Granny - Analysis

A comic storm that keeps turning serious

This poem’s central joke is also its claim: nature’s force is indifferent, and laughter is how the speaker manages that indifference. The wind is not just windy; it is invasive, relentless, and almost violent. Yet the poem insists on telling that violence as farce, turning danger into something we can say out loud. The result is a nursery-rhyme brightness that keeps bumping into real risk.

The wind as an intruder in the body

The first stanza makes the wind feel less like weather and more like a trespasser. It gets into every nook and every cranny, then narrows its attention to Granny’s body: Around her knees, into each ear, even up her nose. That last parenthetical—as well, I fear—is crucial: the speaker pretends to be politely concerned, but the phrasing is comic, almost delighted. Granny becomes the poem’s human measuring-stick for exposure: if the wind can get in there, it can get in anywhere.

When the joke brushes past catastrophe

The poem’s turn comes when the storm leaves the private space of Granny’s face and starts damaging the public world. All through the night the wind escalates until it nearly made the vicar curse, a line that makes a moral authority wobble—his restraint is almost blown off like a hat. Then the danger becomes literal: The top had fallen off the steeple, Just missing him. For a moment, the poem admits the stakes: people could be crushed. The comedy doesn’t erase that; it skates right beside it.

Everybody gets hit, but Granny gets the headline

The final stanza widens the blast radius—man, beast, nun, priest—as if the wind is conducting a chaotic roll call. The repetition of It blew feels like gusts hitting again and again. The funniest humiliation is social—the wig off Auntie Fanny—but the poem insists the main victim is still Granny: But most of all, it blew on Granny. That insistence creates a tension: the poem treats Granny as a punchline, yet it also keeps returning to her as the person most exposed, the one with the least protection. The laughter, in other words, lands on vulnerability—even as it tries to soften it.