Read quickly, Thomas W. Morris's «The cheek of angels» sounds like a nursery rhyme that has swallowed the evening news. Its subject is a world coming apart on every level at once: the weather ("Acidic raindrops"), the landscape ("Burning woods"), society ("Closed music shops"), religion ("Clerics smelting"), the body ("Lungs frozen") and finally light itself ("Black sunlight"). There is no "I" in the poem, no explanation and no rescuer. Disasters are stacked up like items on a shelf. The central idea seems to be that collapse can be both total and strangely casual, and that the calm, orderly voice reporting it is as unsettling as the ruin.
The form supports that calm. The poem is six quatrains, each rhymed ABAB, with lines of only a few syllables. The rhyme grows tighter as the damage spreads. The first stanza only manages slant rhymes ("swords" with "records", "raindrops" with "shops"). The second is half-and-half: "woods" and "floods" only echo each other, but "melting" and "smelting" lock together. From the third stanza on the rhymes are exact: "grows/flows," "vanish/Spanish," "bitter/quitter," "sparrows/arrows." One reading, an inference rather than a certainty, is that the more the world falls apart, the more neatly the verse clicks shut, like a machine running without anyone in charge.
The grammar is just as telling. Most lines are fragments, noun phrases or participles ("Summoning swords," "People melting"), so nothing seems to begin or end. The exception is the third stanza, the only one made of full statements: "The grass grows / Humans vanish / Darkness flows." It reads like the poem's one plain report, and it says that people are leaving while plants and darkness take over.
The imagery mixes the epic with the oddly small. Swords and burning woods belong to legend, but "Gym junkie records" and "Closed music shops" belong to a modern high street. "Records" could mean personal bests or vinyl, and the poem does not choose. Either way, the apocalypse arrives as a list of lost hobbies and shut businesses as well as fire and flood. "Internal floods" sits among the outer catastrophes and suggests that the damage is private too. The echo of "People melting" and "Clerics smelting" moves from soft to industrial. Perhaps the clerics are being turned into metal, or perhaps they are working it (the swords have already been summoned), and the poem leaves that open.
The last two stanzas run on contradiction and absence. "Black sunlight" and "Chilling hot springs" turn nature inside out. "White moonlight" is the only conventional phrase, and beside the others it looks eerie rather than normal. Then come things with a necessary part removed: "No jungle kings," "Eyeless dragons," "Wheels with no wagons." The wheels have lost what they were built to carry, and the dragons have lost the ability to see. Against these, "Growing sparrows" and "Millions of arrows" suggest an overflow of small, sharp things. "Unspoken Spanish" is the poem's one reference to a particular language, and a language that falls silent is a whole culture disappearing without a sound. Near the middle, "One chosen" stands out against all the millions. We never learn who is chosen or for what.
Then comes the title line on its own, unrhymed and unpaired: "The cheek of angels." "Cheek" can mean a part of the face or impudence, so the line might picture angels as bold, or as soft and vulnerable. The old idea of turning the other cheek may also be in the background, though the poem never confirms it. What the line clearly does is break the pattern. After twenty-four lines of matched pairs, it is a loose end, a punchline with no joke, or a shrug from a heaven that has watched all this happen.
Part of the poem's interest lies in what it declines to do. It does not argue, narrate or console. It sets images side by side and lets the reader supply the connections, and it lets the neat form contradict the chaos of its content. That tension between tidy rhyme and an untidy world is its most memorable feature, and it shows how a poem can say a great deal about disaster in very few words.