Albert Cook opens "Façades" with an order, almost a dare: "Look, just look." The command suggests that we normally walk past houses without really seeing them, and what follows is a slow education in how to look. The speaker begins outside, with "grey, brown, weatherbeaten" fronts that are "argus eyed," watched over by a hundred-eyed giant of Greek myth, or perhaps simply covered in windows that watch back. From there the poem moves steadily inward, through stairs, chandeliers and bare bulbs, and finally out again to the street. Its central idea is that a house is a performance of dignity wrapped around something unstable: fear, absence, the pull of the past.
The opening description is built on tidy paradoxes. The houses are "less tall than silent, distinguished than old," a phrase that quietly deflates their grandeur. They look impressive mostly because they are quiet and aged. Even their authority is compromised: they "command" the street, yet are "remanded by an eye," a legal word for being sent back into custody. The houses rule the street while being held under the street's gaze. Looking, in this poem, goes in both directions.
Inside, the language turns architectural and psychological at once. Stairs "wind, / decline, incline" like "implications," as if climbing a staircase were following an argument. Some lead "plainly" to privacy, though the poem never says what privacy contains. The chandelier that "hives, perhaps too dignifiedly, reservations" is a strange, buzzing image: a hive stores things away, and what it stores here are doubts or hesitations, polished up in cut glass. Set against it is the "naked bulb" that "irradiates fear / of masked tensions." The two lights offer a small social map, the showy and the stark, and both illuminate anxiety rather than comfort.
The poem's most ambitious turn comes with the myth. Houses "need men / exhaling their absence," and the comparison is to underground rivers that ancient people took for "mouths of hell." An Orpheus, "absorbed in love / of some past phase," can vanish into them. Orpheus is the figure who descended to the underworld for love and ruined everything by looking back, so when the poem says "his rare / appearances deceive, for he always looks back," the myth quietly becomes domestic. The man who disappears behind a locked door is haunted by what he has lost, and every glimpse of him is misleading, since half of him is elsewhere.
The final stanza turns to ordinary objects with a sudden, comic sharpness: "angels on crystal paperweights, devils in wastebaskets." Heaven and hell have been shrunk to desk accessories and rubbish. Then comes the question about how we walk over carpets, "taking care to tread / How? As we are certain is decorous / for the particular house." Each house imposes its own etiquette, and we obey it without being told. The poem ends on a double image: "pause and blast / of one trumpet," a bit of Last Judgment imagery shrunk to a single note, followed by a question that brings us full circle: "where do streets lead / finally but back to the same houses?"
Formally, the poem is unrhymed and loosely unrolled in long lines that stay near the rhythm of speech while keeping a faintly iambic pulse. The stanzas are uneven in length, and sentences run past line endings, so the reading feels like walking and noticing rather than reciting. The lack of rhyme suits the subject: nothing resolves neatly, and the questions are left open.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to treat houses as cosy. Cook's houses are social masks, and the poem's real subject is the gap between the face we present and the interior life it protects. The ending offers no escape, only a loop: streets lead back to houses, interiors to façades, and we keep returning to the same performance.