And I, who as a grown man yearned,
To sit on leather, with pens of bone,
‘Round office walls, where thoughts are churned,
Perhaps an observatory to call my own.
I, who sought to unearth the past,
To rewrite it in the light of thought,
Amidst old teachers, wisdom amassed;
I, who as a man, wished naught
But to be a man—yet what is that,
In this very moment when I write,
If my voice still quivers at your sight,
If to seem mature remains my plight,
If still I linger, empty, lost. I…
I, who wished to grow and age,
And see a street bear my name at last,
Yet stand at the sill, in silent rage,
Envying those already dead.

Marco Delrio

As a Grown Man

Thoughts – by E. Ashcroft

On Meaning and Context

The poem is a confession of failed adulthood, or more precisely, a confession that adulthood itself was never the thing possessed but always the thing performed, and that the performance has collapsed, or is collapsing, in the very act of being examined. The speaker catalogues what he yearned for as a grown man: leather chairs, pens of bone, office walls, an observatory, the unearthing of the past, the company of old teachers. These are the furnishings of a particular fantasy of masculine intellectual maturity, the study, the desk, the accumulated wisdom, the gravitas of the scholar surrounded by his instruments. And the catalogue is immediately undermined by the poem’s central admission: that none of it has been achieved in substance, only in posture, and that the posture is failing, and that beneath the posture there is nothing but the quivering voice and the empty lingering of a man who wished to be a man and found that the wishing was the closest he could come.

The narrative arc is one of progressive collapse. The poem opens with the grand anaphoric “I, who”, the construction of self-definition, the rhetorical posture of a man declaring his credentials. But each declaration is a declaration of desire rather than of accomplishment: “yearned”, “sought”, “wished.” The speaker did not sit on leather. He yearned to. He did not unearth the past. He sought to. He did not become a man. He wished to. The gap between the verb of aspiration and the verb of achievement is the poem’s entire subject, and the poem widens that gap with each stanza until, in the final lines, the gap has become an abyss, and the speaker stands at the sill, envying the dead.

The final image is the poem’s most dangerous and its most honest. To envy the dead is not to wish for death, which would be melodrama, but to envy the completion that death represents, the fact that the dead have finished, that they have become what they were going to become, that the question of what they were is no longer open, whereas the speaker’s question remains unanswered and, he suspects, unanswerable. The dead have the one thing he lacks: finality. They are no longer performing. They are no longer yearning. They are no longer standing at sills in silent rage, wondering whether the street will ever bear their name. They are done, and the doneness is what he envies, not the dying.

On Style and Register

The register is contemporary, with only minimal archaic touches. “Naught” and “‘round” are the sole concessions to the older diction, and their isolation within an otherwise modern idiom gives them the quality of residual habits, traces of a formality the speaker aspires to but cannot sustain, much as he aspires to the leather chair and the pens of bone and cannot sustain those either. The register, in other words, mirrors the content: the speaker reaches for elevation and falls back into the plain.

The anaphoric “I, who” is the poem’s most conspicuous rhetorical device, and it deserves careful examination. The construction is borrowed from the rhetoric of the epitaph, of the public monument, of the inscription that declareth who a man was and what he did. “I, who conquered.” “I, who built.” “I, who served.” But the speaker’s “I, who” is followed not by accomplishments but by longings, not by deeds but by wishes, and the gap between the monumental form and the insufficient content is the poem’s primary source of irony. The speaker is writing his own epitaph in advance, and the epitaph has nothing to inscribe, and the nothing is what the poem is about.

“Perhaps an observatory to call my own” is a line of considerable tenderness, and the tenderness resides in “perhaps”, a word that introduces uncertainty into what is already a fantasy. The speaker does not even commit fully to his own daydream. The leather is definite. The pens are definite. The office walls are definite. But the observatory is hedged, qualified, offered with the diffidence of a man who suspects he is asking for too much. The observatory is the dream’s most extravagant element, the place from which one observes the universe, and the speaker cannot quite bring himself to claim it without the protective “perhaps”, as though the claiming might jinx the having, or as though the having were so far beyond possibility that even the desiring must be conducted with caution.

“If my voice still quivers at your sight” is the poem’s most exposed line. The archaic “thou” is absent here: the addressed figure is “you”, and the shift from the poem’s self-directed meditation to this sudden, direct, second-person admission produces a rupture in the poem’s texture that is both technically disorienting and emotionally devastating. The speaker has been talking about himself, constructing his litany of failed aspirations, and suddenly there is a “you”, and the “you” is the cause of the quivering, and the quivering is the evidence that all the leather and the bone and the observatory are irrelevant, because the body betrays the performance, and the body’s betrayal is the truth the poem has been circling.

On Technique and Metre

The poem is written in a metre that resists easy classification, and the resistance is, I think, both a strength and a weakness, depending on the passage. The lines vary between tetrameter and pentameter with an irregularity that gives the poem a conversational quality, the rhythm of a man thinking aloud rather than composing, and the thinking-aloud quality suits the material, which is itself a form of thinking aloud, a self-examination conducted not from a position of retrospective clarity but from within the confusion it describes.

“And I, who as a grown man yearned” opens in tetrameter with a confidence that the subsequent lines do not entirely maintain. “To sit on leather, with pens of bone” is clean tetrameter. “‘Round office walls, where thoughts are churned” is tetrameter. “Perhaps an observatory to call my own” is pentameter, and the expansion is meaningful: the observatory requires more room, more syllables, more line, as the dream requires more ambition, more reach, more “perhaps.”

The middle section, where the “I, who” construction accumulates, produces a rhythmic intensification that is well managed. “I, who sought to unearth the past, / to rewrite it in the light of thought, / amidst old teachers, wisdom amassed”: the three lines build in syntactic complexity and rhythmic weight, and the weight is the weight of the aspiration itself, growing heavier with each clause, accumulating until the line “I, who as a man, wished naught / but to be a man” collapses the entire construction into a tautology, the man who wished to be a man, and the tautology is the poem’s structural climax, the point at which the aspiration reveals itself to be circular, the goal identical to the starting point, the wish for manhood indistinguishable from the condition of already being, technically, a man.

The final lines present the greatest metrical challenge. “If still I linger, empty, lost. I…” The ellipsis after “I” is a typographical silence, a caesura that is also a collapse, the pronoun left hanging without its predicate, the self without its definition. The metre breaks here, and the breaking is the poem’s most honest moment, the point at which the formal apparatus that has been sustaining the speaker’s self-presentation gives way and leaves only the pronoun, the bare and unsupported “I”, which is the smallest possible unit of identity and which, in this context, is also the largest, for it contains everything the poem has been unable to say.

“Yet stand at the sill, in silent rage, / envying those already dead” closes the poem with a metrical settling that is almost too controlled for the content it delivers. The final line is a trimeter, shorter than anything that has preceded it, and the brevity is effective: the poem has been expanding and contracting irregularly throughout, and the final contraction, the shortening of the line to its minimum, enacts the diminishment of the self, the shrinking of the grand “I, who” to the small figure at the window, looking out, envying the completed.

On Rhyme

The scheme is irregular, and the irregularity requires comment, for it is either a deliberate formal enactment of the poem’s thematic disorder or an insufficiency of structural planning, and the distinction matters.

The first four lines rhyme ABAB: “yearned” / “bone” / “churned” / “own.” This is clean and establishes an expectation. The next four lines shift to something less determinate: “past” / “thought” / “amassed” / “naught.” “Past” and “amassed” rhyme. “Thought” and “naught” rhyme. The scheme is still ABAB, but the rhymes are less immediately audible, the polysyllabic “amassed” softening the connection with the monosyllabic “past.”

The poem then enters its most metrically and formally unstable passage. “Write” / “sight” / “plight” / “I” presents three consecutive rhymes on the same sound followed by a non-rhyme, a structural collapse that mirrors the speaker’s collapse. The triple rhyme creates an insistence, an almost desperate repetition of the same sound, as though the speaker were clinging to the one sonic certainty available to him, the “ight” sound, the sound of light and sight and night and plight, and then the fourth line refuses to rhyme, offering only “I”, a monosyllable that answers nothing and completes nothing and stands alone, as the speaker stands alone.

“Age” / “last” / “rage” / “dead” in the final lines presents a similar irregularity. “Age” and “rage” rhyme. “Last” and “dead” do not. The poem’s formal contract has been broken, and the breaking is, I believe, intentional: a poem about the failure to become what one wished to become cannot end with the satisfaction of a completed rhyme scheme, for the completion would be a formal achievement that contradicts the content of failure. The poem must end broken, as the speaker is broken, and the unrhymed “dead” in the final position is the poem’s last and most decisive formal choice, a word that answers nothing, that resolves nothing, that simply sits at the end of the line and the end of the poem with the finality that the speaker envies and cannot achieve.

On Impressions

This is a poem that risks a great deal and does not always succeed, and the places where it does not succeed are the places where it succeeds most interestingly, which is a paradox I shall not apologise for, since the poem itself is constructed entirely of paradoxes and has therefore earned the right to be discussed in paradoxical terms.

The poem’s greatest strength is its structural mimicry: the form enacts the content with a consistency that extends from the metre to the rhyme to the typography. The expanding and contracting lines mirror the expanding and contracting ambition. The triple rhyme followed by the collapse mirrors the accumulation of aspiration followed by the admission of failure. The bare “I” on its own, followed by the ellipsis, mirrors the self stripped of all its predicates.

The poem’s greatest weakness is the line “perhaps an observatory to call my own”, which is, as I have noted, tender and effective in its content but metrically incongruent with the surrounding lines. The shift from tetrameter to pentameter is not sufficiently prepared, and the reader experiences a momentary stumble that the line’s content does not entirely justify. The observatory is the poem’s most extravagant image, and extravagant images require either metrical regularity to ground them or metrical disruption so extreme that it signals its own significance. This line achieves neither: it is simply longer than its neighbours, and the length reads as accidental rather than as strategic.

The poem’s most remarkable achievement is its ending. To close a poem with the word “dead” is a risk that few poets would take, for the word carries a weight that can crush everything that precedes it if the preceding material is not strong enough to bear it. Here, the material is strong enough, barely, and the “barely” is part of the effect, for the poem is about the barely, the almost, the not-quite, the man who wished to be a man and was, barely, one, and who stands at the sill and envies those who have finished the performance he cannot finish and cannot abandon.

I commend it, with the reservation that the poem’s formal irregularities, while largely productive, would benefit in two or three places from the attention of a poet who knows, as this poet demonstrably knows, the difference between the deliberate and the accidental, and who might, on revision, make the distinction clearer. The content does not require revision. The form, in places, does. But the places are few, and the poem, as a whole, stands, at the sill, in silent rage, and the standing is sufficient.