Mike Stone's poem opens by running away. The speaker has fled "Through Light Saint Yellow's Gate", a name the poem never explains, into a landscape of dead leaves and "softened colors long since bled." Then Eurydice arrives, "dew-lipped" and "imagined wed", and the reader understands that this is the old myth of the poet who goes down to the underworld for a lost beloved, retold as a university love affair. They meet "outside English Lit", and what draws the speaker "down to her graven underworld" is a white raincoat and a white kiss. Her whiteness has something ghostly about it from the start.
The poem's central idea is that love, once it is over, can only be reached by descent, and that memory is a kind of underworld. The speaker says "No chronology was possible," and the poem behaves accordingly. Time "ebbed and flowed / Like water under a moon," and she turns the clocks to face the wall. "Description was equally unlikely," he admits, and then gives only fragments: "Blonde hair swept back. / High forehead, arched brows. / Eyes in wonder round." These short lines read like details surfacing from a fading memory. They are all he can retrieve of her.
The descent is built from the repeated word "step": "It was the first step," then "Another downward step," then "Another step deeper still." Each step is a stage of intimacy and also a stage of surrender. The breathing image is the most intense: "As I was drawn toward her / She drew back; / My lungs, her air." He needs her to breathe, and she controls the supply.
Stone is clever with reversals. In the myth, Orpheus loses Eurydice by looking back at her. Here the speaker says, "Like the clocks, I faced the wall. / She stood behind me." He is the one who turns away, copying her gesture with the clocks, and she is behind him, "in her thrall." I read this as the poem quietly flipping the myth. The loss comes through absorption and helplessness rather than a fatal glance.
The sound of the poem shifts as the mood does. The opening four lines all end in *-ed* (fled, dead, bled, wed), a tight chain that feels like a spell or a dirge. Then the poem loosens into free verse, with short, uneven lines and stray rhymes such as "moon" and "room." The rhyme comes back at the end, as the affair reaches its peak and its collapse: "reeling," "feeling," "pealing," and earlier "wall" and "thrall." The music tightens as desire does, and the speaker is caught by the sound as much as by the feeling.
The imagery is full of echoes and contrasts. The bridge "from nowhere to nowhere" throws back their words "like a fugue of shakuhachis," a gentle flute-like sound, but the next line turns it into "a clash of Samurai swords." Beauty and violence share the same echo. The "water on the moon" in the cave stanza is an impossible image, so the home they might have had is shown as unreal. The wordplay "After innocence came incandescence" moves the affair from discovery to burning. Her final gift is both sound and fire: a string of bells taped to the ceiling, the lights switched off, the string lit, "a small flame" rising "with bells pealing." It is sensual, theatrical and dangerous at once.
The ending is the cruelest part. The moth simile promises that he will be "consumed by feeling," but the flame simply disappears: "And suddenly that flame is gone." A moth should burn, and he is left in the dark, still circling. The last line doesn't rhyme with anything, so the poem stops on an absence.
The little-birds stanza in the middle seems at first like a stray piece of folk wisdom. Little birds have only "their love of being little," while "many have naught." Read against the rest, it sets simple, unashamed love against the grander, more painful love the speaker chose, and it hints that he knows what that choice cost him.
The poem is significant because it makes a very old story feel private. Eurydice becomes a woman with a wit, a raincoat and a habit of turning clocks around. The form acts out the experience, with its fractured memory, its steps downward, and its rhyme that tightens and then slips away.