Once Below A Time - Analysis

A fable of being tailored into a self

This poem reads like an origin story told through cloth, tools, and sea-myth: the speaker remembers being made—measured, pinned, dressed, costed—into a person, and he both resents and longs for that making. The central pressure is that his identity feels manufactured by labor and hardship: his cut-to-measure flesh and pinned-around-the-spirit suggest a body treated like fabric, with the soul pinned inside it. Yet the poem refuses to keep this as simple victimhood. The speaker also thrills to the spectacle of his own costumes and transformations, as if the very machinery that constricts him also launches him into myth.

The tone is feverish and brash at first—packed with piled-up nouns and barbed adjectives—then it turns toward a strange, exhausted quiet at the end, where the speaker wants to lie down and be quiet as a bone. That final calm doesn’t cancel the earlier hallucinated grandeur; it makes it feel like the cost of wearing so many selves.

Hardship as a payment plan: the first suit

In Part I, the speaker’s earliest self is a kind of indentured outfit: paid-for slaved-for and own too late. The phrase serial sum and the bitterly bureaucratic first of each hardship turn suffering into installments, like rent due on a body. Even love appears as damage to clothing—love torn breeches, blistered jacket—so intimacy doesn’t soften the speaker’s world; it rips and scalds it. The setting is equally rough: snapping rims of the ashpit, cellar work, a snipping shop. This is a childhood (or early life) remembered not as innocence but as grinding labor under a collar—literally spiked with a mastiff collar, as if the speaker is both worker and guarded animal.

Yet even in these dirty grottoes he worked with birds, a detail that starts the poem’s main contradiction: he is trapped in material conditions, but his imagination keeps growing wings. Birds recur as a kind of double emblem—freedom and also a trade, something you handle, keep, or pin down. The speaker’s world is full of craftspeople—tailors, stitchers, droppers—so the making of a life is figured as a making of garments, a relentless, practical shaping that still produces bizarre beauty.

From ashpit to rocket: the brag of metamorphosis

After the soot and cellars, the poem suddenly bursts into maritime fantasy: a bursting sea with bottlecork boats and out-of-perspective sailors. The toy-like boats and warped perspective make this sea feel like a child’s dream, but the speaker’s claims are bold and adult: he astounded the sitting tailors and even set back the clock faced tailors. That is, he doesn’t just impress the makers; he rewinds them, pushing against time itself. The clothing becomes increasingly outlandish—bear wig and tails—and the earth itself turns animal: he hops from the kangaroo foot of the earth. The speaker is no longer the pinned body on the ashpit rim; he is a projectile: I rocketed.

The local and the cosmic collide in the lubber crust of Wales. Wales is not a scenic homeland here; it’s a thick crust he must break through, like a geological layer or a tough bread. He rockets upward to the flashing needle rock—a brilliant image that fuses landscape with tailoring tools. Even the audience for his ascent is a guild of deprivation: criers of Shabby and Shorten, famous stitch droppers. The poem’s swagger is therefore uneasy: he wants to astonish the world, but the world he can name is a world of mended poverty, rushed work, and clothes that never fit right.

The maker who deceives: faith in the tailor-god

Part II darkens the fantasy by naming a maker who is not simply a craftsman but an authority the speaker once trusted. The silly suit becomes funereal: it hangs around some coffin carrying Birdman or told ghost. The bird-image tilts from freedom toward death-mask. The speaker describes an owl hood with a heel hider and a hole for the rotten / Head, like a costume designed to hide decay. Then comes the admission: deceived, I believed—a compressed confession that he colluded in his own disguising.

The deceiver is the cloud perched tailors' master, a strange god of textiles with nerves for cotton. This is not a warm creator; it’s a jittery, industrial divinity, perched above like weather. The tension here is sharp: the speaker wants a maker (someone to explain why he is stitched into flesh), but the only maker he can imagine is a nervous boss of tailors, a master who produces costumes that hide rot. Belief itself becomes another garment—something worn, something fitted, something that can be wrong.

Mythic explorers and sea dandies: the self as costume

The poem then floods with explorers and heroic impostors: Columbus on fire, Cold Nansen's beak, a boat full of gongs. These are loud, theatrical icons—discovery presented as costume drama. The speaker is glared through a shark mask and a navigating head, which makes even perception feel like putting on a mask to cross an ocean. He is pierced by the idol tailor's eyes: the maker’s gaze is invasive, like a needle. It’s as if the speaker is always being fitted, even at sea, even in myth.

And then the poem names a smaller, more intimate figure: the boy of common thread, the bright pretender, the ridiculous sea dandy. This sounds like the speaker seeing his own younger self—ordinary thread trying to pass as splendor, making a bed out of dry flesh and earth. The word pretender is crucial: it keeps the earlier rocket-brag from becoming triumph. The speaker can be mythic, but he knows how much of that myth is dress-up.

The final surrender: drowning in the ready-made

The ending pivots into a lullaby of self-erasure: sweet to drown in readymade handy water. The water is ready-made the way clothing can be—pre-cut, pre-sized—suggesting a death that feels like slipping into something that requires no more tailoring. Yet the speaker’s drowning is not purely despairing; it’s described with seductive detail: a cherry capped dangler green as seaweed, a child's voice summoned from a webfoot stone. Even in surrender, the imagination keeps dressing the scene in bright, uncanny accessories.

The repeated vow—Never never oh never—insists on no regret for the bugle he wore on his arm, for the noisy heroics of blasting in a wave. But the last movement contradicts that bravado: Now shown and mostly bare, he would lie down and live as quiet as a bone. The contradiction is the poem’s ache: he wants both the spectacular costume life (bugles, masks, rocketings) and the peace of being stripped of all fittings. Quiet here is not just rest; it is a desire to be beyond the maker’s eyes, beyond alteration, beyond the endless labor of becoming someone.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If the speaker was deceived because he believed, then what is the poem itself doing—unmasking the costumes, or making a last, gorgeous costume out of language? The final wish to be mostly bare comes in a poem that can’t stop inventing bear wigs, shark masks, bottlecork boats, and needle rocks. It’s possible the only way he can reach bone-quietness is by spending every last scrap of fabric first.