Few poems make the reader work as hard for six lines as "Allopath" does, and the work starts with the title. An allopath is a conventional doctor, someone who fights illness with its opposite. The word comes from Greek roots meaning "other" and "suffering," so it can also be read as "other people's pain." Yet the poem contains no doctor, no clinic, no prescription. All it offers is "her arms." The reader has to decide who the healer is, and what exactly is being treated.
The opening couplet puts a sound inside a body: "I howl in her arms / like a heart condition." A howl is animal and unguarded, and the speaker does it while being held, so comfort and distress arrive together. The comparison is odd. A howl is loud and a heart condition is silent and internal, so the simile makes the howl chronic, something carried around inside like a diagnosis. "Heart" also works on two levels, the organ a doctor examines and the place where grief lives. The h-sounds in "howl," "her" and "heart" make the line feel breathy, as though it were said through sobbing.
The second couplet shifts from the body to a habit: "familiar as tobacco / which people plant to be miserable." The word "familiar" explains the earlier "condition," since this suffering is something the speaker knows well and perhaps even returns to. Tobacco also connects quietly to the heart, because smoking is a classic cause of heart trouble. The verb "plant" is the sharpest word in the poem. Misery is not caught like a cold. It is sown, tended and harvested on purpose. The pronoun changes here too, from the confessional "I" to a detached, almost sardonic "people." The remark sounds like a general observation, but after the howl in the first couplet it reads as a judgment the speaker is passing on himself.
The final couplet is the hardest to read: "eyes weary of the light / in a pipe." With no punctuation, the grammar gives way. The light might be the glowing ember of tobacco, with "eyes" as the bowl's red glow seen as a tired eye. Or the speaker's own eyes might be tired of staring into that small fire. The poem suggests both readings, and perhaps others, such as a pipe as a throat or windpipe, through which the howl began. The sentence has no verb to hold it together, so the poem simply stops, like smoke thinning out.
The form supports this. There are three couplets, no capital letters, no punctuation and no rhyme. Without commas or full stops, the reader chooses where to breathe, which makes the reading feel as unsteady as the speaker. The lines also swell and shrink. They run from the short "I howl in her arms" to the long, drawling "which people plant to be miserable," and then drop to the three-syllable "in a pipe," the smallest line in the poem. The poem is built almost entirely from comparison, first "like a heart condition," then "familiar as tobacco." Each image replaces the one before it, and none gives the reader firm ground. The howl becomes a condition, the condition becomes a habit, and the habit becomes a glowing bowl.
What makes "Allopath" worth reading is how much it leaves unsaid. The title promises treatment by opposition, and the arms offer a plausible one, since holding is the opposite of howling. The poem never says the treatment works. The speaker seems to know that some suffering is cultivated, and that being held does not stop a person planting more of it. The poem gives no cure, only a diagnosis delivered with dry humour and a flicker of tenderness. It shows how a few well-chosen images can say what a longer poem might take pages to explain.