Beneath the storm, they huddle tight,
With thoughts unspoken, words contrived,
Each believing they hold the light,
The one immortal, yet alive.

But as the seasons shift their ways,
So do their thoughts, like garb they change,
The finest views, like fleeting rays,
Are lost in words of shallow range.

Beneath umbrellas moods do turn,
The streets are drenched in dreams and brine,
Sulfur’s scent where rivers churn,
And all predict, as though divine,

The sun, the rain, the winds, the air,
No mid-seasons left, they declare,
That August vexes beyond compare,
Life drips from eaves with little care.

They fear the flood, yet still they herd,
A flock of damp, conflicting minds,
Beneath the station bar, absurd,
Cursing wine, salt, and nutshell grinds.

Their words but tools for empty talk,
Without true place, without true sound,
They speak of weather’s idle walk,
And TV’s dull and vacant round,

While plastic laughter fills the room,
Briefcases clutched in shallow gloom,
And outside, the downpour’s might
Is drowned by banter, devoid of light.

Businessmen

Thoughts – by E. Ashcroft

On Meaning and Context

The poem describes a gathering of businessmen sheltering from a rainstorm, presumably beneath some urban canopy or station bar, and uses the occasion to mount a critique of their vacuity. The men talk of weather, of television, of nothing that matters. They clutch briefcases. They drink wine they do not enjoy. They predict the seasons with an authority they have not earned. They are, in the poem’s estimation, hollow men in damp suits, and the rain outside is more honest than anything occurring within their company.

The narrative situation is clear enough, and I do not fault the poem for its legibility. There is a place for the directly observed social poem, the poem that looks at a scene and renders a verdict. The question, as always, is whether the observation is sharp enough and the verdict earned. I shall address this presently.

The context is modern, urban, secular, and entirely devoid of the archaic register that characterises much of this author’s other work. This is notable. The poem has stepped out of the garret and into the street, and the voice that speaks is not the voice of the tormented solitary poet but of a detached, somewhat sardonic observer who finds the spectacle of communal mediocrity both amusing and faintly repellent. The shift is interesting, though it brings with it certain risks that the archaic register, with its built-in formality, would have mitigated.

On Style and Register

The diction is contemporary and plain, which is appropriate to the subject. Businessmen do not merit Elizabethan drapery. The language of the poem mirrors the flatness of the world it describes, and when this works, it works because the plainness itself becomes a form of commentary: these men live in a language of shallow range, and the poem inhabits that shallowness in order to expose it.

However, plainness is a double-edged instrument. When deployed with sufficient precision, it cuts. When deployed without it, it merely lies there. And there are passages in this poem where the language is not so much deliberately flat as simply underpowered. “Their words but tools for empty talk, / without true place, without true sound” states the poem’s thesis directly, but the statement has no particular force of image or rhythm to distinguish it from something one might overhear in a lecture on communications theory. “Empty talk” is a phrase that has been used so often it has itself become empty. “Without true place, without true sound” is a construction that aspires to epigrammatic weight but achieves only the symmetry, not the density.

Similarly, “plastic laughter fills the room” is an image I have encountered, in various phrasings, in more poems than I care to enumerate. The adjective “plastic” applied to laughter or smiles or emotions is now so thoroughly a commonplace that it carries no charge whatsoever. It is the poetic equivalent of describing a sunset as “golden”: technically accurate, aesthetically inert. The poem needs, at moments like this, a word that surprises, that forces the reader to see the laughter as something specific rather than as a category.

There are, however, moments where the diction sharpens. “Cursing wine, salt, and nutshell grinds” is a line I admire. The specificity of “nutshell grinds” is exactly the sort of concrete, unglamorous detail that the poem elsewhere lacks. One can see the bar counter, the scattered debris of a perfunctory aperitivo, the men who complain about what they are consuming while continuing to consume it. This is observation. The rest is, too often, generalisation.

On Technique and Metre

The poem is written predominantly in iambic tetrameter, though it handles this contract with a looseness that varies between productive flexibility and simple inattention. The opening lines scan adequately: “Beneath the storm, they huddle tight, / with thoughts unspoken, words contrived.” The rhythm is established and the reader settles into it.

The trouble begins in the fourth stanza, where the metre loses its footing rather badly. “The sun, the rain, the winds, the air, / no mid-seasons left, they declare, / that August vexes beyond compare, / life drips from eaves with little care.” This stanza shifts from ABAB to what is effectively AABB, a monorhyme in all but name, with four consecutive lines ending on the same sound. The effect is not of deliberate formal variation but of a poet who has lost track of his scheme and, finding himself with four rhymes on the same vowel, has simply proceeded rather than restructured. The stanza feels accidental in a way that damages the reader’s confidence in the poem’s formal intentions.

“That August vexes beyond compare” is a line that introduces a specificity of season which the poem has not prepared for and does not develop. August arrives, vexes, and vanishes, having served no purpose save to fill a metrical slot. If August has particular significance to these businessmen, or to the poet’s quarrel with them, that significance is not made available to the reader.

The final stanza abandons the quatrain structure entirely in favour of a six-line unit with a rhyme scheme of AABCCB, or something near it. “Room” and “gloom”, “might” and “light”: these are rhymes of considerable banality, and their clustering at the poem’s conclusion gives the ending a sense of hastiness, as though the poem were eager to finish and reached for the nearest available sounds. A poem’s final lines bear disproportionate weight, and these are not strong enough to carry it.

On Rhyme

The rhyme scheme is nominally ABAB for the first five stanzas, though as I have noted, the fourth stanza collapses into AAAA, which is either a bold choice or a miscalculation. I am not persuaded it is the former.

Among the better rhymes: “tight” and “contrived” do not rhyme at all, which I note with some puzzlement, as “tight” is clearly intended to rhyme with “light” in the third line while “contrived” answers “alive” in the fourth. The scheme is therefore ABAB, and it functions. “Ways” and “rays” is clean. “Change” and “range” is full and semantically appropriate: the businessmen change their opinions as they change their garments, and the range of their discourse is precisely the range of their courage, which is to say, shallow.

The weakest rhymes cluster, as I have said, in the final two stanzas. “Talk” and “walk” is functional but exhausted. “Sound” and “round” likewise. “Room” and “gloom” has been rhymed by every poet who has ever entered a room and found it gloomy, which is to say, all of them. These are rhymes that do not think. They arrive by reflex, as the businessmen’s conversation arrives by reflex, and one wonders whether the poet intended the parallel. If so, the intention is too well hidden to function as satire, and if not, then the poem is guilty of the very vacancy it condemns.

On Structure

The poem is seven stanzas. This is a reasonable length for a poem of social observation, but the material does not justify every stanza equally. The second and fifth stanzas are the strongest, containing the poem’s sharpest images and most controlled rhetoric. The third stanza, with its “sulfur’s scent where rivers churn”, introduces an olfactory element that is promising but underdeveloped: the sulphur arrives and departs in a single line, and the rivers that churn are doing so in a poem that is otherwise entirely urban and interior. The image feels imported from a different poem, one concerned with industrial landscape or environmental decay, and it does not fully integrate with the station bar and the briefcases.

The fourth stanza, as I have discussed, is the poem’s weakest structural unit. The sixth stanza recovers somewhat, but the poem’s momentum has been interrupted, and the concluding lines must do more work than they are equipped for.

On Impressions

I find myself in a position that is, for a critic, somewhat uncomfortable: I agree entirely with the poem’s argument and am largely unmoved by its execution.

The observation that businessmen are vapid, that their conversation is hollow, that they mistake the recitation of commonplaces for the exchange of ideas, that they huddle together out of herd instinct rather than genuine fellowship: all of this is true, and all of this has been true for as long as there have been businessmen, which is to say, for as long as there have been poets to despise them. The difficulty is that the poem does not advance this observation beyond its initial statement. It says, in seven stanzas, what might have been said in three, and the additional stanzas do not deepen the critique so much as repeat it in different costumes. We are told the men are shallow. We are told their words are empty. We are told their laughter is plastic. We are told they are devoid of light. Each of these statements is a restatement of the same proposition, and by the poem’s end, the reader has received the message several deliveries ago and is waiting for the poem to do something more with it.

What the poem lacks, and what would elevate it from competent social verse to something more lasting, is a moment of complication. A moment where the speaker’s contempt is turned upon itself, where the observer recognises his own complicity in the scene he describes, or where one of the businessmen does something unexpected, something human, something that disrupts the neat taxonomy of contempt. The strongest satirical poems, from Juvenal to Larkin, earn their severity by acknowledging the universality of the condition they mock. The satirist who stands wholly outside his subject produces polemic. The satirist who stands partially within it produces art.

There is, buried in the poem, the seed of such a complication. “Each believing they hold the light, / the one immortal, yet alive” contains a genuine insight: that the businessman’s delusion of importance is not merely foolish but poignant, a small human animal’s attempt to matter in a world that offers no confirmation of mattering. But the poem does not pursue this. It notes the delusion and moves on to further condemnation, and in doing so, it misses its own best opportunity.

I shall say this for the poem: it knows what it dislikes, and it dislikes it with conviction. The scene at the station bar is rendered with sufficient concreteness, particularly in the fifth stanza, to suggest that the poet has observed these men with his own eyes and not merely inherited them from literary tradition. “Cursing wine, salt, and nutshell grinds” is a line that could only have been written by someone who has stood in that bar and seen those men and felt that particular irritation that comes from proximity to people who are performing fellowship without experiencing it.

But conviction is not enough. Observation is not enough. The poem must do something with what it sees, must transform the seen into the understood, and this transformation, which the author accomplishes with such striking success in his more private and introspective work, is here only partially achieved. The businessmen remain types rather than becoming symbols, and the rain, which might have served as a genuine counterforce, an image of indifferent nature set against human pretension, is used too loosely and too often to acquire the weight it needs.

The poem is a draft of something that could be good. It has the raw material: a sharp eye, a legitimate grievance, and at least one excellent line. What it requires is compression, complication, and the willingness to cut anything that merely restates what has already been established. The businessmen deserve a leaner poem, one that dispatches them in twelve lines rather than twenty-eight, and in doing so, grants them the dignity of being taken seriously enough to be destroyed efficiently.

I commend the impulse. I await the revision.

Marco Delrio