The cradles rock and underground the trains...

[romac]

The cradles rock and underground the trains
pursue their seismic arcs. A madman shakes
his thumb-stub at the subterranean
blast, and from the atrament, the stone’s dark
belly rumbles with hunger, which swells
and beckons to excess. A restless law:
from first beat until last shudder, the pulse
thrums out fear of catalysis: fast, slow,

stop. There. That’s where slewing round
the Circle Line gets you – a station-list
you have by heart. Yet every place you pass
yields shrinkage, atrophy, and overground
a tremor like a shy kiss from a past
lover. Nothing stills the way it was.

[Nanphi]

Hello, Rob -
Delightful to see you joining us toilers in the halls of Scansion Mansion. I think your sonnet is effective and has some very interesting features: the well-handled slant rhymes, a polyvalent metaphor, and a powerful volta--definitely a poem you'll want to keep polishing.

Some details of the metaphor remain obscure to me (the madman and his thumb-stub) and I'm having trouble fitting in the dark inky liquid and the concept of catalysis (atrophy, on the other hand, works well). In the main, I'm reading your subway system as a metaphor for both the cradle/grave life cycle and the ceaseless pulsions of the subconscious id with all its instinctive cravings (and in this last sense the "seismic arcs", otherwise problematic in terms of subway tracks, are translating for me as automatic neuron synapses). The metaphor is pleasantly surprising, and I believe the sudden casual intimacy of the second-person address in S2 helps drive it home. The final sentence is a relentless and observant conclusion.

Of course, the opening phrase and the style of the title are reminding me of Whitman's Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking with its concluding passages about death. Don't know if you deliberately intended this, however.

All in all, the only problems I see in the text are madman, atrament, catalysis, but this is probably just me being dense.

About scansion: I can't tell how strict or loose a pentameter you intended and the poem sounds good when read aloud because of your fine ear for rhythms, but the following are lines that deviate (in some cases rather far) from standard iambic pentameter:

his thumb-stub at the subterranean
-iamb-trochee-iamb-iamb + unstresed syllable
only 4 stresses because the enjambement tends to turn -ean into something like -yun. If the line were end-stopped, we might be able to get enough of a light stress on -an to count "eeAN" as the fifth iamb, but it's problematic as it stands.

blast, and from the atrament, the stone’s dark
- 5 trochees

belly rumbles with hunger, which swells
- trochee, trochee, iamb, anapest - only 4 stresses
That's one way of seeing it. But this is a 9-syllable line, so maybe we could say it starts with a headless iamb, which would yield iamb-iamb-anapest-anapest -- still only 4 beats, though. It's true that this and the preceding line "read well aloud" if considered in rhythmic terms (rather than strictly metrical), with the anapests adding a nice impetus and build-up to swells. But it's in no way a line of iambic pentameter.

from first beat until last shudder, the pulse
- iamb-trochee-iamb-trochee-iamb
Here I like the trochaic substitutions; the stresses are falling very elegantly on significant words and the metric variants are deftly accentuating the meaning of shudder.

thrums out fear of catalysis: fast, slow,
- trochee-trochee-iamb-iamb-spondee: maybe a bit heavy on the substitutions.

stop. There. That’s where slewing round
- spondee-trochee-trochee + a stress. You have 5 actual stresses, but only 3 1/2 feet; a 7-syllable line won't ever yield iambic pentameter.

the Circle Line gets you – a station-list
- iamb-iamb-spondee-iamb-iamb. Here, too, I like the substitution. The spondaic gets you followed by the dash makes a strong and effective mid-line stop before the iambs resume their course. The following 3 lines are solidly iambic with only one spondee (yields shrink-) and one trochee (kiss from).

lover. Nothing stills the way it was.
- I really would consider this one as starting with a headless iamb and I think the final line in a sonnet is one where you can do that effectively. Other "scanners" may have a different opinion, but this works for me.

This is very enjoyable, Rob. Good luck on further metric fiddling!
Cheers -
Nanphi

[Scavella]

Nanphi's crit is excellent.