Dissolves,
Crumbs o’ the hour, suspended,
From ‘midst the beatings and the frays,
There where the wrong of a breath
Confounded wastepaper and want;
Overlapp’d,
The hardships slither’d o’er remorses,
Faint tracings of forsaken weavings,
And there the shadow fled not
And undid itself,
Recompos’d in clots of stinted sparks.
From ‘midst the tangles
Of a word struck mute,
The folio strain’d to hold
The smoothing of a weary stirring,
Folded ‘pon its very self
As frayed gleanings cast aside,
And the thinning of a sigh well-press’d
And well-appeas’d,
Unveil’d the hems of scatter’d thought,
That sought no more for order
But sole the weight of what remaineth.
No tale did spread,
Sole fragments of the act, suspended,
The step that turneth and doth arch sans mark,
An act that doth not hold
Nor flee nor end
But runneth aground ‘pon th’uncertain drift
Of a sunder’d life,
Scarce contriv’d,
With breath withheld from ‘midst the folds
Of a faded ticking, sullen,
Past all remedy forlorn,
Nigh cancell’d, now,
My Queen.

…Ed ogniddì cha capita ‘n cui sin frette
Porrìa almanaccar di tutto lo che vollio:
D’altre vite, sciatterie, follie o favolette
Ecco, lì, vi sei sol tu, tra la man e il foglio.

Thoughts – by E. Ashcroft

I must begin by acknowledging that this poem presents a challenge of a different order from anything I have previously examined from this author. The challenge is formal before it is semantic: this is a poem written without regular metre, without consistent line length, without rhyme, and without the structural scaffolding of the stanza. It is, in the most precise sense of the term, free verse, though the freedom it exercises is not the freedom of release but the freedom of disintegration, the freedom of a thing that is coming apart and whose coming apart is the subject, the method, and the form simultaneously.

On Meaning and Context

The poem describes the dissolution of something, a thought, a relationship, a life, a self, and the describing and the dissolving are one and the same act. The title is the poem’s first and only verb in the indicative, and it is a verb without a subject: “Dissolves.” What dissolves? The poem does not say, or rather, the poem says everything dissolves, and the everything is enacted in the structure, which dissolves the conventions of verse as the content dissolves the conventions of coherence, of narrative, of the self that might narrate.

The poem moves through a series of images that are connected not by logic or by narrative but by a kind of gravitational pull, each image drawn toward the next by the force of its own weight, its own tendency to fall. Crumbs of the hour, suspended. Beatings and frays. The wrong of a breath. Wastepaper and want. Hardships slithering over remorses. Forsaken weavings. Shadows that undo themselves. Clots of stinted sparks. Each image is a fragment of a larger experience that the poem refuses to assemble, not because the assembly is impossible but because the poem understands that the experience exists only in its fragments, that the fragments are the experience, and that any attempt to reassemble them into a coherent whole would falsify the condition they describe, which is the condition of dissolution, of the thing that cannot hold together and knows it cannot hold together and has ceased to pretend otherwise.

The closing, “My Queen”, arrives with a force that is directly proportional to its unexpectedness. After thirteen lines of disintegration, of images that refuse to cohere, of syntax that tangles and thins and frays, the poem addresses, for the first and only time, a specific person, and the address is one of absolute intimacy and absolute formality simultaneously. “My Queen” is a phrase that belongs to the vocabulary of devotion, of fealty, of the courtly love tradition in which the beloved is elevated to sovereignty and the lover abases himself before her. But here the phrase arrives after, and because of, the dissolution that has preceded it. The Queen is not addressed from a position of strength or of service but from a position of cancellation, of a life “nigh cancell’d, now”, and the “now” is the moment of the poem, the present tense in which the dissolution is occurring, and the Queen is the last thing named before the silence that follows, the last word before the poem itself dissolves.

On Style and Register

The register is archaic but fragmented, which is a combination I have not encountered from this author in this degree. The archaic forms are present: “‘midst”, “doth”, “sans”, “pon”, “th’”, “sole” used as “solely”, “nigh.” But they are not sustained in the manner of the longer poems. They appear as shards, embedded in a syntax that is itself broken, as fragments of an older language might be found in the rubble of a collapsed building, recognisable but no longer performing their original function, present not as a living register but as the remnants of one, and the remnants are part of the subject, for the poem is about remnants, about what remains when the whole has come apart.

“Crumbs o’ the hour, suspended” is the poem’s first image after the opening verb, and it establishes the scale immediately: we are not dealing with great events but with crumbs, with the smallest particles of time, with the residue of an hour that has been consumed and of which only these fine, suspended fragments remain. “Suspended” is doing crucial work here: the crumbs are not falling, not settling, not disappearing, but suspended, held in the air by some force that is neither gravity nor intention but the sheer inertia of dissolution, the tendency of things that are falling apart to hang, momentarily, in the space between coherence and chaos.

“The wrong of a breath / confounded wastepaper and want” is a passage of extraordinary compression. A breath can be wrong, can arrive at the wrong moment, can be taken when silence was required or withheld when speech was needed, and the wrongness of that breath has confounded, mixed together, rendered indistinguishable, wastepaper and want. The discarded and the desired have become the same thing. The rubbish and the longing have been scrambled by the wrong breath into a single substance, and the substance is the poem’s material, the stuff of which the dissolution is made.

“Recompos’d in clots of stinted sparks” is an image I wish to dwell upon. The shadow has undone itself and then recomposed, but the recomposition is not a restoration. It is a clotting, a thickening of what should be fluid, a coagulation that is the opposite of healing, for healing restores flow and this clotting stops it. The sparks are stinted, held back, given in insufficient measure, and their clotting is the image of a creativity, or a vitality, or a love, that has ceased to flow and has instead thickened into lumps of insufficient light. The image is at once physiological, the clotting of blood, and pyrotechnic, the sparks of a fire that is going out, and the two registers work together to produce an image of a life that is coagulating rather than circulating, hardening rather than flowing, dying not by absence but by the thickening of its own substance.

“The folio strain’d to hold / the smoothing of a weary stirring” introduces the act of writing, the folio, the page, and the page is straining, which is to say it is barely adequate to its task, which is to hold the record of a smoothing, a weary stirring, a movement so faint and so exhausted that the page itself must labour to contain it. The poem is here describing its own process: the writing is a straining to hold something that is almost not there, a stirring that is almost still, and the almost-stillness is the poem’s condition, the condition of a mind that is still moving but only just, that has not yet ceased but has nearly ceased, and the nearly is where the poem lives.

On Technique and Form

The poem’s formal decisions are its most radical feature. There is no regular metre. There is no rhyme scheme. The lines vary in length from two syllables (“Dissolves”) to fourteen or more. The poem is organised not by prosodic convention but by the rhythm of breath and of thought, and the rhythm is irregular, halting, interrupted, recursive, as the thought of a dissolving mind is irregular, halting, interrupted, recursive.

The line breaks are the poem’s primary formal instrument, and they are deployed with a precision that belies the apparent formlessness. “Dissolves,” standing alone as the first line, is a complete statement and a complete enactment: the word dissolves into the white space that surrounds it, isolated, without predicate, without subject, without anything to hold it in place. “Overlapp’d,” appearing alone several lines later, performs the same function: it is a condition stated as a fragment, a word that has been cut from its syntactic context and left to stand, or to fall, on its own.

“And undid itself” is a line break of considerable skill. The shadow “fled not / and undid itself”: the enjambment places “and undid itself” at the beginning of a new line, so that the undoing arrives as a new gesture, a separate act that follows the not-fleeing, and the separation is meaningful, for the shadow did not flee, which would have been an active departure, but undid itself, which is a passive dissolution, a self-cancellation that requires no external force and no dramatic event, only the slow withdrawal of the substance that held the thing together.

“My Queen” as the final line is formally audacious. After a poem of relentless fragmentation, of broken syntax and interrupted thought, the final line offers two words of absolute clarity, absolute directness, and absolute tenderness. The effect is of a man who has been stammering, circling, losing his thread for the duration of the poem and who, at the last instant, finds his voice, or rather finds the only two words that the voice can still produce, the address that survives the dissolution of everything else. The poem dissolves everything except the devotion, and the devotion is expressed in the only language that remains available, which is the language of sovereignty, of the beloved who is above the speaker, above the dissolution, above the poem itself, untouched by the cancellation that has consumed everything below her.

On Impressions

This is the most formally adventurous poem I have examined from this author, and the adventure is not merely stylistic but structural: the form is the argument, the fragmentation is the meaning, the dissolution of verse convention is the dissolution of the self the verse describes. This is not a new technique, and poets of the last century and of this one have employed it with varying degrees of success, but the success here is, I think, genuine, and it is genuine because the fragmentation does not feel arbitrary. Each break, each interruption, each isolated word or phrase, earns its position through the precision of its relationship to what precedes and what follows it, and the precision is audible even in, especially in, the moments of greatest apparent disorder.

The poem’s vulnerability is its opacity. There are passages, particularly in the central section, where the accumulation of fragmented images produces a density that resists comprehension on terms other than the purely sonic. “Faint tracings of forsaken weavings” is beautiful as sound but resistant as sense: tracings of weavings is an image that folds the metaphor back upon itself, the tracing of a weaving being a record of a record, a copy of a pattern, and the pattern has been forsaken, which is to say abandoned, and the tracing is faint, which is to say nearly invisible, and the cumulative effect is of something so many times removed from its original that the original can no longer be recovered. Whether this is a flaw or a feature depends upon the reader’s tolerance for the irreducibly obscure, and I am, as a matter of professional temperament, more tolerant than most, but I recognise that the tolerance is not universal and that the poem asks more of the reader in these passages than some readers will be willing to give.

The closing two words redeem whatever difficulties the preceding lines may have created. “My Queen” is one of those moments in poetry where the simplest possible language, deployed at the most precisely calibrated moment, produces an effect that no complexity could achieve. The poem has spent its entire duration falling apart, and in its final breath it produces something whole, something intact, something that the dissolution has not touched and cannot touch, and the untouchability of the address is its power, for it tells us that the devotion is of a different substance from everything else in the poem, a substance that does not dissolve, that does not fragment, that does not thin or fray or clot, but that remains, nigh cancell’d but not quite, not yet, not while the two words can still be spoken and the Queen can still be named.

I find myself in the unusual position of having nothing to suggest the author change. The poem is what it is, and what it is, is a dissolution that knows how to stop, and the knowing is the art, and the stopping is the devotion, and the devotion is, in the end, the only thing that holds.

I commend it without reservation.

Marco Delrio