A poem which treats romantic love as the contradictory phenomenon it mostly is, Fruition, by the young Welsh poet Rhian Edwards, displays a 21st-century impatience with lyric closure. For all its song-like rhythm, the talk is tough, angry, humorous, and questioning.
So forget the faint Byronic echo ("When we two parted / In silence and tears"). Nostalgia is far from the initial mood. The speaker, without regret, is confronting the moment in a relationship when enough is enough: "Ripe is the night/ to sever our hips." The subject-predicate inversion adds dramatic pitch and emphasises the paradox. Ripeness suggests fulfilment, sexuality, the "cherry lips" of traditional erotic trope. What has come to fruition, here, is severance.
The conventional metaphor of lovers joined at the hip (which sex makes nearly literal) underlies a sensation of flesh parted by steel. And yet, after the further metallic, clicking consonants of "locked" and "unbuckle," and their unforgiving mechanical associations, the word "kiss" is a soft surprise, because the plosive of the more obvious rhyme-word, "lips", has been hovering in the reader's expectations. Though shot through with assonance, the poem nearly always dodges straightforward rhyme ("covers"/ "lovers" being the exception), just as it dodges emotional certainty.
"Ripe is the night" becomes the demonstrative "ripe is this night" (my italics) in the next stanza, emphasising the speaker's now-or-never mood. In the ensuing lines we're led to believe that the lovers may harbour guilty secrets of infidelity ("come clean and confess") but this is a tease. It's "the fruition of boredom" which needs to be admitted, and perhaps it's a harder admission than infidelity, since it's intrinsic: "the equation of us".
The third stanza marks a decided turn. "Lips re-acquaint" as if the lovers were impelled together by magnetic forces. Nostalgia lives, after all; or, at least, the time has come "to talk in nostalgias", the odd but effective plural suggesting a process as strange and disconcerting and self-hypnotic as "speaking in tongues".
The rhythmic physicality of the language in stanza 3 suggest real-time love-making, although, as in all the stanzas, the action is only putative. The sounds in the last four lines become particularly evocative and lightly alliterative, with the unromantic "sandwiched" nicely echoed by the expressive Welsh word "cwtched".
The "throne" in the last line denotes the self-aggrandisement of lovers when they consider themselves fated; "meant-to-be lovers" as the poem neatly puts it. Such certainty is not so easily given up.
In the next stanza, the turn seems complete. The assertions have become a question, and severance is on hold. "Will the night ever ripen/ to slice us in two?" seems to be the rhetorical question which invites a negative answer. As in nursery rhyme or folk song, such a question is answered with a series of conditions: "When the kisses core hollow/ and the mattress sags sallow," etc. These eventualities may not be at all unlikely, but things are not yet at such a pass. A mood of tenderness dawns in the last two lines, with "the sleep of your face". The image of the halo as crown reprises the image of the throne, and the romantic idea of love as elevation.
The last stanza seems to twist the knife again. The repeating line comes back in the future tense, now sounding like an angry threat: "Ripe will that night be …" The sagging, hollowing, dethroning processes of the previous stanza are still in the future, but when they do occur, the relationship will end. "Ripe" morphs into "rip" and "rip up that twinning" recalls the earlier image of hip-joined lovers violently severed. There's a metaphysical touch of paradox in the notion of becoming "whole as a half" but, although wholeness is obviously desirable, the poem doesn't quite celebrate the potentiality. It retains ambivalence.
The last word of the whole poem, significantly, is "tedium" and the pairing of "love and its tedium" raises a question from the poem's psychological hinterland. "Tedium," note, is a more desperate condition than the "boredom" mentioned in line 9, being redolent of exhaustion as well as routine (from the Latin, taedere, to weary). What if love and tedium are finally inextricable?
Fruition, despite its light, jaunty, dactylic rhythms, its inventive word play, its warm physicality and emotional knife-throwing, reveals a more complex dimension. Even if love involves tedium, its destruction will certainly not be bloodless. The question is: will the conjectured dark "fruition" be denied or deferred? The poem's very structure may suggest a cycle of repulsion and attraction that's inescapable. But nothing is certain, and the poem is all the richer for leaving us in life-like uncertainty.
Fruition comes from Rhian Edwards's adventurous debut collection, Clueless Dogs, recently published by Seren. See here for details of Rhian's future readings, including the London launch of her book at the Savoy Tup, 26 Jun, 7.30pm. She will also be teaching a poets' performance workshop, Only Poetry Aloud, at Morley College from 10-12 July.
Fruition
Ripe is the night
to sever our hips,
to unfurl the locked fingers
and unbuckle the kiss.
Ripe is this night
to come clean and confess,
to unshoulder the burden,
admit we want more than
this fruition of boredom,
the equation of us.
Ripe is the night
to let lips re-acquaint,
to talk in nostalgias,
exhuming I love you's,
sandwiched in sheets
and cwtched under covers,
resuming our throne
as the meant-to-be lovers.
Will the night ever ripen
to slice us in two?
When the kisses core hollow
and the mattress sags sallow,
when the sleep of your face
is decrowned of a halo.
Ripe will that night be
to rip up the twinning
and become whole as a half,
leaving love and its tedium.