Albert Cook's "Waking in Foreign Mountains" begins with a sensation almost too pleasant to name. A man wakes in an unfamiliar place, light pouring through the window, and tries three comparisons to capture the feeling: falling without the landing, rising, swimming. The comparisons keep shifting because the feeling will not settle. By the end of the poem that restlessness has turned into something harder, a stubborn question about what it means to be happy somewhere you do not belong.
The opening is all lightness. The air is "water-thin," and the speaker calls out to it with an old-fashioned "O salubrious air!" The swimming image is the oddest and most telling. He is "a fish out of water" who survives by exerting his gills, "learning to love survival as he strives." Then the water itself becomes doubtful: it is "imaginary water," like the ether of Victorian physicists, a substance people invented to explain what they could not see, or the thick air of a séance. Already the poem hints that this comfortable atmosphere may be something the speaker is conjuring for himself.
The second stanza narrows to a bedroom: a Directoire bureau, a clock "unheard," its Roman numerals like "straight strokes of hairs / On an eggshell dial." The images are delicate and slightly fussy, and the clock introduces the poem's first shadow. It is "later than I believed or wished, but ever / So early in my life." Lateness and earliness sit side by side. "Empires and delectations / Indicate not at all" suggests that history and pleasure both fall silent in this room, though he remains "clocked / In all the blazonings of circumstance." Even in a quiet bedroom, he cannot step outside his own situation.
Outside, the mountains are described with a similar balance. The sky is "dimpling," rain comes and lifts, and the walk around the "transparent / Lake" is shared with a companion whose presence warms the poem: "You are rising too, in the light / Of our surviving love." The word "surviving" echoes the fish's survival earlier, so love, like breathing, is something endured as well as enjoyed. The leaves "crackle and flake" and the snow is "slowly solidifying down," small signs of a season turning.
Then the poem changes. "We are not at home. / We are here. Why?" Cook runs through the castle's owners, a count, monks, another nobleman, and finally "the Luciferian general," who used it "rarely / (He had so many)" as a hunting lodge. The parenthesis is a small act of savage understatement. Then comes the sentence the whole poem has been circling: under the same mountains, "lie in a neatly mown mass grave / His victims, under their own star." The word "neatly" is chilling, because the grass is tidy while the ground holds the dead. The poem does not say whose war this was or name the general, and I would not guess; what matters is that the beauty of the landscape and the grave occupy the same ground.
From here the poem tightens its refrain, "whatever that may mean," repeated until it sounds like a man testing whether words still hold. He and his companion are "visitors," "charged / With our own clear purposes," while a woman in an overcoat drives cows with a switch, working for life as they do not. Even nature, which "so gladdens us," comes with an admission: "the happiest man would still blink his eyes," and nature is only "simply laid out for us, whatever / Nature has ever meant."
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme. Lines break mid-phrase ("thinner / Glass," "ever / So early"), so the reader tumbles forward as in the opening image of falling. Syntax grows plainer and more broken as the poem darkens.
Its significance lies in that honesty. Cook does not pretend the view is ruined, nor does he let it excuse itself. He holds delight and guilt in the same sentence and leaves them unreconciled.