With the temper of the crag rasped by the spume,
I drag to me chamber, let the rind unlace,
I strip off the scrap, let the marrow exhume,
To coil in the vaults where the grit clamps grace.

Thoughts – by E. Ashcroft

On Meaning and Context

The quatrain describes a return, a withdrawal, a stripping down to the essential. The speaker comes home, or comes to his chamber, carrying with him the temperament of a crag that has been abraded by sea spray, and upon arrival he removes the outer layers, the rind, the scrap, and exhumes the marrow, the innermost substance, in order to coil in the vaults where grit clamps grace. The movement is from exterior to interior, from the eroded surface to the buried core, from the world’s assault to the solitary space where something essential, something that might be called grace, is held in place not by beauty or by comfort but by grit, by the coarse and abrasive substrate of endurance itself.

The narrative, compressed to a single gesture, is this: a man comes inside. He undresses. He lies down. But the poem refuses to present these actions in their domestic banality. It translates them into a vocabulary of geology and butchery and archaeology that elevates the quotidian to the elemental without inflating it, for the crag is not a metaphor of grandeur but of erosion, and the marrow is not a metaphor of treasure but of the last thing left when everything else has been removed, and the vault is not a cathedral but a cellar, a place of storage and of darkness, and the coiling is not regal but serpentine, the posture of a creature that has withdrawn into itself and made of its own body a shelter.

This is a poem about the daily act of surviving one’s own exposure to the world, and the chamber to which the speaker retreats is both a physical room and a psychic space, the place where the rind of social performance is removed and the marrow of the actual self is allowed to emerge, not into light but into the particular darkness of the vault, where grit, the residue of friction, the fine particles of abrasion that the world deposits upon the surfaces it wears, clamps grace, holds it in place, prevents it from escaping. Grace is not free here. It is restrained, secured, locked down by the very substance that ought to be its opposite. The grit and the grace are not enemies but collaborators, and the collaboration is the poem’s most original insight.

On Style and Register

The register is archaic but subordinated to a diction that is predominantly physical, tactile, geological. “Crag”, “rasped”, “spume”, “rind”, “scrap”, “marrow”, “exhume”, “coil”, “vaults”, “grit”, “clamps”: these are words of substance and of texture, words that can be felt in the mouth as well as heard, and the poem’s sonic surface is as abrasive as the landscape it describes. There is nothing smooth here. Every consonant cluster resists the tongue. “Crag rasped” is a sequence of sounds that the voice must work to produce, the hard “g” colliding with the “r” of “rasped” and the sibilant of the following syllable, and the work of production is itself the subject: the poem sounds like what it means, which is the oldest and most reliable test of prosodic competence.

“Let the rind unlace” is the quatrain’s most unexpected image. Rind, the tough outer skin of a fruit or a cheese, the protective layer that preserves the softer substance within, is given the verb “unlace”, which belongs to the vocabulary of clothing, of corsetry, of the deliberate and sequential loosening of a thing that has been bound. The combination produces an image that is simultaneously organic and sartorial: the speaker’s outer self is a rind that has been laced shut, tied tight for the purposes of the day, and the return to the chamber is the occasion of its unlacing, its controlled release. “Let” is important: the rind is not torn off, not ripped away, but let to unlace, permitted, the agency belonging to the rind itself rather than to the speaker, as though the outer layer has its own volition and its own relief at being allowed to open.

“Let the marrow exhume” continues the pattern of delegated agency: the marrow exhumes itself, is permitted to emerge from burial, to rise from the grave of the day’s concealment. “Exhume” is a word of considerable weight, belonging to the forensic and the funereal, and its application to the marrow, the innermost and most vital substance, produces a paradox: the most alive thing in the body is being treated as though it were dead, as though it had been buried, as though the act of living in the world were itself a form of interment from which one must be disinterred each evening. The paradox is not resolved. It is stated and left, which is the correct treatment.

“To coil in the vaults where the grit clamps grace” is the quatrain’s densest line and its last. “Coil” is the verb of the serpent, of the spring, of the rope, of the thing that withdraws into a circular compression of itself, and the speaker coils in the vaults, in the arched and darkened spaces beneath the surface, where grit clamps grace. I have already noted the originality of this final image, but I wish to add that the verb “clamps” is precisely right. To clamp is to hold by force, by pressure, by the application of a mechanical grip that is not gentle and does not pretend to be. Grace is not nurtured here, not cultivated, not invited. It is clamped. It is held in place by the grit that surrounds it, the coarse particles of endurance that press upon it from all sides and prevent it from dispersing. This is not a comforting image. It is an image of grace under duress, grace as a thing that would escape if it could but is prevented by the grip of the material that contains it, and the material is grit, is friction, is the residue of the day’s abrasion, and the abrasion is what holds the grace, and without the abrasion the grace would be lost. The poem’s theology, if theology it be, is one of grace preserved by suffering, which is not a novel position but is here expressed with an originality of image that makes it feel discovered rather than inherited.

On Technique and Metre

The quatrain is written in a metre that is broadly iambic pentameter, though the pentameter is handled with a muscularity that admits frequent spondaic substitution and that treats regularity as a point of departure rather than a destination.

“With the temper of the crag rasped by the spume” opens with an anapaestic foot, “with the TEM-“, that gives the line an initial momentum before the heavier stresses of “crag rasped” bring it to a near-halt. The spondee “crag rasped” is the line’s gravitational centre, two consecutive heavy stresses that force the voice to slow and to labour, and the labour is mimetic: the crag is being rasped, worn down, and the voice is being worn down with it, forced through a consonant cluster that resists fluency. “By the spume” releases the line into a lighter, more open sound, the bilabial “sp” and the long vowel of “spume” providing a contrast to the preceding hardness that is almost a relief, a momentary spray of lightness before the next line’s renewed compression.

“I drag to me chamber, let the rind unlace” is metrically more regular, and the regularity is meaningful: the dragging to the chamber is a habitual action, a nightly ritual, and the metre settles into the routine of it. “Let the rind unlace” is iambic and flowing, the unlacing enacted in the smoothness of the prosody, the line literally loosening as the rind loosens.

“I strip off the scrap, let the marrow exhume” introduces a trochaic substitution on “strip off” that creates a sense of decisive action, the stress falling on the first syllable of each word with the force of a hand removing a garment. “Let the marrow exhume” returns to a more flowing rhythm, the trisyllable “marrow” and the disyllable “exhume” creating a gentler cadence that mirrors the more delicate operation of allowing the inner self to emerge.

“To coil in the vaults where the grit clamps grace” is the most metrically compressed line. “Grit clamps grace” is three consecutive monosyllabic stresses, a spondaic cluster of almost brutal density, and the density is the poem’s final statement made in pure sound: the grit, the clamping, the grace, all pressed together in a space so tight that the words can barely breathe, and the inability to breathe is the condition of grace under pressure, of the essential held in place by the abrasive.

On Rhyme

The scheme is ABAB. “Spume” and “exhume” is a full rhyme and an excellent one. The sea spray that erodes the crag is answered by the exhumation of the marrow, and the rhyme connects the external abrasion with the internal excavation, the wearing away of the surface with the uncovering of the core. The two processes are sonically identical, which tells us they are structurally related: the world wears the speaker down, and the wearing down is what makes the uncovering possible, and the rhyme binds the destruction to the revelation in a single sound.

“Unlace” and “grace” is the quatrain’s finest rhyme, and I say this with the confidence of a man who has examined a great many rhymes and has learned to distinguish between those that merely sound alike and those that think alike. To unlace is to open, to release, to permit the bound thing to emerge. Grace is the thing that emerges, or rather the thing that is found waiting in the vaults after the unlacing has been completed. The rhyme traces a causal arc from the act of opening to the thing that is found within, from the removal of the rind to the discovery of what the rind was protecting, and the arc is completed in a single phonetic gesture, the long “a” and the terminal sibilant of “unlace” finding their echo in “grace” with an inevitability that is both sonic and logical. When one unlaces, one finds grace. The rhyme says so, and the rhyme, in this instance, is right.

On Impressions

This is a quatrain of four lines that contains within it a complete phenomenology of retreat, a description of the nightly withdrawal from the world that is at once physical, psychological, and, in its final image, theological. The compression is extreme, and the extremity is justified by the intensity of the imagery, which is amongst the most original and the most physically immediate that I have encountered from this author.

The quatrain’s single most remarkable quality is its refusal of comfort. The chamber is not a refuge. The vault is not a sanctuary. The coiling is not rest. The grace is not free. Every element of the retreat is presented in terms of hardness, of pressure, of the abrasive and the geological, and the comfort, if comfort there be, is the comfort of the crag itself, which is to say the comfort of a thing that has been eroded to its essential shape and that stands, not because it has been preserved but because it has been reduced to the point where there is nothing left to remove. The speaker is not a man who has retreated to safety. He is a man who has been rasped to the marrow and who coils in the vault not because the vault is warm but because the vault is all that remains, and in it, clamped by grit, held in place by the residue of the day’s friction, there is grace, and the grace is sufficient, not because it is abundant but because it is clamped, and the clamping is what makes it grace, for grace that is freely available is merely air, and grace that must be held by force is the only grace that matters.

I find no word in this quatrain that could be substituted without loss. I find no image that is decorative rather than structural. I find no metrical choice that is not in service of the meaning. These are the conditions of a achieved poem, and they are met here without exception.

I commend it without reservation.

Marco Delrio