Selected Poems of Thom Gunn
Page 19
The ferry anecdote in the opening section is from Duncan’s Heavenly City Earthly City (1947). The story of Duncan’s fall near Wheeler Hall at Berkeley (section 2) is G’s ‘memory of escorting him from the last reading he gave in ’86 (Feb 4, 86)’ (Bancroft, notes for readings, n.d.). The reference to H.D., the poet Hilda Doolittle who published under those initials, is from her book Hermetic Definition (1972).
This poem, written in a strict stanza form and using ancient elegiac conventions, celebrates a poet famous for informality and open-endedness. G commented on this in an interview:
I didn’t plan things in this way but it seems to be one of the things that I specialise in. Filtering some kind of subject matter through a form associated with its opposite. It’s as though I’m taking street noises and turning them into a string quartet. I figure that, in that way, one finds out more about the potentiality of the string quartet also. One finds out more about the rough and unformed and also about the elegant as well. I was aware of doing this in the Duncan poem and that, in a sense, is part of my subject matter in the Duncan poem. I’m writing about open poetry. In fact, the poem ends with an image I get from the Venerable Bede: the sparrow flying through the top of the feasting hall – in one open end and out the other – and of course ‘open-endedness’ is also the characteristic of Duncan’s own poetry. I’m using that as a kind of pun.
(Clive Wilmer, Poets Talking, Manchester: Carcanet, 1994, p. 5)
Lines 43–44: ‘whose great dread … soon to be enclosed.’ Duncan had told G that ‘For [his friend the experimental poet Charles] Olson, closure meant death’ (Bancroft, notebook 3, 1980).
Line 45: ‘the sparrow’s flight’ – an image in the Venerable Bede’s An Ecclesiastical History of the English People (completed c.AD 731): ‘the sparrow flying thro the feasting hall of the warrior – in one end and out the other’ is an image of the course of life from birth to death. I remember G referring to this passage in conversation as early as 1964.
‘My Mother’s Pride’
G’s first notes for this poem are in a notebook of 1974. He began work on it, however, in 1990. Early titles include ‘My Mother’s Precepts’, ‘My Mother’s Sayings’ and ‘Pride’.
G compared the organisation of this poem to that of Ezra Pound’s ‘Canto XIII’, ‘which is [G said in an interview] a slightly random collection of sayings by Confucius. I brought her sayings together in the same kind of way …’ (JC, p. 19).
‘The Gas-poker’
Composed 1991, unusually quickly by G’s standards. An alternative to the present title was ‘The Instrument’.
The first entry in G’s diary is for 29 December 1944, when he was fifteen. It records the suicide of his mother, as follows:
Mother died
at 4.0 A.M, Friday,
DECEMBER 29TH
1944 –
She committed suicide by holding a gas-poker to her head, and covering it all with a tartan rug we had. She was lying on the sheepskin rug, dressed in her beautiful long red dressinggown, and pillows were under her head. Her legs were apart, one shoe half off, and her legs were white and hard and cold, and the hairs seemed out of place growing on them.
We had awoken at 9.45, and had dressed leisurely but were puzzled by a tender note against the parlour door, saying ‘Don’t try to get in. Ask Mrs Stoney to help you, darlings.’
Then we realized that both the parlour and kitchen door were locked. So we did go over to Mrs Stoney, who lives next door. But only her son was in, she having gone out shopping. Then Ander [G’s younger brother] tried the back gate which was unlocked and we went in through the back door into the parlour. but I guessed – though I hardly dared to even when I saw the note. I think Ander did too. But we did not dare mention our conjectures. Both gate and door were unlocked, and they had certainly been locked the evening before. Mother had done this, we supposed to make it easier for us to get in. Ander began to scream ‘Mother’s dead! She’s killed herself,’ before I could even realize that she was, and that her body stretched along the floor, with her hands up to her face under the loose rug.
There was a smell, but not a very horrible great one, of gas. It haunted us for the whole day afterwards. I turned the gas off and Ander took the gas poker out of her hands.
We didn’t undo the blackout for we could see her perfectly well by the the light from the French window, open behind us.
We uncovered her face. How horrible it was! Ander said afterwards to me that the eyes were open, but I thought they were closed; she was white almost, like the rest of her body that we could see. ‘Cover it up. I don’t want to see it. [Illegible crossing-out.] It’s so horrible,’ Ander cried. Her hed [sic] was back, and the mouth was open, – not expressing anything, horror, sadness, happiness, – just open.
But oh! mother, from the time when I left you at eleven on Thursday night until four in the morning, what did you do?
She died quickly and peacefully, they said, but what agonies of mind she must have passed through during the night. I hate to think of her sadness. My poor, poor mother; I hope you slept most of the time, but however sad then, you are happy now. Never will you be sad again! Dear, dear, sweet mother. It was Joe [her second husband, from whom she was estranged] perhaps who caused your death. He had left the house (for the second time since their marriage), on the early morning of the 27th; I had heard his voice, through my sleep; at her command.
Oh mother, you could have called him back, but you knew we didn’t like him! But we would rather you had 10,000 Joes in our house, rather than you had killed yourself.
How could we know how sad she was! I feel certain that it was after 11.20, when I came down to fetch my watch, and when I kissed her (I’m so glad I did!), that she decided to kill herself.
I kissed her legs. – Then called the police … I kissed her forehead when the policeman wasn’t looking; poor lovely statue! At first we ran screaming into the front garden – stiff with frost.
Later in the morning, I came into the parlour to get something out of the bureau; the blackout on only one window was undone, the cat was nestling and purring with a pleased look and half-shut eyes, in the dressing gown’s folds between her legs, in the dim light and disordered room …
In a radio interview broadcast in 2000, G said: ‘She killed herself, and my brother and I found her body, which was not her fault because she’d barred the doors, as you’ll see in the poem. 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 came easy, because it was no longer about myself. I don’t like dramatizing myself’ (JC, p. 19). G felt distaste for what M. L. Rosenthal called the Confessional school. This poem about a mother committing suicide may hint at one of several reasons why.
The image of the flute owes something to classical tradition: when Pan chases Syrinx she escapes him by turning into a reed. Instead of taking her virginity, he plucks the reed, makes a flute of it, and plays a lament upon it. This shows how the consolations of art are directly connected to the original loss.
Line 18, ‘A burden, to each other’: There is a pun here. A burden in music can be a drone (like a bagpipe), the bass accompaniment of a song, a refrain or a persistent theme.
‘To Donald Davie in Heaven’
Composed in 1995, soon after the death of Donald Davie on 18 September.
A distinguished poet and critic, Davie (1922–95) was one of G’s most valued literary friends. Radical and adventurous as a critic, he was by contrast politically conservative and, in religion, something of a Puritan. He and G differed fiercely on such matters, and this poem plays affectionately with their disagreements.
Regarding the title, cf. William Carlos Williams, ‘To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven’.
Lines 10–12, ‘those who sought honour … increase our loves’: Dante, Paradiso 5.100–
05. Seventeen years before this poem was written, G quoted this passage of Dante in a notebook (Bancroft 3:38, April–May 1978) and adds this translation of it:
As in a fish pool still & clear,
the fish draw to what comes from outside
in such a way that they think it their food
so did I see more than a thousand splendors
draw toward us, and in each was heard
Lo, one who shall increase our loves.
The reference is conflated with an allusion to W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Fish in the unruffled lakes’.
‘The Artist as an Old Man’
Composed 1995 or 1996. An earlier title is ‘Painter as Samson, Painter as Lion’.
Inspired by Lucien Freud’s full-length nude self-portrait, Painter Working (1993). Another self-portrait of Freud’s, Interior with Hand Mirror (1967), was chosen by G for the cover of BC. Freud reciprocated G’s admiration.
In the biblical Book of Judges, Samson kills a lion with his bare hands. Returning to the spot later to find a woman of the Philistines who has attracted him, he finds ‘a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion’. He takes the honey for his parents and, later asked to explain himself, he replies with a riddle: ‘Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness’ (Judges 14:5–14).
‘A Wood near Athens’
Composed 1994.
The poem is closely related to G’s sequences ‘Troubadour’ and ‘Dancing David’ (see headnote, p. 267). Work for all three appears in the same notebook. ‘Troubadour’ is concerned with the gay serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, who exemplifies one of G’s recurrent metaphors: that of feeding on an object of desire or the subject of a poem. ‘A Wood near Athens’ deals with a much wider conception of love, but includes Dahmer, both his name and what he represents for G.
G describes ‘A Wood near Athens’ as ‘a TSE or EP-like collage’ with connecting phrases left out ‘so that the reader could make the connections’ (JH/Bancroft, 2 November 1995). The initials are those of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and a manuscript draft is headed with the question ‘A Canto?’, referring to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Where Pound would have used free verse, however, G writes in iambic metre.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘A wedding entertainment about love’, is set in ‘A wood near Athens’.
Line 6: Absalom is the son of King David, who rebelled against his father. When the King heard that Absolom had been defeated and was dead, he wept and said: ‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!’ (2 Samuel 18:33). The citation connects the poem with ‘Dancing David’ (pp. 193–97).
Line 37: Attila Richard Lukacs (b. 1962) is a Canadian painter of homoerotic subjects, mostly hyper-masculine nudes.
Line 42: ‘They that have power to hurt’ – Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94.
The last stanza alludes to the ending of Dante’s Paradiso.
‘Dancing David’
Composed 1994. The first draft follows ‘A Wood near Athens’ in G’s notebook.
‘God’: King David’s first wife, Michal, was the daughter of his predecessor, Saul. The stories told of her in the two books of Samuel are sometimes contradictory. She seems to have loved David against the wishes of her father; she is also, in the passage G is using here, contemptuous of his apparently barbarous behaviour, dancing before the Ark of the Lord unclothed. See 2 Samuel 6:14–16, 18, 20–23:
And David danced before the Lord with all his might; and David was girded with a linen ephod.
So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet.
And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal Saul’s daughter looked through a window, and saw king David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart …
And as soon as David had made an end of offering burnt offerings and peace offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord of hosts.
Then David returned to bless his household. And Michal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David, and said, How glorious was the king of Israel to day, who uncovered himself to day in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself!
And David said unto Michal, It was before the Lord, which chose me before thy father, and before all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of the Lord, over Israel: therefore will I play before the Lord.
And I will yet be more vile than thus, and will be base in mine own sight: and of the maidservants which thou hast spoken of, of them shall I be had in honour.
Therefore Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day of her death.
‘Bathsheba’: David’s great sin is the killing of Bathsheba’s husband because he, David, lusted after her. David married her and she became the mother of Solomon, the wisest of Hebrew kings. See 2 Samuel 11:1–4, 14–17, 26–27:
And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and besieged Rabbah. But David tarried still at Jerusalem.
And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.
And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?
And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her; for she was purified from her uncleanness: and she returned unto her house.
And the woman conceived, and sent and told David, and said, I am with child …
And it came to pass … that David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah.
And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die. And it came to pass, when Joab observed the city, that he assigned Uriah unto a place where he knew that valiant men were.
And the men of the city went out, and fought with Joab: and there fell some of the people of the servants of David; and Uriah the Hittite died also …
And when the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband was dead, she mourned for her husband.
And when the mourning was past, David sent and fetched her to his house, and she became his wife, and bare him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.
‘Abishag’: See I Kings 1:1–4, 15–17:
Now king David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat.
Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat.
So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found a Shunammite, and brought her to the king.
And the damsel was very fair, and cherished the king, and ministered to him: but the king knew her not …
And Bathsheba went in unto the king into the chamber: and the king was very old; and Abishag the Shunammite ministered unto the king.
And Bathsheba bowed, and did obeisance unto the king. And the king said, What wouldest thou?
And she said unto him, My lord, thou swarest by the Lord thy God unto thine handmaid, saying, Assuredly Solomon thy son shall reign after me, and he shall sit upon my throne.
Index of Titles and First Lines
Poem titles are in italics. First lines are in roman.
Abishag 197
All my defiance in the past, I lay 197
All summer’s warmth was stored there in the hay 17
All three are bare 90
All today I lie in the bottom of the wardrobe 123
The Allegory of the Wolf Boy 22
An Amorous Debate 118
The Artist as an Old Man 188
At the Back of the North Wind 17
Autobiography 121
Autumn Chapter in a Novel 18
Bathsheba 195
Being without quality 27
Between the pastel boutiques 144
Birds whistled, all 118
Born in a sour waste lot 164
The Byrnies 36
Carnal Knowledge 6
Claus von Stauffenberg 38
Considering the Snail 41
Crosswords 140
Crystal 138
Dancing David 193
Diagrams 103
The Differences 158
The Discovery of the Pacific 97
Do not enquire from the centurion nodding 20
Downtown, an office tower is going up 103
Duncan 181
Elegy on the Dust 71
Elvis Presley 21
Epitaph for Anton Schmidt 70
Even in bed I pose: desire may grow 6
Expression 129
Falstaff 137
Father, I scarcely could believe you dead 47
The Feel of Hands 42
The First Man 73
Flying Above California 40
For several weeks I have been reading 129
For Signs 88
Forty-eight years ago 184
From an Asian Tent 47
From the Wave 92
The Gas-poker 184