Most poems about noon celebrate fullness, the sun at its height. William Dickey's "Noon" does the opposite. His midday is hard, hostile, almost cruel, and the poem's drama lies in what happens when that hardness cracks. In a Mediterranean-looking marketplace, a sudden perception shows the speaker, or "man" in general, a vision of an unfallen world, and then takes it away, leaving him exactly where he started, looking at his own hands.
The opening stanza builds the scene out of hardness. The stone is "white, belligerent"; the sea is "so blue it petrifies the air." The verbs and adjectives belong to a fight or a freezing, and even the colour blue turns to stone. The poem insists that everything here is "past ambiguity," that "form is form." Then comes its quiet reversal: on "the deliberate stroke of a real noontide / The scene is less than it was meant to be." That last line is the poem's hinge. The solid world, too certain of itself, suddenly feels like a diminished version of something else.
That something else arrives through a surprising doorway: the merchant's "flat, coined-metal eyes." The image works on two levels. The eyes are flat like coins, so the man is reduced to commerce, and the coin carries the "Caesar face," a reminder of empire and the long history of buying and selling. But behind that face the speaker glimpses an older one, "some face before the Caesar face," and beyond it a "glade by orderly branches overgrown / Into a greener equilibrium." The marketplace, which the poem calls the "navel of the town," becomes a kind of origin point, and under the commerce sits a forest.
The third stanza is the visionary centre, and its logic is linguistic. Bird and tree are "entwined," and a leaf might have "voice and proper flight," a wonderfully strange idea in which the categories of plant and animal, speech and movement, haven't yet separated. The stanza imagines them hovering "in unseparated light," with moon and star running "like blood in their twin veins." Then comes the claim that gives the poem its depth: the worlds were "from their common fire of language stirred." Creation is imagined as something spoken, with sky "implicit in their word." The lost Eden here is a state in which naming and being were still one thing. That fits the poem's earlier insistence on hard, separate forms, since the harsh noon is the world after the split.
The final stanza turns the vision into a human predicament. "Man under weight of Eden in his blood" suggests that this memory is inherited, carried in the body like a debt. The green wood momentarily will "Split stone, spill sea, compell his time away," a violent, almost liberating verb sequence that answers the "belligerent stone" of the opening. But it vanishes "while the shock of noon still sings," and the ending is bleakly precise: he is left "there, only there, / Watching his hands, those marketable things." The hands, which once might have shaped or named, are now only goods. The poem closes by repeating its first image, "the hollow sunlight's bitter glare," with one word changed. The glare is now "hollow," emptied by what the speaker has lost.
Formally, the poem is steady and controlled. It runs in iambic pentameter, and its quatrains rhyme alternately, ABAB, though several rhymes are slant ("known" and "noontide" are not rhymes at all, but "air" and "glare" frame the poem beautifully). The long sentences that spill across stanzas, especially the one running through the second and third, mimic the vision opening out, while the final stanza's shorter clauses snap back to the hard world. The measured form feels like the "orderly branches" it describes, order that almost becomes something greener.
What makes the poem significant is how unsentimentally it treats longing. It doesn't claim Eden can be recovered; it shows how briefly, and how painfully, it can be glimpsed, and it locates that glimpse in the least likely place: a market, at noon, in the glare.