manderley

A found poem

‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,’

Joan Fontaine says in a strange,
sing-songy tone.

‘For awhile I could not enter,
for the way was barred to me.

Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed
with supernatural powers
and passed like a spirit
through the barrier before me.’

But of course we see
what she is talking about
and it isn’t a dream at all

It’s a shifting picture of a dark and tangled wood

And we peer through the trees
at a black and jagged ruin
a Gothic scramble of turrets
and mullioned windows.

Michael Wood writing about David O. Selznick’s «Rebecca» in «The London Review of Books»