A poem called "The beast" invites us to expect a monster, and Brian Routh makes us wait for it. The opening stanza contains no creature and, more strikingly, no verb. It is a stack of phrases, each beginning with "the": "the endless games", "the pointlessness of worlds", "the strivings of egos and vanities". It reads like a weary inventory of everything human life busies itself with. The last item is the most revealing, because it describes the wish of "permanence" to "fix itself / in time and space". Permanence is the one thing that should not need to hurry, yet here it is anxious and grasping. The verb "fix" also carries two meanings, to fasten something in place and to hold it still, and the poem quietly returns to that idea.
Then the grammar wakes up. In the second stanza the speaker arrives all at once: "my throat", "me", "I", "myself" appear within three short lines. The impersonal catalogue turns bodily and frightening: "hands are around my throat from the inside". The image is physically impossible, which is why it feels so true to a certain kind of dread. The throat is where a voice passes through, so one reading is that the speaker is being choked in the act of speaking. The phrase "from the inside" removes any outside enemy, and "the beast is inside me" says it flatly. Judging by the first stanza, the beast may be bound up with those "egos and vanities", the part of the self that strives and clutches. The hands also grip in the way the first stanza's "permanence" tries to fix itself in place.
The form supports all this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the poem has no punctuation at all, not even a full stop. Nothing is closed off or settled, which suits a poem about the failure of anything to stay fixed. The lines also shrink as the poem goes on. The first stanza is long and abstract, full of heavy nouns like "pointlessness" and "strivings". The second turns to plain words: hands, throat, beast. By the third stanza the lines have narrowed to single words: "actual", then "imagined". The poem seems to be stripping itself down as the speaker is stripped of a stable self.
The sound is worth a look too. "Solid and fluid" nearly rhyme, since both end in "-id". This is the poem's one gesture toward musical pairing, and it falls on two words that mean opposite things. The last stanza is built from such pairs: "good and bad", "solid and fluid", "actual / imagined". They move from morality to physical matter to the question of what is real at all, widening with each step.
The turn between the second and third stanzas is the poem's most interesting moment. "I am no longer myself" sounds like defeat, yet the next line reads "I am everything good and bad". The loss of one fixed identity becomes an enormous expansion, and the poem does not tell us whether this is horror or release. Perhaps the beast's grip is what shatters the narrow, defended self of the first stanza and leaves something larger and less comfortable. Ending on "imagined" adds another twist. If the speaker contains the imagined as well as the actual, the strangling hands themselves may belong in that category without being any less painful.
That ambiguity is what makes the poem worth reading. It refuses the usual story in which a person defeats or escapes an inner monster. Instead the speaker finds that the beast cannot be separated from the self, and that the self is not one thing. It is a short poem in plain language, but it leaves a question hanging at the end: if "I" am everything, who exactly is being strangled?