An ominous and foreboding atmosphere is created in the first ten lines when the speaker states “I stood with my back turned”. This suggests to the reader that there could be something behind the speaker, waiting to attack or approach him. It is reminiscent of the horror scene in which the attacker can be seen lurking behind the victim.
There is a very clear sense of duality in the first ten lines of the poem. This begins in the phrase “with ten minutes to kill”. This is a double agent. The speaker is saying that he has a lot of spare time before the ferry comes and he needs something to fill it. However in reality it is time that kills us, as we age or get ill. The duality is continued with “I took myself on for the hell of it”. There is a clear image here of a man in a pub playing himself at pool. There are two of him – there is even a hint that he could be playing for his life further on in the poem.
The first image of death in the first ten lines appears when the speaker states “I was magnetized by a remote phosphorescence/and drawn, like a moth, to the darkened back room.” Here the speaker compares himself to a moth and the back room of the pub to a light which attracts the moth. However, given that there is an overtone of Greek mythology and death to this poem a deeper reading of this simile shows us that actually it is his soul that is moving towards the light. There are also echoes of the western idea of being pulled towards the light when you have died.
The second image of death appears in the phrase ‘a striplight/ batted awake in its dusty green cowl”. The metaphor which the light fitting becomes a cowl is suggestive of death’s hood and robe.
In lines 11-20 the speaker states that “the black did the vanishing trick”. The word choice here could simply be talking about the ball being pocketed. However it could be a metaphor for the life of the player ending. This is his passage from the real world – the green felt of the pool table – into the underworld – the inner mechanics of the pool table.
The ferry’s arrival is made to sound sinister through word choice. We are told that it arrives from “somewhere unspeakable”. The place from which the ferry has come is unnameable. It suggests through the ‘unspeakable’ that it is physical impossible or painful in some way to utter the name. The sibilance in these two words also adds to that idea, as they are almost hissed out again making it sound like the ferry has arrived from somewhere dangerous or disagreeable.
The light colours in this poem are all associated with life where as the darker colours come to be associated with death. In the first stanza the colours are mostly associated with the pool balls. The coloured balls are used to represent those who are still living, whereas the black ball is eventually potted and is put inside the table – or to use the wider analogy of this poem, the black ball who represents the speaker is taken to the underworld. Even the green felt of the table and light fitting come to represent life as opposed to the blackness of death. There is a clear simile in the final stanza, where the sea is compared to the “black” of the speaker’s guiness. Both the sea and the drink are able to hide things within their depths.
One of the allusions to a Greek myth is when the speaker ‘slots a coin in the tongue’ of the pool table. In Greek times the dead would have had coins placed on their eyes. These were to pay Charon, the ferryman, who would take them along the river Styx and into the Underworld. Here instead the speaker pays the pool table with the coins before he gets on his own ferry.
