Window Freda Downie Analysis [new] -

: Downie contrasts the "rain-wet shore" and the "advancing dusk" outside with the interior of a house where someone plays music by Reynaldo Hahn. This creates a sharp divide between the "monstrously grey" sea and the quiet, cultured world within the house. The "Game" with Nature

Line 8 is the poem’s volta, or turning point. Immediately after describing the trees’ salute, the speaker reports: “And my own face comes caving in.” This is a moment of radical internal disruption. Grammatically, the face is the subject that performs the action — but “caving in” is something that happens to a structure (a mine, a roof), not something a face does voluntarily. The speaker is both agent and patient of her own collapse. window freda downie analysis

Like much of Downie’s work, "Window" takes a domestic scene—a person at a window—and elevates it to philosophical inquiry. There is no grand gesture, no heroism, no tragedy. Only a chair, a sill, a pane of glass. This is poetry of the ordinary made strange (a technique borrowed from the Surrealists and from Tomlinson’s objectivist eye). : Downie contrasts the "rain-wet shore" and the