Hi Michael,
I like this a fair bit. It's evocative. I like the fire grey and then all-consuming, and the metaphoric work that does. The ending, closing on the image of the screaming gulls works very well too, is darkly suggestive, and for me gives an impression of the present and the past. I also like the formal choice of ending each stanza on an image, and how these work collectively to suggest darkness and/or decay. The screaming, the hunter and the hunted, the withered seaweed, the grass invading.
I do wonder if there's a slight imbalance in the poem's focus on winter. The N, observing the house in summer, what it was, who lived there, seems to be largely only wondering how the winters were. And it's kind of implied that perhaps it was the fire in winter that burned it down, though I appreciate this is doing more metaphorical work.
S2L1 "put" seems a little weak, general, especially given how much emphasis it's given by the line-break. I wonder if there's a stronger, more specific verb?
I'm not sure if "young and strong" is pulling its weight, it also has me wondering if the entire family could be young and strong, can a three-year-old be strong, for example, or if the kids are grown and strong, can the parents be young? (And for how long they could remain young, assuming they lived there for any length of time. Did they leave when they got older? Etc.) There's maybe some scope for ascribing them some clam-like property, I guess. The house as their shell. Tightly sealed. Underwater. Something closed around them. Something along those lines?
The luring of ships with false beacons is apparently something of a myth but, of course, that's not an objection to the N wondering about it. "wreckers" is an option for "scavengers", if you want to make things clearer (and then you'd no longer need "false", "setting beacons" would do it), but I like "scavengers", which puts me in mind of seagulls and other shoreline scavengers.
S3L3-5 the short lines work well here to show the compression. Though I wonder if that's as effective in L7-8. I might be inclined to move "the fire" up to the end of the previous line. I can see that you want to emphasise the "the fire" in the light of the poem's close, but I think it gets a much, if not more emphasis, moved up. And L3-5 are maybe more effective if the effect is not repeated.
best,
Matt
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