Summary
The speaker ventures outside his home, possibly to survey the wind's devastation upon the landscape. He sticks close to the side of his house. He looks up once and feels the wind's forceful impact upon his eyes while witnessing the damage it continues to inflict upon his surroundings. The landscape's features, including the hills, the sky, and the fields, hold fast in spite of the wind's strength. However, the speaker sees two birds, a magpie and a black-gull, brutally succumb to the wind's power.
Analysis
In the middle of the poem, the speaker attempts to brave the wind's forces, but ultimately recognizes that fleeing, or staging some kind of defense, is futile. The wind is ruthless, and it seems as though it will eventually destroy anything and anyone that stands in its path. The content shifts from the speaker's dramatic narration of the wind's action to his helpless survey of its damage.
The image of the wind "dent[ing]" the speaker's eyeballs transforms the wind into both an oppressive and destructive force. It also subtly calls attention to the role that vision and perception play in the poem. The changes the speaker sees in the landscape echo the effects of his emotional upheaval, which we discover in the last stanza with the introduction of the second figure. As a powerful storm can rearrange one's familiar surroundings, an emotionally destructive event can alter the way someone sees the world.
The language in this section bolsters the poem's sonic elements. The speaker describes the hills' outlines as "drumming" through the wind, while the skyline could at any moment disappear with a "bang." The image of the black gull "bent like an iron bar slowly" also suggests a piercing, high-pitched tone amid the poem's crashing, chaotic landscape, a sound which carries through the beginning of stanza 5.
The mounting tension in stanzas 3 and 4, expressed through the landscape's foreboding imagery, the active language used to characterize the wind, and the diction's escalating sonic intensity, brings the poem to its climax at the beginning of stanza 5. The wind's awesome power reveals the speaker's helplessness; as his attempt to brave the wind is quickly defeated, all he can do is observe. Unable to combat the wind, the speaker must retreat into his home, where the heart of the poem's conflict resides, or risk the same fate as the gull and magpie. Although the speaker manages to hold fast against the wind's growing power, the enjambment in stanza 4's final line, which leaves "The house" lingering at its end, further emphasizes the speaker's isolation.
