Comment 1 of 2, added on March 21st, 2007 at 5:53 PM.

The speaker describes the inner thoughts of an unmarried girl walking out with a potential lover, who realises that she cannot share her life with a man since it would result in her losing control over her own, very strictly ordered, life as a single person.
The ‘particular’ girl – the carefully chosen adjective meaning both this “specific” girl and one who is “very fastidious and set in her ways” – is walking with a suitor in a “ceremoniously” formal manner. The time is April: the season is spring, the time of rebirth after the austerity of the winter. Yet the the “irregular babel” of the birdsong and the “litter” of the leaves – perhaps not fresh on the trees, but the discarded rubbish of winter, on the ground – disturb the girl; she rejects the the “disarray” of the spring and inwardly longs for the “scrupulous austerity” and “order[ed] … white and black” of winter. When she equates her lover’s exuberance with the “slovenliness” of the season and rejects him “neatly”, it is clear that, as a confirmed misanthrope, she has constructed an emotional barrier around herself against the violence and unruliness of men.
The poem consists of five stanzas, each of six lines. The first line of each stanza has a regular metre [trimeter or tetrameter], which is not in itself immediately remarkable, although it is – unusually – followed by four lines without regular metre. However, the return to a rigid controlling metre in the final line, which has the same foot count as the first line of the stanza but which generally lacks the relief of unstressed syllables, gives a terrible sense of repression. The metrical form of the poem reflects the defence of “a barricade of barb and check” which the confirmed spinster has set against the “irregular, disarrayed and giddy” sensations which bombard her “five queenly wits” – her five senses.
The rhyme scheme relies almost wholly on pararhyme – “slant rhyme” – that reflects the weakness that the girl feels in her particular position. The two perfect rhymes – order/border and set/threat – employ words of containment, rigidity and violence, thereby emphasising that they serve as a metaphor for the girl herself.
The enjambment of the first stanza flows at the ‘ceremonious’ walking pace of the couple; the first caesura follows “herself”, which draws the focus inwards to the girl’s private thoughts. A second caesura signals that thoughts are “sudden” and “intolerable”: this girl is unhappy in the untidiness of the countryside, her taciturnity threatened by the “intolerable babel” of the birds, and the alliteratively-stressed “litter” of the “leaves”.
The second stanza reveals further signs of inner panic. Her lover’s gestures “unbalance the air”: a transferred epithet suggesting that he is cavorting about in an unbalanced way, like a fool. Offended by the “unevenness”, the “rank wilderness”, she “judges” the whole season to be “slovenly”. Here, the word judge suggests a courtroom rather than a pastoral setting, but in the fourth stanza the image of her lover’s foolery is developed using vocabulary from the semantic field of a Court of a different kind. Her five queenly wits (her senses) come under threat from the vulgar motley of a jester, the “idiot” who “reels giddy” in the madhouse of “bedlam spring”; any challenge to her regal isolation is now treason.
The symbolism of the third stanza reveals the depth of the girl’s need for order. She wishes things to be clearly defined, “white and black”, and “scrupulously austere” like “ice and rock” – unmelting and impenetrable. No room for wild abandonment here: her heart will be “disciplined” and kept “exact as a snowflake”, cold and perfect, but also unique in its geometrical perfection, and through its uniqueness, alone.
Just as the poet has constructed a metaphor for her isolation, the girl herself has constructed her “barricade” against the threats of men; sadly, the barrier is effective against the softer emotions, too. But whose regret do we hear in the final line? The regret of the poet? Or the regret of the girl?


Chris Thorns from United Kingdom