The town’s asleep, clamped tight in pitch,
No pulse nor grip, no root nor plea.
My peace bricked deep in slag and stitch
As thy ghost runs poison into me.

Thoughts – by E. Ashcroft

The quatrain presents itself as a nocturnal scene, though “scene” is perhaps too generous a word for what is, in truth, a condition. The town is not merely sleeping but imprisoned in its own darkness, and the speaker is not merely awake but under siege. The poem’s narrative, such as it is, concerns the return of an absent figure, reduced to spectrality, whose presence operates not as comfort or even as haunting in the conventional gothic sense, but as contamination. This is a poem about being poisoned by memory, and it has the good sense not to dress that poisoning in anything particularly noble.

The opening line is the quatrain’s strongest. “Clamped tight in pitch” is muscular, compact, and earns its violence through sound alone. The hard consonants, the monosyllabic compression, the sense of something mechanically shut: all of this works. One feels the town not as a place but as a vise. “Asleep” is the only concession to softness in the entire line, and it is immediately overridden by the brutality of what follows. This is effective writing. I do not say so lightly.

The second line, however, gives me pause. “No pulse nor grip, no root nor plea” is a catalogue of absences, and catalogues of absence are a temptation to which poets surrender far too readily. The construction is symmetrical to the point of neatness: two pairs, each linked by “nor”, each offering a negation. But what, precisely, is being negated? Pulse and grip belong to the body. Root and plea belong, respectively, to place and to speech. The line attempts to cover too much ground, and in doing so covers none of it with particular depth. It is the one moment in the quatrain where craft is visible but meaning is thin. The reader admires the scaffolding without being moved by the building.

The third line recovers considerably. “My peace bricked deep in slag and stitch” is a remarkable image, and I use “remarkable” in its strict sense: it is worth remarking upon. Peace is not lost but entombed, buried under industrial waste and sutured shut. “Bricked” carries the weight of deliberate enclosure, something walled in, perhaps by the speaker’s own hand. “Slag” is an inspired choice, being the residue of a process already completed, the aftermath of smelting, and therefore implying that whatever furnace produced this condition has already done its work. “Stitch” pulls in two directions at once: the surgical, suggesting a wound closed but not healed, and the textile, suggesting the rough, coarse binding of something patched rather than mended. The line does not sentimentalise suffering. It industrialises it. That is a distinction worth respecting.

The final line lands with the force of a closing statement, though whether it entirely earns that force is debatable. “Thy ghost runs poison into me” is direct, almost blunt, and after the density of the preceding line, this plainness is either a calculated contrast or a slight falling off. I am inclined to be charitable and read it as the former. The verb “runs” is interesting: it suggests not a single act but a continuous process, an infusion, something intravenous and slow. The ghost does not strike or wound but administers. There is something clinical in this, which sits well against the industrial imagery of the third line. However, “poison” as a noun deployed in this manner is dangerously close to the commonplace. The line is saved, I think, by the accumulated pressure of what precedes it rather than by its own intrinsic force.

On the matter of style: the poem operates in a register that is largely contemporary but inflected, through “thy”, with a deliberate anachronism. Unlike certain other quatrains where the archaic pronoun is deployed as part of a sustained older diction, here it appears only once, and its isolation is conspicuous. One must decide whether this is a flaw or a feature. I am, on balance, persuaded that it functions as a marker of intimacy reserved for the spectral figure alone, a linguistic tenderness extended to no one else in the poem, not even the speaker. But I would not fault a reader who found it merely incongruous.

Technically, the metre is tetrameter, and it is handled with a roughness that suits the material. The first line scans cleanly. The second is metronomic, perhaps excessively so, which contributes to its comparative weakness. The third line is the most metrically interesting, with “bricked deep” creating a spondaic heaviness that physically slows the reading. The fourth returns to regularity. The overall rhythmic shape is therefore one of compression, release, density, and resolution, which is architecturally sound.

The rhyme scheme is ABAB. “Pitch” and “stitch” is a full rhyme, phonetically tight and semantically productive: darkness answers suture. “Plea” and “me” is likewise full, though less interesting, being a functional closure rather than an illuminating one. The rhymes do their work without drawing excessive attention to themselves, which is the correct behaviour for rhymes in a poem of this temperament.

My overall assessment is this: the quatrain is uneven but at its best genuinely accomplished. The first and third lines are excellent, dense with purpose and sonically assured. The second line is competent but expendable in its current form, a placeholder dressed as a catalogue. The fourth is effective largely by inheritance, riding the momentum generated by the third. The poem’s controlling metaphor, of poisoning as intimacy, of haunting as slow contamination, is strong and, more importantly, it is not overexplained. The poem trusts its images to do the thinking, which is a courtesy not all poems extend to their readers.

It is not a perfect quatrain. But it is a serious one, and seriousness, in an age of decorative melancholy, is not nothing.

Marco Delrio