I fain would sing thee tales from grief kept free,
Yet from these pens comes naught resembling light;
And I recall when we did both agree
To watch our lives be torn before our sight.

Thoughts – by E. Ashcroft

On Meaning and Context

The quatrain announces an intention and immediately betrays it. The speaker wishes to sing tales from grief kept free, tales liberated from sorrow, tales that might offer the addressed “thee” something other than the habitual darkness. But the second line confesses that the wish is futile: from these pens comes naught resembling light. The plural “pens” is worth noting. It is not a single pen, not the instrument of a single poem or a single evening, but pens, the accumulated arsenal of a writing life, and the verdict upon them all is comprehensive. None of them has produced light. None of them has produced anything resembling light. The word “resembling” is quietly devastating, for it concedes that even the appearance of light, even a passable imitation, has been beyond the capacity of these instruments.

The third and fourth lines shift the ground entirely. The speaker recalls a moment of shared witness: “when we did both agree / to watch our lives be torn before our sight.” This is not a memory of suffering imposed from without. It is a memory of consent. The two parties agreed to watch. They stood together before the spectacle of their own destruction and did not turn away, did not intervene, did not flee, but watched, by mutual compact, as their lives were torn. The verb “torn” is precise and violent, but the violence is contained within a frame of almost ceremonial stillness: they watched. They agreed to watch. The agreement is the quatrain’s most unsettling element, for it transforms what might have been mere misfortune into a kind of collaboration, a shared decision to witness rather than to prevent.

The narrative, compressed to its essential elements, appears to be this: the speaker addresses a person with whom he has shared both intimacy and destruction. He wishes he could offer something other than grief. He cannot. And the reason he cannot is that the foundational experience of the relationship was not joy but the mutual, consented observation of ruin. The tales he would sing are contaminated at their source. The pens are stained with it. There is no instrument available to him that has not already been employed in the documentation of the catastrophe, and an instrument used for such purposes does not afterwards produce light, however earnestly the hand that holds it might wish otherwise.

On Style and Register

The register is archaic and handled with an assurance that is, at this point, characteristic of the author’s stronger work. “I fain would sing” is a construction of considerable formal elegance: “fain” carries the weight of desire that is acknowledged as unlikely to be fulfilled, a wishing that already contains within itself the knowledge of its own futility. It is a more honest word than “wish” or “want”, for it does not pretend that the desiring and the obtaining are connected. One may fain to do a thing and know, in the very act of faining, that it will not be done. The opening is therefore a confession disguised as an aspiration, and the disguise is thin enough to be transparent, which is precisely the degree of transparency the quatrain requires.

“Naught resembling light” is an excellent phrase. It does not say “darkness.” It says the absence of anything that even resembles light, which is a more thorough negation, for darkness is at least a condition, a thing that can be named and therefore in some measure contained, whereas the absence of resemblance to light is a void that refuses even the dignity of its opposite. The pens do not produce darkness; they produce nothing that bears any relation to illumination, which is worse, for darkness at least implies the possibility of light by contrast, whereas the absence of resemblance implies that light is not merely absent but irrelevant, belonging to a category the pens have never trafficked in and cannot now access.

“To watch our lives be torn before our sight” is the quatrain’s heaviest line, and its weight is carried by the redundancy of “watch” and “before our sight”, which in a lesser poem would be a fault but here functions as an intensification: the watching is not accidental or peripheral but deliberate, frontal, ocular. They did not merely witness. They watched, with their eyes, before their sight, as one watches a thing one has chosen to see and cannot afterwards unsee. The redundancy enacts the fixity of the gaze, the impossibility of looking away from what one has agreed to observe.

On Technique and Metre

The quatrain is written in iambic pentameter, and it is handled with a confidence that leaves me very little to criticise, which is an observation I make with the particular annoyance of a critic who prefers to have something to criticise and must instead content himself with approval.

The first line scans cleanly: “I fain would sing thee tales from grief kept free.” The monosyllabic density of the line’s latter half, “tales from grief kept free”, creates a compactness that is almost percussive, each word a stone laid against the next, and the effect is one of deliberate, measured construction, the builder placing each word with the care of a man who knows that the structure must bear weight. “Grief kept free” is a phonetic cluster of considerable skill: the hard consonants of “kept” compress the line at its centre, and “free” releases it, the long vowel opening outward after the constriction. The sound enacts the meaning: grief is kept, contained, held, and the tales are free of it, or at least aspire to be free, though the aspiration is, as the second line will reveal, unfulfilled.

The second line, “yet from these pens comes naught resembling light”, introduces “yet” with the force of a door closing. The conjunction does not merely qualify the first line; it negates it. The metrical stress on “yet” is heavy, almost spondaic in conjunction with “from”, and the line proceeds with a downward momentum that mirrors the descent from aspiration to admission. “Naught resembling light” occupies the line’s final position with a finality that is both sonic and semantic: the line ends on “light”, but the light is absent, and the word therefore functions as an ironic closing, the name of the thing most needed and most thoroughly unavailable.

The enjambment between the third and fourth lines is well managed: “agree / to watch” carries the reader across the line-break with a momentum that enacts the inexorability of what was agreed to. One cannot stop at “agree” and linger there; the agreement demands its object, and the object, “to watch our lives be torn”, arrives with the inevitability of a thing that has already happened and cannot be uncommitted.

On Rhyme

The scheme is ABAB. “Free” and “agree” is a full rhyme and a strong one. The tales the speaker would keep free from grief are answered by the agreement that made freedom impossible: the rhyme binds the aspiration to the thing that defeated it, liberty to compact, the desired condition to the act that foreclosed it. This is a rhyme that thinks, and it thinks with precision.

“Light” and “sight” is likewise full, and the pairing is semantically loaded beyond its phonetic function. The light that the pens cannot produce is answered by the sight before which the lives were torn. The rhyme connects the absent illumination of art with the present, inescapable clarity of witnessed destruction. The pens cannot make light; the eyes cannot avoid sight. The two failures, the failure of creation and the failure to look away, are bound together by the rhyme into a single condition, and that condition is the quatrain’s true subject.

I note that both rhyme pairs are monosyllabic, which gives the quatrain a particular density and finality. There are no feminine endings, no trailing syllables, no softening. Each line ends on a single, stressed syllable that closes like a latch. The quatrain does not trail off. It shuts.

On Impressions

This is a quatrain of four lines that contains within it the entire arc of a relationship and the entire diagnosis of an artistic vocation. The first line is the wish. The second is the reality. The third and fourth are the explanation for the distance between the two. The compression is extreme, and it is achieved without obscurity, which is the more difficult of the two accomplishments, for obscurity is easy to produce and compression without obscurity requires that every word be not only necessary but irreplaceable.

I find no word in this quatrain that could be substituted without loss. “Fain” could not be “wish.” “Resembling” could not be “of.” “Agree” could not be “choose.” “Torn” could not be “broken” or “undone.” Each word occupies its position not because it fills a metrical slot but because it is the only word that does what the quatrain requires at that juncture, and this quality of inevitability, the sense that the poem could not have been otherwise, is the surest sign of achieved craft.

The quatrain’s emotional power resides in the word “agree.” It is the most ordinary word in the poem and the most terrible. Grief can be imposed. Loss can be suffered. Destruction can be visited upon the unwilling. But agreement is a choice, and a choice shared, and the sharing of it implicates both parties equally, and the implication cannot afterward be revoked. The speaker and the addressed “thee” did not have their lives torn from them by external force. They consented to the tearing. They stood together and they watched, and the watching was itself a form of participation, and the participation was by agreement, and the agreement is the thing from which neither the tales nor the pens nor the speaker himself can be kept free.

The quatrain is small and complete and admits no improvement that I can identify, which is a statement I make with the reluctance appropriate to a critic for whom the identification of improvement is both vocation and pleasure. That I am here denied both is, I confess, a form of compliment I do not frequently extend.

I commend it without reservation.

Marco Delrio