These readers don’t inhabit classrooms. Rich finds a reader, probably but not necessarily a Palestinian, who has turned down the sound and is reading by the light of a television screen, waiting for news about “the intifada.” This refers to the First Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation that lasted from 1987 to 1993. Rich’s political sympathies are clear. The poem then jump-cuts to a reader in a waiting room, that bland public space where people both look and don’t look at one another, thrust together as strangers at some of the most important moments of their lives. It then moves to a young person reading by a solitary light in a bedroom. There is a didactic or editorial moment when the speaker consider the young “who are counted out, / count themselves out, at too early an age.” She can’t resist telling the young not to discount themselves.
There’s a person who is going blind and can scarcely make out the letters, a mother or father warming milk by the stove with an infant over one shoulder—this evokes Rich’s own days of early motherhood—who seems to be desperately thirsty for something beyond domestic life. She finds a foreigner who can barely understand the words and wants to hear back from him or her (“and I want to know which words they are”). This imagines the poem as a conversation. She also finds someone else who is “listening for something” in the poem itself, someone “torn between bitterness and hope,” like Rich herself, who was also facing a binding obligation, “the task you cannot refuse.”
The last two lines send out a life raft: “I know you are reading this because there is nothing else left to read / there where you have landed, stripped as you are.” The last line is multilayered. Rich told Moyers: “And then in the last line, I thought first of someone dying of AIDS. I thought of any person in an isolate situation for whom there was perhaps nothing but a book of poems to put her or him into a sense of relation with the world of other human beings, or perhaps someone in prison. But finally I was thinking of our society, stripped of so much that was hoped for and promised and given nothing in exchange but material commodities, or the hope of obtaining material commodities. And for me, that is being truly stripped.”
“(Dedications)” carries with it an idea of poetry as a dialogue between strangers, a refuge or shelter for loneliness, and a consolation in time of dire need. It is like a flare sent up in the darkness. It exists for you, whoever you are, and I know you will find it.
Thom Gunn
* * *
“The Gas-poker”
(1991)
Thom Gunn was an Anglo-American poet with a serious formal intelligence, a warm heart, and a cool head. He loved the rigor and balance of the Elizabethan plain style, the combination of what he called “Rule and Energy.” He had a wild streak tempered by a genuine sense of decorum. He was also a personal poet who disliked confessional poetry and believed in the objectifying power of lyric. His poems have a well-earned directness, a restrained nobility.
Gunn’s work took a sorrowful turn with his book The Man with Night Sweats (1992), which contains his heart-rending elegies for friends who died in the AIDS epidemic. Equally touching but even closer to home is his elegy for his mother, “The Gas-poker,” which appears in his last collection, Boss Cupid (2000). Gunn’s mother, Charlotte Gunn, committed suicide when he was fourteen years old, but it took him nearly fifty years to write about it.
Gunn composed “The Gas-poker” in 1991 and considered calling it “The Instrument.” It is a companion piece to his short poem “My Mother’s Pride,” which immediately precedes it in Boss Cupid, and closes with the line “I am unmade by her, and undone.”
The Gas-poker
Forty-eight years ago
—Can it be forty-eight
Since then?—they forced the door
Which she had barricaded
With a full bureau’s weight
Lest anyone find, as they did,
What she had blocked it for.
* * *
She had blocked the doorway so,
To keep the children out.
In her red dressing-gown
She wrote notes, all night busy
Pushing the things about,
Thinking till she was dizzy,
Before she had lain down.
* * *
The children went to and fro
On the harsh winter lawn
Repeating their lament,
A burden, to each other
In the December dawn,
Elder and younger brother,
Till they knew what it meant.
* * *
Knew all there was to know.
Coming back off the grass
To the room of her release,
They who had been her treasures
Knew to turn off the gas,
Take the appropriate measures,
Telephone the police.
* * *
One image from the flow
Sticks in the stubborn mind:
A sort of backwards flute.
The poker that she held up
Breathed from the holes aligned
Into her mouth till, filled up
By its music, she was mute.
The most crucial decision that Gunn made concerning “The Gas-poker” was to cast the poem in the third person. The second and third lines express his utter disbelief that so much time has passed—“Forty-eight years ago /—Can it be forty-eight / Since then?”—which is the only autobiographical clue in the poem itself. John Berryman does something parallel at the beginning of his poem “Henry’s Understanding” (“He was reading late, at Richard’s, down in Maine, / aged 32?”), but whereas Berryman then turns from the third to the first person (“my good wife long in bed”), Gunn does precisely the opposite and switches from the first person to the third. Once he makes that turn everything is presented as if it had happened to someone else. It objectifies the situation.
Gunn talked revealingly about “The Gas-poker” in an interview with the critic James Campbell, who asked him: “Your new book, Boss Cupid, contains some new poems about your mother. Is this the first time you’ve written about her?” Gunn mentioned “My Mother’s Pride” and continued:
The second poem about my mother is called “The Gas-poker.” She killed herself, and my brother and I found the body, which was not her fault because she’d barred the doors . . . Obviously this was quite a traumatic experience; it would be in anybody’s life. I wasn’t able to write about it till just a few years ago. Finally I found the way to do it was really obvious: to withdraw the first-person, and to write about it in the third-person. Then it became easy, because it was no longer about myself. I don’t like dramatizing myself.
In a perceptive short book about Elizabeth Bishop, Colm Toíbín connects Gunn’s statement (“Obviously this was quite a traumatic experience; it would be in anybody’s life”) to a letter in which Bishop writes about her unhappy childhood and says, “Please don’t think I dote on it.” She speaks about her mother’s mental illness and says, resigned, “Well, there we are.”
There’s something about the solitude and tact, the intense feeling mixed with a certain detachment, that leads Toíbín to Joseph Brodsky’s essay “Grief and Reason,” which explicates Robert Frost’s poem “Home Burial.” Brodsky wonders what Frost was after and declares: “He was, I think, after grief and reason, which, while poison to each other, are language’s most efficient fuel—or, if you will, poetry’s indelible ink.” Brodsky names in Frost what Toíbín finds in Gunn and Bishop, “grief masked by reason, grief and reason battling it out.”
In “The Gas-poker” reason asserts itself as a remarkably skillful lyric. The poem employs a short, punchy three-beat, or trimeter, line of six or seven syllables each. This meter, which Theodore Roethke uses so well in “My Papa’s Waltz,” has a brisk songlike quality that can be purposefully disconcerting in a grief-stricken poem. Gunn’s lyric also consists of five seven-line stanzas. The septet has an odd extra punch, a piercing last line, which moves pas
t the symmetry of an even-numbered stanza, and Gunn uses it to great effect. Look at the last lines. Each one simultaneously closes a sentence and a stanza:
What she had blocked it for.
Before she had lain down.
Till they knew what it meant.
Telephone the police.
By its music, she was mute.
Gunn believed that writing in form pressed a poet to go further and further in order to explore a subject. “The Gas-poker” is one such proof. The poem is partly tied together by the way that the first lines of each stanza rhyme (“ago” / “so” / “fro” / “know” / “flow”). The rhyme scheme connects the second and fifth lines, the third and seventh lines, and the fourth and sixth lines of each stanza. This enables the poet to make some unexpected connections, such as “lament” and “meant,” “treasures” and “measures.” Gunn said that he probably got some help from Thomas Hardy in writing this poem, especially in the emphasis on a few awkward rhymes, such as “barricaded” and “they did.”
The title of the poem, “The Gas-poker,” directs our attention away from the mother to the homely object that she used to inhale the gas that killed her. The first stanza holds back or barricades the figure of the mother’s dead body. Indeed, it will be revealed only at the end of the poem. That’s also where we come to understand the true significance of the gas-poker, which was normally used to ignite coal fires.
The second stanza tries to imagine what the mother did behind the blocked door:
She wrote notes, all night busy
Pushing the things about,
Thinking till she was dizzy,
Before she had lain down.
It’s as if the mother was doing housework until the very end, remembering chores, trying to think of everything before she finally had to give up. The rhyme on “busy” and “dizzy” enacts what she is doing. There is metrical agitation in the lines, all that pushing and thinking, which finally relaxes at the end.
The third stanza moves the setting to a garden, which is why Clive Wilmer, the editor of Gunn’s New Selected Poems (2018), suggests that the poem is a pastoral, though it is a counter-pastoral or doomed pastoral: the nostalgic promise of a simple peaceful life in the country comes to a crashing end on “the harsh winter lawn.” At times the rhythm of this poem seems reminiscent of Hardy’s lament “During Wind and Rain,” especially in the following stanza:
The children went to and fro
On the harsh winter lawn
Repeating their lament,
A burden, to each other
In the December dawn,
Elder and younger brother,
Till they knew what it meant.
These lines sound a bit like Hardy’s “They sing their dearest songs— / He, she, all of them—yea . . .”
In the fourth line, the interpolation “A burden” breaks the rhythm, and there is a revealing pun on the word “burden.” Its most familiar meaning suggests something emotionally difficult to bear. Another meaning comes from music: “a drone, as of a bagpipe,” or “a chorus or refrain.” Thus, the burden, the repeating lament, is a persistent theme. Gunn found a way to pity the two brothers because of how he had distanced them. He was pretending that he was writing not about himself and his brother, but about some other children. In the next stanza, the two of them act with a sort of shocked practicality:
They who had been her treasures
Knew to turn off the gas,
Take the appropriate measures,
Telephone the police.
The last stanza is the most devastating. Gunn’s speaker continues to generalize—“One image from the flow / Sticks in the stubborn mind . . .” In a review of Boss Cupid, the scholar Langdon Hammer noted that Gunn declines to say “my” because the image itself “is alien, something from outside that has been taken in, a troubling object, and it has the effect of making the mind itself seem partially alien, objectified, its own processes open to examination.”
There is a terrifying realization in the image of the poker as a “backwards flute.” On one hand, it is a musical instrument, which evokes the classical tradition, since the elegy, a funeral lament, was accompanied by the flute. We recall from Anna Akhmatova’s elegy for Mikhail Bulgakov how the flute is inevitably associated with the expression of grief. Like Milton in his pastoral elegy “Lycidas,” Gunn rhymes “flute” with “mute.” But whereas Milton begins with the word “mute” and follows it with “flute” (“Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute; / Tempered to the oaten flute”), Gunn does precisely the opposite. For him the flute negates the possibility for expression that Milton sees in it. It has now become the perverse opposite of a musical instrument. The mother who plays the music, which is silent, becomes permanently muted by suicide. The whole poem ends on a note that is beautiful and horrible. It preserves a silence.
This is all a way of saying that in “The Gas-poker,” one of Thom Gunn’s most harrowing poems, grief is masked by reason, and grief and reason are forever battling it out.
Heather McHugh
* * *
“What He Thought”
(1991)
Heather McHugh’s poems have a breezy, self-reflexive, daredevil linguistic wizardry and wit. The thinking is quick and quirky, the wordplay dense and dizzying. She finds the world through words. There are dozens of smart, crackling language lessons in her first four books: Dangers (1977), A World of Difference (1981), To the Quick (1987), and Shades (1988). But the verbal dazzle and fast thinking in her work doesn’t quite prepare us for “What He Thought,” the first poem in Hinge & Sign (1994), a collection of her new and selected poems. It has a different kind of depth charge. The title of the poem refers to thought, a product of the mind, but the content shows that thinking too has its limitations.
What He Thought
for Fabio Doplicher
We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the mayor, mulled
a couple matters over (what’s
a cheap date, they asked us; what’s
flat drink). Among Italian literati
* * *
we could recognize our counterparts:
the academic, the apologist,
the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib—and there was one
* * *
administrator (the conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated
sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.
Of all, he was most politic and least poetic,
so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome
(when all but three of the New World Bards had flown)
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)
to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.
I couldn’t read Italian, either, so I put the book
back into the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans
* * *
were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there
we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,
till, sensible it was our last
big chance to be poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked
“What’s poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables and
marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or
the statue there?” Because I was
* * *
the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn’t have to think—“Th
e truth
is both, it’s both,” I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed
taught me something about difficulty,
for our underestimated host spoke out,
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:
* * *
The statue represents Giordano Bruno,
brought to be burned in the public square
because of his offense against
authority, which is to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government, but rather is
poured in waves through all things. All things
move. “If God is not the soul itself, He is
the soul of the soul of the world.” Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him
forth to die, they feared he might
incite the crowd (the man was famous
for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask, in which
* * *
he could not speak. That’s
how they burned him. That is how
he died: without a word, in front
of everyone.
And poetry—
(we’d all
put down our forks by now, to listen to
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 31