The wind his death-lament. In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. And I was unaware. The poem opens with blow after blow of ominous images, similes, and metaphors. Frost is gray as a ghost, Winter has dregs, as if the year were a drink that has been consumed down to the bitter lees.
Stems are like strings of broken lyres.
It is as if poetry itself is broken, music itself is out of tune. The very landscape has becomes the pinched face of a corpse withered in death. The poem owes much of its power to the economy of diction. Meaning accretes with each word choice. But perhaps one of the most interesting word choices in the poem is in the title.