem has no end rhyme, and its short lines have no steady metre, though most run to about five syllables. With no rhyme there is no neat click of resolution, which suits a poem called "Disquiet." Sound does the work rhyme might have done. The soft, rounded words of the first stanza ("curls," "'round," "grow") give way to sharper ones in the second ("bristles," "captor chafes"). Repeated letters tie the lines together: the g of "grizzled," "grasslands" and "grow," the b of "bristles" and "beast," and the h of "horizon," "heated" and "heart." Both stanzas end on a hard stop, "back" and then "heart," and the single full stop at the very end makes the poem feel like one held breath.
The structure narrows like a camera lens. We start with the horizon, drop to the grassy back of the land, move to a shed, and finally reach a heart. The scene also shifts from open space to confinement, and from slow growth to violent agitation. Each step brings us closer to something that is straining to get out.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without explaining itself. It gives no cause for the unease, no character who speaks, and no moral. It trusts its images to carry the mood, and that mood stays with the reader long after the pipe smoke has drifted away.