“The chill of the crooked wing falls down along my body”

“The chill of the crooked wing falls down along my body” is an Auden line that Leda taught her daughters, Bianca and Marta, and made part of their private family vocabulary. Its significance lies in that double life: it is both a shared phrase for ordinary discomfort and, when it returns in the shower, a line spoken inwardly amid the bodily unease of Leda’s return to the apartment.

A Family Phrase

Leda and her daughters used the line to signal that they disliked a place, were in a bad mood, or simply found the day freezing cold. The quotation gave them a compact, literary way to name passing discomfort, turning a line of poetry into a piece of domestic shorthand. Leda reflects that the girls were made to be cultured even in their family lexicon, so the phrase also carries a trace of the education and habits she passed on to them.

The Line in the Shower

The phrase returns after Leda drives home in a daze, sees Bianca and Marta in her mind as frightened and small, and steps immediately into a cold shower. As water runs over her, black sand slides down her legs and feet onto the white enamel floor; the line follows this concrete image of cold, water, and residue. Its movement from family shorthand to solitary recollection gives it a more unsettled force: the shared code remains, but the daughters are absent from the bathroom scene.

Meaning and Recurrence

The expression links a remembered family intimacy to Leda’s present physical experience without explaining that experience away. Earlier, it could name anything from a disliked place to an ordinary cold day; here, surrounded by the cold water and the sand washing from her body, it gathers those meanings into a moment of discomfort and recollection. The line’s return shows how the daughters’ shared language persists in Leda’s mind even when they are not with her.