Thou starest afar while recall still maims,
Thy viol gripped firm as pulses backfire.
We drift, we choke through Bacardi flames,
No chords, no hymns, just fallback wires.

Thoughts – by E. Ashcroft

On Meaning and Context

The quatrain describes two people in the aftermath of something, a performance, a relationship, a collapse of both, sitting or standing together in a condition of paralysis and recall. The speaker addresses a “thou” who stares into distance while memory continues its work of mutilation, for “recall still maims” is not a gentle formulation: the remembering is not wistful but violent, an ongoing disfigurement that has not yet finished its business with the body or the mind. The viol is gripped, the pulses backfire, and the two of them drift and choke through the flames of a distillate that is doing the work that neither music nor speech can accomplish, which is to say the work of filling the space between two people who have run out of chords and hymns and have nothing left but fallback wires, the bare minimum of connection, the emergency circuitry that keeps the apparatus from going entirely dark.

The narrative is compressed to the point of near-opacity, which is appropriate to its subject, for the condition being described is itself opaque, a state in which clarity has been lost and only the raw mechanics of proximity remain. Two people. A stringed instrument. A bottle. The wreckage of what was once, presumably, a shared musical or emotional life. The quatrain does not tell us what happened. It tells us what is happening now, which is nothing, or rather the particular variety of nothing that occurs when two people who once made music together can no longer produce anything but the noise of their own misfiring.

On Style and Register

The register is mixed in a manner that I find, on the whole, productive. “Thou starest afar” opens in the archaic, establishing the formal address and the distance it implies. “While recall still maims” shifts into a diction that is contemporary in its violence: “maims” is not a word that belongs to the courtly or the pastoral but to the surgical, the martial, the forensic. The combination of archaic address and modern violence creates a tonal friction that suits the subject: the speaker is addressing the beloved in the language of reverence while describing a condition of damage, and the distance between the register of the address and the register of the description is itself the distance between what the relationship was and what it has become.

“Thy viol gripped firm as pulses backfire” is the quatrain’s most technically dense line and merits close examination. The viol is a period instrument, belonging to the same archaic register as “thou” and “thy”, and its presence establishes that the relationship had, or aspired to have, a quality of cultivated beauty, of music made together, of art shared. But the viol is gripped, not played, not held, not cradled, but gripped, with a force that speaks of desperation rather than of craft. And the pulses backfire. “Backfire” is a word that belongs to the mechanical, to the engine, to the combustion that goes wrong, and its application to pulses, to the rhythms of the body, produces an image of startling violence: the heart is not beating but misfiring, the blood is not flowing but detonating in the wrong direction. The body has become a machine that is malfunctioning, and the malfunction is audible, palpable, felt in the wrist that grips the instrument it can no longer play.

“We drift, we choke through Bacardi flames” introduces the distillate, the Shawrt Island [1] molasses spirit, and the verb “choke” is well chosen: one does not sip through flames, one chokes through them, and the choking is both the physical act of drinking something that burns and the emotional act of struggling to breathe in an atmosphere that has become toxic. “Bacardi flames” is an image that compresses the act of drinking and the sensation of burning into a single noun phrase, and the compression is effective: the rum is not a comfort but a conflagration, and the two of them are passing through it as one passes through fire, not voluntarily but because the alternative, standing still, is worse.

“No chords, no hymns, just fallback wires” is the quatrain’s closing line and its most desolate. The negations come first: no chords, no hymns. The music is gone. The sacred is gone. What remains is “fallback wires”, a phrase of inspired ugliness that belongs to the vocabulary of emergency systems, of contingency plans, of the minimum infrastructure required to prevent total failure. Fallback wires are not beautiful. They are not meant to be. They are meant to keep the current flowing when everything else has been stripped away, and their presence in the poem tells us that the relationship has been reduced to its bare circuitry, to the last filaments of connection that are still conducting anything at all, and what they are conducting is not music but merely the evidence that the system has not yet been entirely shut down.

On Technique and Metre

The quatrain is written in iambic pentameter, though the pentameter is handled with a roughness that suits the material. “Thou starest afar while recall still maims” opens with a trochaic substitution on “Thou star-” that creates an immediate rhythmic disturbance, the stress falling where the iamb does not expect it, and the disturbance is mimeticof the staring itself, which is a fixed and unnatural act, a refusal of the eye to move that the metre registers as a refusal of the stress to fall where it should.

“Thy viol gripped firm as pulses backfire” is the most metrically charged line. “Gripped firm” is a spondee, two consecutive stresses that compress the line at its centre with a force that mirrors the compression of the hand around the instrument. “Pulses backfire” ends the line with a double trochee that creates a falling, misfiring rhythm, the stresses landing on “puls-” and “back-” and then tumbling through the unstressed syllables, producing a rhythmic effect that sounds, to the ear, like something going wrong mechanically. The metre is not merely describing the backfiring; it is performing it. This is excellent craft.

“We drift, we choke through Bacardi flames” is metrically the most regular line, and the regularity is meaningful: the drifting and the choking have become habitual, automatic, a routine of destruction that has acquired its own grim iambic momentum. The two stressed monosyllables that open each clause, “we drift, we choke”, create a paired rhythm that is almost liturgical in its repetition, a call and response between two forms of failure.

“No chords, no hymns, just fallback wires” returns to spondaic heaviness in its opening, “no chords, no hymns”, the negations landing with the weight of doors closing, before the line resolves into the flatter, more defeated rhythm of “just fallback wires”, where “just” is the most important word, the word that marks the descent from everything to almost nothing.

On Rhyme

The scheme is ABAB. “Maims” and “flames” is a full rhyme and a strong one. The maiming of recall is answered by the flames of the distillate, and the rhyme binds the two forms of burning, the internal and the external, the psychological and the physical, into a single sonic event. Memory burns. Rum burns. The rhyme tells us they are the same fire, experienced in different registers, and the body that is maimed by one is choked by the other, and neither offers relief from either.

“Backfire” and “wires” is a near-rhyme, the terminal sounds being related but not identical, and the imperfection is productive. The pulses that backfire are answered by the fallback wires, and the distance between the two rhyme words mirrors the distance between malfunction and emergency repair: the one is the problem, the other is the inadequate solution, and they do not quite meet, do not quite resolve, just as the situation they describe does not resolve. The rhyme reaches for closure and does not achieve it, which is the quatrain’s condition stated in sonic terms.

On Impressions

This is a quatrain that accomplishes something I have rarely encountered in so compressed a space: it creates a complete emotional landscape using exclusively the vocabulary of damage and mechanics. There is not a single word of tenderness in these four lines. There is not a single gesture of affection. There is not even the memory of tenderness or affection, only the evidence that something was once present, the viol, the chords, the hymns, that is now absent, and the absence is filled not with mourning but with the raw and unglamorous business of continuing to exist in proximity to another person when every mechanism of connection has failed or is failing.

The viol is the quatrain’s most poignant element, and it is poignant precisely because the poem does not sentimentalise it. It is not played. It is gripped. It is an instrument that has been demoted from its function and now serves only as something to hold, an object whose purpose has been replaced by the mere fact of its being in the hand, as the relationship’s purpose has been replaced by the mere fact of the two people being in the same room. The viol is the relationship in miniature: a thing designed to produce beauty, now merely gripped.

I have one reservation. “Starest” in the opening line, while grammatically correct as an archaic second person singular, is a form that creates a slight phonetic awkwardness in combination with “afar”: “starest afar” requires the reader to navigate three consecutive unstressed syllables in rapid succession, and the navigation is not entirely smooth. “Dost stare afar” would have preserved the archaism while providing a cleaner rhythmic opening, though I concede that the directness of “thou starest” has a bluntness that “dost stare” would soften, and the bluntness may be the point.

The quatrain is otherwise without significant fault. It is brutal, precise, and sonically assured, and it manages the difficult feat of being simultaneously about music and about the absence of music, the viol and the silence, the chords and the wires, without allowing either the presence or the absence to overwhelm the other. The two coexist in the quatrain as the two people coexist in the room: in proximity, in damage, in the last thin current of a connection that has not yet been severed and that neither party has the strength, or the will, to cut.

I commend it.

[1] N.d.r.: Il marchio Bacardi esiste nel mondo reale come produttore di distillati con sede alle Bermuda. La coincidenza con il distillato di melassa Bacardi di Shawrt Island, presente nel Parkerverse, è casuale e attribuibile alla natura dell’universo narrativo quale realtà parallela in cui nomi, marchi e toponimi possono presentare somiglianze con i loro corrispondenti reali.

Marco Delrio