Most stories about bad dates need a villain or a heartbreak. Alexander Baron's «No Chemistry» has neither, which is why it stings a little. Two people meet, drink, part, and the only thing that goes wrong is that nothing goes right. The poem's central idea is that attraction cannot be negotiated into existence. Courtesy, effort and good manners are all present, and none of them can stand in for the missing spark.
The first phrase, "Blind strangers", does double duty. It hints at a blind date, but it also suggests two people who can't see anything in each other worth looking at. Small judgments pile up at once. The other person smiles "uneasily", the speaker "frowned at your cigarette" and, "almost wincing, straightened up my tie." Each gesture is a reflex rather than a decision. The word "almost" returns in the third stanza ("before / We started talking almost"), and the whole poem lives in that hedge: almost wincing, almost talking, almost a connection.
The dialogue is deliberately lifeless. "Hello: you said. Hello." replaces quotation marks with a colon, and the reply simply bounces the word back, like two people passing a parcel neither wants. The tavern is "to your like", a slightly stiff, old-fashioned phrase that suits the stilted mood. Then comes the line "The conversation died the death before / We started talking almost". The line break leaves "before" hanging, and the sentence undoes itself, since something dies before it has been born. Even the "pointless hike" of the second stanza makes the evening sound like a trudge towards a destination both already know is wrong.
The best image is the simplest: "My cider tasted sharp, your lager, flat." The drinks become a double portrait. One has an edge, the other has gone dull, and neither suits the other. "Flat" is the last word of the stanza and lands like a dropped glass. It also quietly puns on the title, because chemistry is fizz and reaction, and here there are no bubbles at all.
Formally, the poem is a fourteen-line English-style sonnet. It has three quatrains rhymed ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, and a fourth, GHGH, before a closing couplet. The sonnet is traditionally a vehicle for declarations of love, so using it for an anticlimax is a dry joke in itself. The steady ten-syllable lines and tidy rhymes behave like the characters: impeccably well-mannered, with no feeling underneath. Some rhymes even strain slightly, as "hike" does for "like", which fits an evening of forced effort.
The station stanza is the quietest and most revealing. "Shelter" and "shielded" share a soft hiss, and the sound is protective, though the rain is the only thing being kept off. Then comes the poem's one real moment of communication: "though we didn't speak, both understood / The reason we would never meet again." After a whole evening of failed talk, silence is where they finally agree. The reason itself is withheld until the couplet, which delays the verdict as politely as the characters do.
When it arrives, the verdict is almost casual: "I smiled and said to you: / No chemistry". The title becomes the speaker's actual words, delivered with a smile. The kiss ("We kissed once") sounds less like passion than like a final check on an experiment, with the result already known. Then "Adieu" arrives, a grand French farewell that rhymes neatly with "you" and seems comically too big for the occasion. It can also be read as kindness, a flourish of formality that cushions the bluntness.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty and its lack of cruelty. Neither person is mocked, and both reach the same conclusion at the same moment. By setting an ordinary, slightly embarrassing evening inside a form built for grand feeling, Baron suggests that the absence of love can be as precise, and as quietly painful, as its presence.