by Thom Gunn
I have been this way before.
Think! the land here is wooded still all over.
An oak snatched Absalom by his bright hair.
The various trails of love had led him there,
The people’s love, his father’s, and self-love.
What if it does indeed come down to juices
And organs from whose friction we have framed
The obsession in which we live, obsession I call
The wood preceding us as we precede it?
We thought we lived in a garden, and looked around
To see that trees had risen on all sides.
2
It is ridiculous, ridiculous,
And it is our main meaning.
At some point
A biological necessity
Brought such a pressure on the human mind,
This concept floated from it – of a creator
Who made up matter, an imperfect world,
Solely to have an object for his love.
Beautiful and ridiculous. We say:
Love makes the shoots leap from the blunted branches,
Love makes birds call, and maybe we are right.
Love then makes craning saplings crowd for light,
The weak being jostled off to shade and death.
Love makes the cuckoo heave its foster-siblings
Out of the nest, to spatter on the ground.
For love has gouged a temporary hollow
Out of its baby-back, to help it kill.
But who did get it right? Ruth and Naomi,
Tearaway Romeo and Juliet,
Alyosha, Catherine Earnshaw, Jeffrey Dahmer?
They struggled through the thickets as they could.
A wedding entertainment about love
Was set one summer in a wood near Athens.
In paintings by Attila Richard Lukacs,
Cadets and skinheads, city boys, young Spartans
Wait poised like ballet-dancers in the wings
To join the balance of the corps in dances
Passion has planned. They that have power, or seem to,
They that have power to hurt, they are the constructs
Of their own longing, born on the edge of sleep,
Imperfectly understood.
Once a young man
Told me my panther made him think of one
His mother’s boyfriend had on his forearm
– The first man he had sex with, at thirteen.
‘Did she know about that?’ I asked. He paused:
‘I think so. Anyway, they were splitting up.’
‘Were you confused?’ – ‘No, it was great,’ he said,
‘The best thing that had ever happened to me.’
And once, one looked above the wood and saw
A thousand angels making festival,
Each one distinct in brightness and in function,
Which was to choreograph the universe,
Meanwhile performing it. Their work was dance.
Together, wings outstretched, they sang and played
The intellect as powerhouse of love.
Dancing David
God
my darling and my daily ecstasy
I danced before the Lord, before the Ark,
I whirled and leapt, I danced with all my might,
Uncovered in the sight
Of slaves and slavegirls, greeting the restored.
My dance was play and yet my play was work
That raised a homage to the appointing Lord.
I tasted sweat even though I wiped it off.
Beyond, I tasted all-approving air
And cut swathes through it, where
Learning from it an indiscriminate taste
I drew all things to me, however rough,
The harvester in whom God’s power is placed.
Saul’s daughter watched me through the window-slit,
Despised me, took me for vulgarian,
A vain and tasteless man.
She said ‘How glorious was the King today.’
Ironic Michal, of the unkind wit,
Taste, taste, good taste will starve your years away.
For finicky taste will pucker up your womb
That shrinks in your disdain before the dance
Of my uncouth advance,
Until it lose ability to swell,
No longer a capacious flexile room
But closed and empty like a light nutshell.
Bathsheba
Much later, in Jerusalem,
While I was walking on my roof
Above my people, watching them,
King, poet, close and yet aloof,
I glimpsed a certain woman nude,
I saw Bathsheba from above
Washing her breasts in solitude,
I learned the imperatives of love.
As for her husband, loyal fighter,
I had a kingly stratagem:
He was to carry me a letter,
All unaware it dealt with him.
I had him posted, for my ends,
In hottest battle of the line
And then abandoned by his friends,
So I could make Bathsheba mine.
Nothing to do, this time, with taste
But with the fervor of the dance
In which I kicked aside, from haste,
Any obstructing circumstance.
A common sequence, I observed:
Love leading to duplicity.
Displeasing to the lord I served,
Also, eventually, to me.
Yet from such commonness and greed
A wiser king than I was grown,
For in our very draining need
The seed of Solomon was sown.
Abishag
All my defiance in the past, I lay
Covered with bedclothes but I gat no heat.
They sought to take the chill off my old age
And found me the lithe virgin Abishag.
She lay on my bosom
oh pubescent girl
Smelling, how lightly, of anxiety,
The source of merely temporary mild heat
So innocent she might have been a dog.
Therefore Bathsheba handsomest of the wives
Entering my room came to the point at once,
Briskly demanding forthwith my assurance
Of the succession for her Solomon,
And took less notice of the girl than if
I had a closed pan of warm embers on me.
I relished secretly what I discovered,
Citron for a parched thought, Abishag
Sweet to the point of sharpness, dense and damp,
A comfort to the memory where I found,
Already present in the God-dance, her –
The ultimate moment of the improvisation,
A brief bow following on the final leap.
NOTES
Fighting Terms
First published by the Fantasy Press in 1954. In 1958 a revised text, with two poems omitted, was published by the Hawk’s Well Press in New York. When it was eventually published by Faber & Faber in 1961, the original text was mostly restored, though the two rejected poems were still left out. FT was nearly all written during G’s period at Trinity College, Cambridge: a remarkable achievement for an undergraduate. His failure to revise the book proved instructive: he never again, to any serious degree, tried to adapt the record. FT is marked by what was to prove G’s lasting enthusiasm for Elizabethan poetry and drama. It was perhaps the most notable legacy of the three years he spent reading English at Cambridge. Donne and Shakespeare were at this time his twin enthusiasms, and their influence runs all through the book, but it is Donne who gives these poems their special character. ‘Reading Donne was a tremendous explosion for me, and I think a lot of that first book … shows it … I think one thing Donne taught me was what Frank Kermode calls the relationship between image and discourse, and to be able to a
ccept discourse as a proper part of the poem in the twentieth century, as opposed to those both in England and in America who thought that poetry was entirely image’ (JH, p. 36). As the title Fighting Terms suggests, the key image in these early poems is that of the soldier. ‘[My] childhood was full of soldiers … I was ten at the beginning of World War Two and sixteen when it ended, so my visual landscape was full of soldiers. Of course, I became a soldier for two years of national service and so that was another kind of soldier. It was a strange kind of role I had to measure myself against’ (PR, p. 155). In 1971 G noticed the book’s ‘Awkwardness and freshness’ and his ‘urgent desire to show off, both sexually and pedantically’ (Bancroft 3:26).
‘The Wound’
Composed at Cambridge, 1952.
G’s version of the Trojan War is derived from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, in which Achilles and Patroclus are represented as homosexual lovers. Sulking in his tent, Achilles observes that his inactivity has damaged his heroic reputation: ‘My fame is shrewdly gored,’ he says, and Patroclus replies, ‘O then beware: / Those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves’ (4.1.221–22). Thersites in Shakespeare’s version is a cynical satirist. Neoptolemus (or Pyrrhus) was the son of Achilles; he avenged his father’s death by burning Troy to the ground.
In the essay ‘My Life up to Now’, G writes of his soldier figure: ‘First of all he is myself, the national serviceman, the “clumsy brute in uniform” [a quotation from G’s “Captain in Time of Peace”, not included in this selection], the soldier who never goes to war, whose role has no function, whose battledress is a joke. Secondly, though, he is a “real” soldier, both ideal and ambiguous, attractive and repellent: he is a warrior and a killer, or a career man in peace-time, or even a soldier on a quest like Odysseus or Sir Gawain … In … “The Wound” … the speaker is both – at one time Achilles, the real soldier in a real war, and at another time the self who dreamt he was Achilles’ (OP, pp. 173–74).
G often said that ‘The Wound’ was the best poem in FT, though it ‘seemed to me at the time rather mysterious, since I didn’t acknowledge its sexual origins’ (1971 notebook, Bancroft 3:26).
‘Carnal Knowledge’
Composed during the long vacation, 1952.
The first edition of FT began with this poem. In subsequent editions, ‘The Wound’ was moved to the front.
There has been much discussion of G’s ‘Audenish custom of concealing the sex of a lover under the impersonal “you”’ (WS, p. 11). This is certainly true of ‘Tamer and Hawk’, and such later poems as ‘Touch’, but G insisted that he never lied in his poems by deliberately suggesting that the addressee was a woman when it wasn’t. ‘Carnal Knowledge’, he told W. I. Scobie, was ‘addressed to a woman … I was making the most of the situation’ (WS, p. 11). G comments on the refrain with its ‘variations on the phrase “I know you know”’ that ‘anyone aware that I am a homosexual is likely to misread the whole poem, inferring that the thing “known” is that the speaker would prefer to be in bed with a man. But that would be a serious misreading, or at least a serious misplacement of emphasis. The poem, actually addressed to a fusion of two completely different girls, is not saying anything as clear-cut as that. A reader knowing nothing about the author has a much better chance of understanding it’ (OP, p. 188).
G copied the poem into a letter to his friend Karl Miller. He tells Miller that, working at a fruit-picking camp, he had met a young woman who was attracted to him.
I have written a poem which I enclose: it is founded on real life, as you shall see … Round about the 3rd evening I became involved with a girl called Ann – at first sight something very attractive about her. A kiss became prolonged and the situation became inescapable. I felt very vigorous during the first week or 2 and was prepared to experiment without stop, and while we still had confidence in each other and there was still exploration to be made everything was well … She never, I am convinced, suspected for a minute that I loved men, and I was very nice to her. She said at the very beginning that as she was a Roman Catholic she would not have intercourse with me: however it was obvious I cd persuade her to in a few days.
But tho I was very interested until my curiosity was satisfied mere curiosity is soon satisfied, and I never for a minute imagined I felt any passion. To my credit, I never pretended to be more than casual. I carried off casualness with panache for a while; but I began to get bored, & there is also a feeling of fear of being committed to an attitude one does not sincerely feel so I had to make the necessary break, and I now see I was more unkind than I had meant to be. I knew that I cd have persuaded her to do anything I wanted – but I would not have been adequate to deal with her afterwards …
[Two heterosexual male friends] … are at present trying to persuade me to make love to a dear little girl from Leeds whom they assure me has indicated I would not be disagreeable – you would think her very lovely, and she is – but I have learnt by the affair with Ann that one must not enter on such things if one cannot be happy in them and make the girl happy.
(KM, 14 July 1952)
This makes it very clear that the posture of cynical misogyny borrowed from Donne is a fabrication, though it may represent the behaviour he imagines the hurt girl to have experienced.
Line 9: cf. ‘Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art’ (King Lear, 3.4.100–01).
Line 21: i.e. the heart: a commonplace of Elizabethan poetry. Cf. ‘the space / Between the breast and lips – Tiberius’ heart’ (Ben Jonson, Sejanus, 3.1.2011–12).
Line 32: cf. ‘If you have tears, prepare to shed them now’ (Julius Caesar, 3.2.166).
‘Lerici’
Composed 1953.
Shelley spent much of 1822 at San Terenzo, near Lerici, in the Bay of Spezia. On 8 July he was drowned when his boat capsized in a squall; there is an apocryphal story that he gave himself up to death. A week later, he was cremated on a beach near Viareggio, where his body had been washed ashore. After the funeral, Byron swam out to his own yacht and back, a distance of some three miles. A famously powerful swimmer, he once swam the Hellespont in emulation of the legendary Leander, who had swum that distance every night to visit his mistress, Hero.
G’s representation of Shelley may have something to do with the notoriously negative view of him taken by F. R. Leavis – self-indulgent, self-pitying, preferring death to life. See the essay on Shelley in Leavis’s Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936). Leavis’s intolerance of self-pity troubled G throughout his life. G saw it as a necessary if unattractive emotion (see note to ‘Innocence’, pp. 216–18).
‘Tamer and Hawk’
Written at Cambridge for Mike Kitay, spring 1953. First published in the New Statesman and Nation, 14 November 1953, it was G’s second professional publication.
Shakespeare and other Elizabethan authors were fond of images taken from the sport of falconry. These are often metaphors for aspects of the war of the sexes. Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, for instance, tames his termagant wife, Katharina, much as a falconer will tame a hawk. ‘To seel’ a hawk is to close its eyes by stitching up its eyelids: this is part of the taming process. See T. H. White, The Goshawk (1951), a book G may have read around this time.
‘Incident on a Journey’
Composed 1953.
This poem may be indebted to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, a story of the Jacobite rebellions, which G admired as a boy, though in later life he remembered no connection. He did borrow from Kidnapped in ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’, though (see p. 244 below). The bond between the inexperienced Calvinist Lowlander David Balfour and the Romantic Jacobite rebel Alan Breck, around which the novel is built, might be read as a homoerotic friendship. Furthermore, the characters seem two sides of the same coin, which might recall the divided selves of ‘The Wound’ and other early poems of G’s.
The Sense of Movement
Published by Faber & Faber in 1957. Th
is was the first of G’s collections to be written in the United States, much of it showing the influence of G’s teacher at Stanford University, the poet and critic Yvor Winters. ‘The poems make much use of the word “will”. It was a favourite word of [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s, and one that Winters appreciated, but they each meant something very different by it, and would have understood but not admitted the other’s use of it. What I meant was, ultimately, a mere Yeatsian wilfulness’ (OP, p. 177). In an interview G said that he had not yet realised when he wrote the book that, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, ‘will’ was the colloquial word for ‘penis’: ‘I was getting it unconsciously’ (PR, pp. 154–55).
SM includes many of G’s most frequently anthologised poems. It was in this book that he began creating the myth of the motorcyclist as unconscious existentialist and admitting the influence of popular culture, as in ‘Elvis Presley’, for example. Writing of the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), one of the key influences on his early work, G commented: ‘Baudelaire’s ennui has now become democratic – it is no longer the poet’s prerogative. It has become a wider and at the same time more undefined malaise …’, and he goes on to cite ‘the hoodlums in some of my poems like “On the Move” …’ (sleeve note to the LP On The Move, released by Listen, 1962). As the years passed, however, he came to dislike the book for (as he saw it) its excessive formality and over-deliberate manner: ‘A lot of it seems very stiff,’ he wrote in 1971 (Bancroft 3:26). He eventually came to prefer FT, much less accomplished though he knew it to be.