Most poems about lovers' leaps, the sites where doomed couples supposedly flung themselves into the sea, would give us the drama: the quarrel, the plunge, the grief. D. L. Emblen gives us the ground. «Lovers' Leap» is almost entirely a description of eroding earth, and its quiet argument is that the romantic legend attached to such places rests on something far less solid than the stories admit.
The first sentence is a long, slow collapse in miniature. The cliff's "crumbling lip" is made of "sandy loam, white-flecked with bits of shells / held together loosely by a threadbare mat of wild grasses." Everything here is provisional: the soil is loose, the grass is a mere "mat," and the whole edge "tips seaward brokenly, / sagging on a limestone hinge." The word "hinge" is a clever choice. A hinge implies a door, something that swings open, and the cliff seems poised to open onto the sea. The verb "sagging" gives the land a tired, almost human slump. Even the nettles are personified, growing "like lost and ragged flowers," a phrase that quietly sets up the poem's emotional register before any lovers appear.
Sound does a great deal of work. Emblen packs the lines with soft, sibilant, trickling consonants: "sifting ledge," "trickles crumbs of earth," "sea-mist," "hissing spray." You can almost hear sand slipping. The poem uses no rhyme and no regular metre; its lines stretch and shorten like the irregular edge of the cliff itself. Some, such as "tips seaward brokenly," are brief and abrupt, while others run on in long, listing accumulations ("who stand on wide-webbed feet / and listen solemnly to wind and trickling sand and hissing spray"). The free verse suits a subject that has no firm line to hold. Note, too, that the poem's sentences are enormous: the first runs for six lines, the second stretches nearly to the end. The grammar seems to crumble forward without stopping, much like the earth.
The gulls are the most striking figures. They "stand on wide-webbed feet / and listen solemnly," and the word "solemnly" turns these ordinary seabirds into a kind of congregation or jury, witnesses attending to the sounds of the place with ceremonial gravity. They provide the only calm in the poem. Where the humans will arrive in distress, the birds simply rest, which sharpens the contrast between natural indifference and human anguish.
Then the poem turns. "Here is a place for lovers' last long argument" is the line where the title finally pays off, and Emblen's treatment is quietly deflating. The setting for this supposed tragic climax is "a narrow place for pacing, / a half-round stone for resting on." These are small, domestic details: a spot to pace, a rock to sit on. The "last long argument" sounds tired rather than operatic. Yet the landscape grows menacing alongside it. The crevice is "dark and grinning," a grotesque, skull-like image, and it "widen[s] to draw the hot dry eyes." The adjectives "hot dry" suggest eyes that have wept themselves empty, and the crevice seems to pull at them, as though the drop itself were tempting the viewer.
The ending is the poem's sharpest stroke. The "yielding sod" is what "frightens tragic youths / who trod too near the edge." The last word, "edge," lands like a literal and figurative warning. Notice that the lovers are never described leaping; instead they are frightened by the ground giving way. The poem suggests that what stops the tragedy, or perhaps what mocks it, is simple physical fear of the crumbling soil.
What makes the poem worth reading is this refusal of melodrama. Emblen treats a place famous for imagined deaths with geological patience, letting erosion, birds and weather do the talking. The effect is both unsettling and strangely tender: the earth is as fragile as the feelings that bring people to it.