Selected Poems of Thom Gunn

by Thom Gunn

  Completed 1960. First called ‘The Snail’.

  G used to say that this poem was inspired by a painting of Paul Klee’s which he saw in reproduction. The work in question is almost certainly Snail (1924), a painting in tempera on paper in the Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano. Klee’s snail undoubtedly ‘pushes through a green / night’.

  ‘The Feel of Hands’

  Composed 1958.

  This poem anticipates one of G’s masterpieces, ‘Touch’ (pp. 56–57).

  ‘My Sad Captains’

  Composed 1961.

  When Mark Antony loses the battle of Actium and knows that he has lost the struggle for power, he summons his generals and friends to a last revel:

  Come,

  Let’s have one other gaudy night. Call to me

  All my sad captains. Fill our bowls once more.

  Let’s mock the midnight bell.

  (Antony and Cleopatra, 4.2.184–87)

  ‘Sad’ in Shakespeare’s English means ‘grave’ or ‘serious’. The title was suggested by G’s partner, Mike Kitay. G regarded this as one of his best poems. Speaking of its syllabic form, he said: ‘I think I hit on something there but it’s not something I’ve been able to repeat. There’s something going on there with the sounds that I’m amazed I was able to achieve. I don’t think I’ve ever done that in free verse … I certainly couldn’t do it in meter: it’s not a metrical effect’ (PR, pp. 166–67).

  Uncollected

  ‘From an Asian Tent’

  Composed 1961.

  Completed too late to be published in My Sad Captains (1961), this poem seems not to have fitted into G’s next collection, Touch (1967). It was eventually reprinted in a pamphlet, The Missed Beat (Newark, VT: Janus, 1976), and was subsequently included in G’s Collected Poems.

  In a notebook of 1972, G writes: ‘Like most homosexuals, I disliked my father, tho I have since learned to have a certain sympathy for him’ (notebook for autobiography, 1972, Bancroft). In ‘From an Asian Tent’, he writes elsewhere, ‘I am finally able to write about my father … I would like the poem to be read as being about what it proclaims as its subject: Alexander the Great remembering [his father] Philip of Macedon. What is autobiographical about the poem, what I am drawing upon, is a secret source of feeling that might really be half-imagined, some Oedipal jealousy for my father combined with a barely remembered but equally strong incestuous desire for him. And I am drawing upon the autobiographical without scruple, freed by the myth from any attempt to be fair or honest about my father. The poem’s truth is in its faithfulness to a possibly imagined feeling, not to my history’ (OP, pp. 187–88).

  Herbert Gunn died in 1962, the year after the poem was written.

  Positives

  Published by Faber & Faber in 1965. The book is a collaboration between G and his photographer brother, Ander. This collection was never intended as a major book of poetry, but as a set of photographs with verse captions. It records with evident pleasure a year G spent in London: 1964–65 (see ‘Talbot Road’, pp. 144–50). The poems follow the course of human life from birth to death: ‘a friend of ours jokingly referred to it as “the Gunn Brothers’ Guide to Humans”’ (F&F, 26 August 1965). In this book G for the first time abandoned rhyme in syllabics and then moved on to free verse. There are no titles in the book; the one I have given is from G’s Poems 1950–1966: A Selection.

  ‘The Old Woman’

  Composed in London, 1965.

  Ander Gunn’s photograph shows an extremely old woman, clearly a derelict, across the way from G’s flat in Talbot Road in the Notting Hill district of London. The notable graininess of the picture seems to symbolise the process of gradual decomposition that is the poem’s chief concern. G had this picture framed with a holograph of the poem underneath it. It used to hang on the first landing of his San Francisco home.

  Touch

  Published by Faber & Faber in 1967. In the six years between MSC and Touch, G changed and experimented a great deal. He seems to have been uncertain of his direction and dismissed Touch, the product of this uncertainty, as the only one of his books to have bored most of his readers. When he published CP in 1993, he replaced Touch with a section entitled ‘Poems from the 1960s’, which selected from the book and added a few uncollected ones. Despite that, I have decided to retain the title Touch for the historical record.

  In Touch, as in Positives, unrhymed syllabics appear alongside early attempts at free verse, including the title poem. G learned the technique of free verse from an essay by Yvor Winters, ‘The Scansion of Free Verse’, and in particular from Winters’s analysis of William Carlos Williams’s poem ‘By the road to the contagious hospital’ (later called ‘Spring and All’). In that poem, says G in a summary, there is ‘usually an even number of major stresses to the line, with lines ending as often as possible in mid-phrase’ (TT, 12 August ?1966). See Winters, In Defense of Reason (London: Routledge, 1962), pp. 112–29. Winters’s method also allows for a certain number of secondary stresses not counted in the scansion.

  Commenting on the title, G wrote: ‘the touch is not physical only, it is meant to be an allegory for the touch of sympathy that should be the aim of human intercourse. The man in … “Misanthropos” at last discovers it, though he has in the past substituted for it the predatory bite of the animal.’ A poem not included here, ‘Confessions of the Life Artist’, was intended, says G, ‘to summarise the nightmare of any civilized man, as the end of “Misanthropos” is meant to summarise his dream, because one has to seek the fullness of control if one wants to avoid sloth; but it seems that the more controlled one is the more unfit one becomes for the spontaneity of “touch”, which is the only real proof, in a human anyway, of unslothfulness. The celebration of instinct in … “The Goddess”, is all very well, but instinct is self-protective and predatory and it defeats the exercise of sympathy just as much as the over-self-consciousness of the Life Artist. There remains the possibility that one can deliberately and consciously attempt to create in oneself a field which will be spontaneously fertile for the tests of sympathy, that one can form habits that are so readily available that they seem like instincts’ (Poetry Book Society Bulletin, September 1967). G subsequently mocked the ‘cumbersome’ prose of this passage, but it articulates, however laboriously, the moral issues that occupied him for most of his life.

  ‘The Goddess’

  Composed 1961.

  ‘I used to believe my muse was male; but I’ve come to realize that [Robert] Graves is right, that the muse has to be female. The Goddess is a mother, not a wife or a lover. The feminine principle is the source and I think it dominates in male artists whether homo- or heterosexual’ (WS, p. 15). There now seems no doubt that G’s Muse was either his mother or a figure projected out of her. See e.g. ‘Rites of Passage’ (p. 85).

  Line 22: Proserpina (Greek: Persephone) is the Roman Goddess of Spring, the renewal of life and the crop cycle. She is also, as the wife of Pluto, the Goddess of Death and Queen of the Underworld. In view of G’s relationship with his mother and her suicide, these traditions are deeply significant.

  ‘Touch’

  Composed 1966.

  This poem about falling asleep should be read alongside a poem about waking up, John Donne’s ‘The Good-Morrow’. It is also related to Robert Creeley’s ‘The World’, which must have influenced its versification and which is brilliantly discussed in G’s essay on Creeley, ‘Small Persistent Difficulties’ (SL, pp. 91–95). Surprisingly, in that context, G wrote: ‘It has a good deal to do with reading, and trying to like, Edward Dorn, I think’ (TT, 13 September 1966).

  ‘Continuous creation’ is one of the theories of the origin of the universe, sometimes called the ‘steady-state theory’, in which the universe has no beginning and no end.

  ‘Misanthropos’

  Begun in San Francisco in 1963, possibly earlier, and completed in London, January 1965. It was broadcast on the BBC Third Programme (8 March 1965) and published in the maga
zine Encounter (August 1965).

  G had already written a good deal of this sequence when he came to London on a year-long scholarship in Autumn 1964. He worked on it off and on during those first months. It is worth noting that during the same scholarship year he also wrote the poems for Positives, his long essay ‘A New World: The Poetry of William Carlos Williams’ and another sequence, not included here, ‘Confessions of the Life Artist’. He also edited the Selected Poems of Fulke Greville for Faber & Faber and wrote his superb introduction for it.

  ‘Misanthropos’ ‘began as a single poem about a man who finds himself the last survivor of a nuclear holocaust’ (WS, p. 12). G described it as part pastoral, part science fiction. ‘The narrative owes a lot to … my friends Don Doody and Tony Tanner [the literary critic]. I had been recovering from a bout of hepatitis, and listening to them discussing ideas and books and things, and quite a bit of their discussion later appeared in the poem’ (WS, pp. 12–13). The illness no doubt had its effect on section X, though G was more consciously drawing on microscopic images of growing cancer cells. The literary sources are manifold. The moral outlook of the poem, especially as represented in ‘Epitaph for Anton Schmidt’ (pp. 70–71), is indebted to Albert Camus, particularly to the figure of Dr Rieux in La Peste (The Plague, 1947), though in an interview G was more inclined to stress Camus’s La Chute (The Fall, 1956), ‘which was on my mind in the section called “Memoirs of the World”, where the hero looks back on his past, just as the hero of La Chute is constantly looking back’ (JH, p. 44). Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, which G rated more highly than is customary, and King Lear provide the image of the misanthrope who has withdrawn to the desert and attempts to answer the question ‘What is man?’ Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, a source of King Lear, is also there, as is Sidney’s inspiration, the Eclogues of Virgil. For other images of isolation, see Franz Kafka’s story ‘The Burrow’ in Metamorphosis and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The most important contemporary influence was probably William Golding. His novel Pincher Martin (1956), which evokes a man’s struggle to survive on a rock in the Atlantic, represents a critical response to Defoe’s account of human nature. There are also touches from Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), which is about survivors of a nuclear war, and, as G was glad to acknowledge, The Inheritors (1955), an extraordinary feat of imagination depicting the demise of Neanderthal man. In The Inheritors, the last man (a Neanderthaler) encounters a tribe of Homo sapiens, who are, in another sense, the ‘first’ men. Writing to his and Golding’s publisher, Charles Monteith, at some time in the 1960s, G declares of Golding’s novel: ‘God, what a beautiful book that is! Golding is one of the few living novelists who make me wish I weren’t a poet but a novelist’ (F&F, 25 August 1962).

  For the importance of ‘Misanthropos’ to the collection Touch, see headnote (p. 224).

  The title. From Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, 4.3.49–54:

  Alcibiades: What art thou there? Speak.

  Timon: A beast as thou art. The canker gnaw thy heart, For showing me again the eyes of man!

  Alcibiades: What is thy name? Is man so hateful to thee That art thyself a man?

  Timon: I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind.

  I. Written in conscious imitation of Wallace Stevens with his ‘Ideas of Order’ and imagination.

  II. An echo poem. This is a Renaissance genre, which is found, for instance, in such musical works as Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. G’s immediate sources are the Second Eclogue from Sidney’s The Old Arcadia and George Herbert’s poem ‘Heaven’. Herbert’s poem, for instance, ends with these lines:

  Then tell me, what is that supreme delight?

  Echo Light.

  Light to the minde: what shall the will enjoy?

  Echo. Joy.

  But are there cares and businesse with the pleasure?

  Echo. Leisure.

  Light, joy, and leisure; but shall they persever?

  Echo. Ever.

  VI. A reminiscence of G’s boyhood, based ‘on picking up wood on Hampstead Heath during the war …’ (TT, undated, prob. 1965).

  IX. Soon after completing this section, G wrote: ‘I adore this poem, and don’t know how I wrote it’ (TT, undated, prob. 1965). For the opening, see King Lear, 3.4.83, where Edgar speaks in the role of the mad beggar Poor Tom:

  Lear: What hast thou been?

  Edgar: A serving-man, proud in heart and mind, that curled my hair, wore gloves in my cap, served the lust of my mistress’ heart and did the act of darkness with her …

  XI. ‘This is [with IX] the other one I like. It’s a bit like my poem on Claus von Stauffenberg, but I think it replaces it rather than being parasitic on it’ (TT, undated, prob. 1965). ‘I found Anton Schmidt in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem’ (CP, p. 490).

  Line 2: Feldwebel: ‘sergeant’ in German. G had himself been a sergeant in the Royal Army Education Corps.

  Line 6: ‘Reposeful and humane good nature’ is Herman Melville’s description of his Billy Budd.

  XII. G took the form of this elegy from Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Mower against Gardens’, which ‘alternates pentameter and tetrameter lines rhyming in couplets’ (JH, p. 44). It is also indebted to George Herbert’s ‘Church Monuments’, a poem much admired by Yvor Winters (TT, undated, prob. 1965).

  XIII. ‘This is plagiaristic of [William] Golding’s The Inheritors and of [Thomas] Mann’s The Holy Sinner: do you care? Does the start read like a parody of T. S. Eliot?’ (TT, undated, 1965).

  ‘Pierce Street’

  Composed 1966.

  The title refers to a street in San Francisco. The house in question belonged to one of G’s gay, druggy friends, Jere Fransway, who was to be (at a later stage in life) the subject of ‘Falstaff’ in ‘Transients and Residents’ (pp. 137–38). The house had been decorated by another member of their group, probably Chuck Arnett – ‘Crystal’ in the same sequence (pp. 138–39).

  G liked ‘the pretty effects of the rhymes’ in this poem: ‘Borrowed from Pound! Who got it from Cavalcanti!’ (TT, June 1966). Guido Cavalcanti (c.1255–1300) was a major influence upon Dante and the finest poet among Dante’s friends and contemporaries. He was much admired and frequently translated by Ezra Pound (see note to ‘The Differences’, pp. 258–60).

  Moly

  Published by Faber & Faber in 1971. To the end of his life, G thought Moly ‘unquestionably my best book’ (Bancroft 3:26). It arose primarily from his and his friends’ experiences of taking the drug LSD. The book begins with a condensed quotation from Homer’s Odyssey, in which Hermes gives Odysseus the herb called moly to protect him against the sorceress Circe, who has turned his sailors into pigs. ‘I see Moly as the antidote to the piggishness in man (some might see it as the thorazine to be used for an acid freak-out, but let it be, that ambiguity) … Alternative title. SUNSHINE. For: it covers the sunlight imagery that is suppose[d] to grow during the book, and it is also coming, more and more, to be a synonym for acid …’ (TT, 22 April 1970). ‘LSD … extends your awareness into other areas. It’s chemical: it may be simply that you’re not aware of seeing round corners but you just think you are. You tend to think that these other areas are spiritual – and they may be’ (PR p. 166).

  The book was strongly influenced in theme, if not in method, by Ezra Pound and, through Pound, by the Metamorphoses of Ovid, one of the masterpieces of the Latin language, the subjects of which are change, mutability and transformation. ‘[T]he whole theme of the book is metamorphosis … That was LSD, of course. It did make you into a different person. The myths of metamorphosis had much more literal meaning for me: the idea that somebody could grow horns [in “Rites of Passage”], that somebody could grow into a laurel tree, or that somebody could be a centaur … or turn into an angel. In the hallucinations – or more likely, distortions – that you saw under the influence of LSD, things did change their shape’ (PR, p. 168). ‘[T]he main subject of my book’ is ‘change, whether with the help of drugs or not, as a
result of a recognition. A recognition is always itself the start of a change – is a change in itself’ (Bancroft Ctn. 3:18). G also remarked that the book had other themes besides metamorphosis: ‘It could be seen as a debate between the passion for definition and the passion for flow, it could be seen as a history of San Francisco from 1965–9, or as a personal memoir of myself during those years’ (Bancroft 3:21).

  The book is also preoccupied with sunlight as the primary source of energy. In a letter to his editor at Faber & Faber, G wrote: ‘If you want to publish the book, you might suggest to the designer of the dust-jacket that yellow is a very nice color – that is, there is so much sunshine in the poems (more and more, the later you get in the book) that it would be rather appropriate to have sunshiney colors on the cover’ (F&F, 24 May 1970). His publishers acceded to this request. G, who was suspicious of most drug-inspired poetry, often commented on the method of these poems, which are mostly very conscious of tradition – of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of Shakespeare and Elizabethan pastoral, and of the metamorphic and visionary elements in Ezra Pound’s poetry, notably in his Canto 47, which refers to Circe and the herb moly. (For Pound’s poem, see G’s essay ‘What the Slowworm Said’, SL, pp. 53–65.) Moly also represented a return to traditional metre from free verse and syllabics. In his own words, G ‘rationalised’ his decision as follows: ‘The acid trip is unstructured, it opens you up to countless possibilities, you hanker after the infinite. The only way I could give myself any control over the presentation of these experiences, and so could be true to them, was by trying to render the infinite through the finite, the unstructured through the structured. Otherwise there was the danger of the experience’s becoming so distended that it would simply unravel like fog before the unpremeditated movement of free verse’ (OP, p. 182).