Most people know the feeling of waking in a foul mood, but few poems pin it down as neatly as "Poise" by De Von Grady Hough. In sixteen lines, a man wakes from bad dreams, hears a bird singing in the rain, and is made to feel ashamed of his own sourness. The idea at the center is simple and quietly challenging: contentment has little to do with comfort. The speaker has every advantage, and the bird has none, yet it is the bird who keeps his composure.
The poem's structure follows the speaker's slow change of mind. The first stanza is all about the inside of his head, and the vocabulary is deliberately heavy. "Disconcerting," "querulous," and "controverting" are long, Latinate words that clog the lines, and they suit a mind that is tangled up in its own grievances. Notice that he calls his mood "mean," a plain, blunt word dropped in among the polysyllables, as if he cannot quite disguise how petty he feels. The thoughts are "controverting," arguing with one another, so even his private mind is without peace.
Then the song arrives, and the language shifts with it. "Latent dream-thought" suggests the singing seeps into his half-conscious state before he fully registers it. The gaiety is "effervescing," a word that belongs to fizzing liquid, and it is a lovely choice because it makes the sound seem light, bubbling, and impossible to contain. Set beside the stodgy words of the first stanza, it works almost as a contrast in texture. His reaction is bewilderment: he "could but wonder" how a bird could sing "when all was so depressing." The word "depressing" applies to the weather on the surface, but it also describes his own state, and the poem lets the two overlap.
The third stanza is the most vivid. The rain has fallen all night, the dawn is "leaden," and the air is "chill." Leaden is a good adjective for a dawn, since it brings together color and weight, a sky pressing down like metal. Against this, the bird is "poorly housed" yet "shook himself" and carries on with his "joyous trill." That small physical detail does a lot of work. A bird shaking the wet from its feathers is an ordinary, almost comic gesture, and it shows resilience as a matter of habit rather than heroism. The bird does not make a speech about courage; it simply shakes and sings.
The final stanza turns the comparison on the speaker. "He, exposed to the elements, / And I, warmly housed and dry" sets the two side by side in a balanced pair of lines, the grammar itself underlining the contrast. The confession that follows, "For shame on me," has an old-fashioned ring, close to a self-scolding, and it fits the poem's plain moral tone. The title word, "poise," finally arrives in the last line, where the bird shows "a greater poise" than the man. Poise means steadiness of spirit under pressure, and the poem argues that this is a matter of inner disposition rather than outer circumstance.
The form supports this plainness. The lines are short, with a loose, mostly four-beat movement, and the rhyme is light and uneven rather than strict: "sleep" and "querulous" do not chime, though "song" and "effervescing" echo each other in feeling if not in sound. In the second stanza, "depressing" answers "effervescing," a pairing that happens to set the poem's two opposing moods against each other. The looseness of the pattern keeps the tone conversational, like someone thinking aloud at the window.
What makes "Poise" worth reading is its honesty about a small, unglamorous failing. It doesn't claim the speaker has suffered greatly, and it doesn't turn the bird into a grand symbol. It simply notices that the creature with less is happier, and lets that observation embarrass him. The lesson is gentle but lasting, and it still applies on any gray morning when complaining feels easier than singing.