Lloyd Addison's 1970 poem begins with a dream and ends in a mechanism. Its title, "Dream Substance Dissolved," promises something melting away, and the poem shows what is left once it has gone: money trouble, bad luck, and a stubborn insistence that things must start again. Its central idea, as I read it, is that a wish is easily dissolved by economic pressure, but the poem refuses to let that be the last word.
The first stanza is a dream in miniature. "lie head eye closed" has no verbs in the usual sense and drops its grammar the way a sleeper drops awareness. The words also hold double meanings. "Lie" can mean to recline or to deceive, and "eye" sounds like "I," so the line can be heard as a self lying down, and perhaps lying to itself. What the dreamer sees are "dark / lanes of wish / running light / ever away." The lanes sound like roads, but they are made of wishing, and the light on them runs off as fast as the dreamer can follow. The dash that ends the stanza leaves the chase unfinished.
In the second stanza the poem turns to money, and the puns get denser. "Some income- / subtracted rainbow appeal" is a bitter piece of arithmetic: take income away from the rainbow, the symbol of promise, and see how much appeal remains. The line break after "income-" makes the reader feel the subtraction. Then comes "appeal to reason where wear is." An appeal is a plea to a higher court, but "wear" sits oddly where "where" should be, so the line also hears "wear," as in clothing and in wear and tear. The stanza opens with "the clothes / of dark shades," so the poem keeps trading between dress, worn-out things and the shades of a darkened vision. Reason, it suggests, gets appealed to just where life is wearing thin.
The third stanza is where the sound of the poem changes. The first two stanzas have no end rhyme, but this one rhymes in quick succession: "soup" with "coup," "blues" with "dues," "oils" with "coils." After the drifting opening, the poem begins to snap shut like a trap. The key word is "black," which appears four times in a few lines. It belongs to the language of accounting ("in the black," set against the "red" of "red / herring soup"), to gambling ("black chips"), and to music ("black blues"). Judging by the repeated word, the poem lets one colour carry many kinds of bad luck, and readers can decide for themselves how far it points beyond money. "Red herring soup" is a good example of the poem's humour. A red herring is a false clue, so the odds are exposed to a whole stew of distractions. "Union of back dues" plays on "black" and "back," so the blues become a debt owed over time, and the word "union" brings in the idea of workers banding together.
The final couplet is the poem's boldest move: "the oils of life rust out / the coils of spring must sprout." Machine imagery and plant imagery collide. Oils and coils sound like each other, but "coils of spring" can mean a metal spring and the season at once, and the poem insists that something coiled and mechanical will sprout like a seed. The grammar matters too. "Rust out" is a flat statement, while "must sprout" is an insistence, nearly an order. The poem doesn't claim that renewal is certain. It claims that it is necessary, and the rhyme makes the claim sound inevitable.
The poem's rhythm supports this. Its lines are short, usually two to four stressed syllables, with no regular metre, and the missing punctuation lets phrases slide into one another. Because "income-" ends a line mid-word and "oils" and "coils" sit at the ends of lines, the reader keeps meeting meanings at the edges of the page.
The poem is worth reading because it packs so much into so little. In about twenty lines it moves from private dreaming to public bargaining and then to a jolt of hope. It does this through puns that make the reader work, and the effort of decoding each one feels like the effort the poem describes: finding sense in a world that keeps subtracting from the dream.