The grappling reveals the struggle that the poet senses, the shadowy half-life in which humans dwell 'unable to speak at all'. Her decision to speak is both an epic statement of courage and endeavour and also an acknowledgement, perhaps, of vocation. The darkness of this dwelling place encloses a type of Styx where 'they could not see the river for the bank yet still kept talking about the bridge'. This metaphor envelops both the bridge between imagination and reality that the collection attempts to create and the structural contract between the two that language embodies. The desire for growth, regeneration, is obliterated in such stagnant water and shadowy soil.
Nature is remembered as 'an evil dream'.
The relation between water and language is a constant theme in Lake's poetry. The deception of speech and of appearances circumscribes these poems. The freedom of art, of the poet to act or speak, is controlled by the surface beauty of specific juxtapositions and diversions created by the melody or assonance of language. Meanwhile the gap between appearance and reality, the piracy of misinterpretation, is at best devastating. The drowning out of the poet's voice is always imminent in these poems.