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In the given passages, “Erstwhile”, “Reality” and the final three stanzas of “In Light and Darkness”, Chris
Wallace Crabbe explores the fundamental transience of life and the natural world, and interrogates the
ability of various representational mediums – including language itself – to adequately capture the
reality of human experience.
The selected passage from “In Light and Darkness” opens with an Edenic description of the narrator as a
“child” in a “garden where time itself was congealing” – immediately presenting the reader with imagery
that anthologises childhood innocence, and the childlike, prelapsarian view of the world as unchanging,
imperishable and immortal. Indeed, Wallace-Crabbe’s use of playful alliteration (seen in “child in a chill
mountain morning” and “clear crystalline standards”) further evokes this feeling of juvenile naivety,
working to reinforce the whimsical image of a child who takes “no account of thaw”. However, the latter
half of this stanza subverts this prelapsarian worldview in its depiction of the narrator’s loss of this
“notion… of clear crystalline standards”, illustrating the incessance and inevitability of deliquescence
and decay in nature through its visceral, marred description of “the brown receding slush” – a feeling of
deliquescence and melting that is reinforced by the combination of sibilance and liquid consonants. This
imagery works to create a metaphor that is demonstrative of the fundamental mutability of nature, and
the inevitability of decay, entropy and flux – described by the poet in the second stanza as “tireless”.
Indeed, the frank nature of the fragmented, declarative sentence “But noon came on.” is indicative of
the finality and unavoidability of the passage of time – something that is further suggested by the
capitalization of “But” and the use of terminal caesura.
In the second stanza of the passage, Wallace-Crabbe conducts a further exploration of the idea of
ephemerality and mutability, shifting his gaze to the inadequacy of photographs and other hollow
modes of representation in capturing the Heraclitean nature of lived experience and the natural world, a
sentiment that is instantiated in the indented line “a photograph leaves out living” and which is echoed
as a central concern in “Erstwhile” (passage 3). The poet sets up an image of a photograph as something
which is purely representational and altogether “too steady for reverence”, in which life’s “maze of
motion” is diminished to a “stiff and waxy” “arabesque” that fails to capture the fragile and fleeting
nature of life.
While the narrator of “In Light and Darkness” seems to be able to make peace with the perpetual
transience of life and the irretrievability of the past (although its neat rhyme may suggest a certain
artificiality about the poem’s conclusion, the final heroic couplet at the end of the piece implies some
kind of conclusiveness, finality and resolution), “Erstwhile” sees Wallace-Crabbe struggle to come to
terms with this notion of mortality and the passage of time – a tonal shift that can be attributed to the
sudden death of his son. While the narrator of “In Light and Darkness” holds a respect for the ephemeral
nature of human life (he describes “the living, dead and dying” as “poised in their dance”), the narrator
of “Erstwhile” continually struggles to reconcile himself to the loss of his “erstwhile son” – the repeated
shifting between present and past tense combined with faltering dropped lines, enjambment and active
revisionism mimetically mirror the poet’s unsuccessful attempts to formalize his grief and illustrate his
internal struggle locate his son in time. Throughout the poem, the narrator’s son seems to repeatedly
slip between the past and the present, the blurred diectics acting perhaps to establish the narrator’s
inability to understand and accept his son’s transition from living to dead. Indeed, the prolific
juxtaposition of the active, present participle (“riding a horse into the scrub”, “reading out of doors”)
and the passive past tense (“freckled” “both times t-shirted”) when describing the son perhaps
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illustrates the way he is (at least to his father) fugitive in time – a sentiment that is further instantiated
in the narrator’s desperate, plaintive questioning, “Where? Where are you?”
Despite his desperate attempts to recapture his “erstwhile son”, the narrator seems only to be able to
access his son through various kinds of representational mediums – hollow modes of representation
such as phone calls and photographs – that are incapable of truly capturing his son’s essence. Drawing
parallels with the way “a photograph leaves out living” in “In Light and Darkness”, the “little
photographs” are portrayed as being merely hollow reflections of the narrator’s son – ultimately
functioning as imperfect and inadequate mediums between the past and the present, the diminutive
connotations of “little” and the grotesque paronomasia of “remains” serving only as a poignant indicator
of the narrator’s diminishment of his son to hollow, material objects and pathetic mementos. The motif
of the phone call perhaps serves a similar function – acting as another type of representational medium
through which the narrator tries to reach his son, but which only creates a greater disconnect between
himself and his son’s “former girlfriend”, whose status as a “fetch” renders his interlocuter herself a
mere hollow apparition or double of his son. The ironic paradox of the line “we were sad together/ over
the phone” illustrates this disconnect, the enjambment working to emphasise the oxymoronic concept
of being “together” over the phone.
Wallace-Crabbe’s epistemological interest in the limitations and constraints of language also emerges as
a central concern throughout “Erstwhile”. The poem is preoccupied with the incommunicability of the
subjective human experience of grief and loss and the inadequacy of language as a tool to do so,
something that can be observed in the narrator’s desperate yet unsuccessful attempts at formalizing his
grief through language. The poet’s use of anaphora in the opening lines of the poem “your girlfriend
rang me up today, your former girlfriend,” and the hesitant caesura created by the frequent commas act
to mimetically illustrate the narrator’s internal struggle to delineate his grief through language, the
narrator’s cyclical revisionism (“no, that isn’t right”) reflecting his inability to define his son’s girlfriend.
Indeed, despite the poet’s intentions to clarify and untangle the language by redefining the “girlfriend”,
the language he uses only becomes more confused with each attempt – “the present friend of all that
once was you” being awkward and convoluted in syntax. In what can be seen as a further attempt to
capture his son through language, Wallace-Crabbe desperately shifts to a demotic, colloquial register
when describing what remains of his son in the “little photographs”. The poet’s use of intimate
language, the present participle, neologism and anthimeria (“t-shirted”) strives perhaps for immediacy
or honesty in its unadornment. However, these attempts at frankness are ultimately unsuccessful as the
stanza closes with the mimetic dropped line “my erstwhile son” – a painful and resigned reversion back
to an antiquated, archaic register. Similarly, the disruptive catachresis and word choice of the
fragmented “Hence.” (a word that usually precedes some kind of conclusion) further implies how he
“can never come to grasp” the ultimate meaning of his son’s death, the jerky movement created by the
terminal caesura further evoking the poet’s struggle to anthologise and adequately formalize his grief
through language. Ultimately, language is rendered no more effective than the “little photographs” at
recapturing his son.
A similar struggle with the limitations of language is echoed in the poem “Reality” (passage 2), in which
Wallace-Crabbe, as in “Erstwhile”, seems to interrogate language and its function as a medium between
the human world and the material world, the narrator’s wish to “capture [his father] entire” through
language mirroring the way his father seeks to “capture” the fish in the poem. Indeed, the use of the
wistful adverb “yearningly” in the opening stanza evokes the impossibility of reconciliation and the way
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the narrator grapples with the limitations of language in an attempt to capture the “reality” of lived
experience. In a similar way to “Erstwhile”, Wallace-Crabbe manipulates rhythm and meter throughout
the poem in order to mimetically reflect the events of the poem as he recounts them – when describing
the boat as “bobbing lightly”, the poet simultaneously employs frequent caesura and asyndeton to
mimic this feeling of “bobbing” for the reader. This mimesis is recurrent throughout the poem – the
halting pause of the dropped line in the third stanza reflects the jerky “coughing” of the motor, just as
Wallace-Crabbe’s introduction of enjambment and cessation of caesura in the fourth stanza causes the
poem to accelerate just as the dinghy “takes off”. The tendency of Wallace-Crabbe’s poetry to ‘perform
itself’ through mimesis reflects the poet’s epistemological interest in the mimetic functions of language,
while, more specifically, also reflecting the extent of the narrator’s attempts to manipulate language in
order to capture the true essence of reality. However, the piece’s closing description of the “tides of
memory” as “dumb” – that is, unable to express itself using words – indicates the way language
ultimately fails to function as an adequate medium between the world of memory and reality, further
speaking to the poet’s preoccupation with the incommunicability of human experience. The poem
concludes with “let you go”, an apt progression from the previous line that leaves the reader with a
sense that something has evaded capture, and which ultimately anthologises the impossibility of the
reconciliation of memory and reality. However, while the ending line of “Erstwhile” (“like never being
well”) may function similarly, the contrast between “let you go” and the narrator’s initial “yearning… to
capture you entire” at the beginning of the poem perhaps suggests that he has come to accept the
inadequacy of language in recreating the actuality of human experience, while the lamenting, desolate
ending of Erstwhile leaves the reader with a feeling of irreconcilable loss and emptiness.