Power, Mike Stone's "Silent Succubae" suggests, is an expensive way to be alone. The poem gives us six lines and one figure, a "lone god" on a throne. In that space it builds a whole room around him and then quietly turns the room against him.
The first line does its work through repetition: "The lone god sits alone upon his throne." Saying "lone" and then "alone" is deliberately redundant, and "throne" closes the line on the same long *o* sound, so the vowel tolls like a bell. The line also runs to ten syllables, close to a classic pentameter, and it is the steadiest rhythm in the poem. That suits a figure whose power depends on formality. Yet "lone god" puts two heavy stresses side by side, so even here the rhythm lands with a thud rather than gliding.
The next lines pile up wealth. "Velvet and marble and gold" strings its items together with "and," as if the riches simply accumulate without ever adding up to anything. There is a touch of softness, coldness and glitter, but no warmth and no person. Then comes "Dorian thrusts of column." "Dorian" points to the ancient Greek, classical style of architecture, borrowing the authority of old civilisations. "Thrusts" turns stone into something aggressive, almost bodily, and it quietly prepares the ground for the sensual menace at the end. The chandeliers continue this slightly uneasy mood: light is "dripping" from them, like a liquid, or like a slow leak in a building that has more luxury than life.
The poem turns in its last two lines. "Echoes of a false dawn fall" mixes the senses, since echoes belong to sound and dawn to light. The effect is of brightness arriving already weakened and second-hand. A false dawn is a promise of morning that does not deliver, and judging by the imagery, the only light in this room is the glow of the chandeliers, a manufactured sunrise for someone who cannot leave his seat. "Fall" also picks up "dripping," so the room seems to be quietly sinking under its own weight. The nearest thing to a rhyme in the whole poem comes with "fall" and "tall," just as the poem ends.
Then there are the "silent succubae." In folklore, a succubus is a female demon who visits men in their sleep. Stone gives us the plural and then takes away their power to act: they are "silent," and they sit up in "the tall ceilings," far above the throne. The poem does not say whether they are painted or sculpted figures or something in the god's own mind, but either reading works. Temptation hangs over him and never comes down. The sibilance of "silent succubae" hisses like a whisper in a room where nobody speaks. The final line is also the longest, about twelve syllables, and it stretches upward as the ceilings do, leaving the god looking small beneath it.
Nothing in the poem rhymes at the ends of lines, and it has no regular metre after the opening. This looseness is a quiet strength. The poem has almost no action, since the only real verbs are "sits" and "fall." The god does nothing, and that stillness is the point. He is surrounded by every sign of status but by no one who can answer him. The poem never says who he is, whether a king, a tycoon or an idol worshipped by no one, and that openness lets readers decide what sort of power they think is being mocked.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets from so little. A single unexpected word, "succubae," makes us look back and see the velvet, the columns and the dripping light as part of a trap. The grandeur is the god's prison, and the poem implies that he furnished it himself.