Selected Poems of Thom Gunn

by Thom Gunn

  ‘On the Move’

  Composed spring 1955.

  ‘I was much taken by the American myth of the motorcyclist, then in its infancy, of the wild man part free spirit and part hoodlum …’ (OP, p.177). More immediately, the poem was inspired by Laslo Benedek’s film The Wild One (1954), which starred the young Marlon Brando as an anarchic biker. It originally bore an epigraph from the film: ‘Man you gotta go.’ The philosophy of personal freedom is directly taken from a short book of Jean-Paul Sartre’s, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946): ‘I certainly kept close to that text the year or two I was writing SM’ (JH, p. 36).

  It is undoubtedly G’s best-known poem. He was originally very proud of it: ‘This … is the only time I have written adequately on one of the really important subjects: the poem is about movement as an experiment, and about “the search for value” as a value in itself’ (‘Four Young Poets – IV: Thom Gunn’, TES 2150, 3 August 1956, p. 995). He came in later life to dislike it, for the use of ‘one’ rather than ‘you’, ‘which I find very stilted now’, ‘because of its tremendous formality’ and because he was ‘not sure that the last line means anything’ (JC, p. 29).

  Line 32: G wrote: ‘most English people nowadays give “toward” two syllables, whereas Americans, like the Elizabethans, treat it as one. In my early books I was still an English poet, not yet Anglo-American’ (CP, p. 489).

  ‘At the Back of the North Wind’

  Composed while at Stanford, 1954.

  The title is that of a prose romance by George MacDonald (1824–1905), a Victorian writer for children, whose books G enjoyed as a boy. The book’s first chapter is called ‘The Hayloft’.

  ‘Autumn Chapter in a Novel’

  Composed 1954–55.

  The hero and his amorous adventures recall those of Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s novel Le Rouge et le noir. Stendhal (1783–1842) was one of G’s favourite novelists and Stendhal’s heroes, Julien and Fabrice (in La Chartreuse de Parme), came to represent for G the man who lives by the will. As a young man, G thought that ‘everyone plays a part, whether he knows it or not, so he might as well deliberately design a part, or a series of parts, for himself. Only a psychopath or a very good actor is in danger of becoming his part, however, so one who is neither is left in an interesting place between the starting point – the bare undefined and undirected self, if he ever existed – and the chosen part. This is a place rich in tensions between the achieved and the unachieved. I thought of Julien Sorel with Madame Rénal [Julien’s aristocratic mistress], the counterpoint a man’s vulnerable emotions made upon his seduction timed by the clock’ (OP, p. 162).

  G suggested to his editor, Charles Monteith, that this poem might be included in Selected Poems of Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, to make a contrast with poems like ‘On the Move’: ‘so as to show I can be well-turned, ironic, detached, and all that jazz …’ (F&F, 19 September 1961). G said with reference to ‘Autumn Chapter in a Novel’ that he ‘admired the kind of poem where meaning is achieved through the images, through a description – something which could be reducible to a statement but the statement isn’t made anywhere’ (JH, p. 41).

  ‘The Silver Age’

  Composed 1964.

  The Golden Age is traditionally the age of innocence, identified with sunlight and pastoral harmony. The Silver Age, therefore, reminds us of moonlight and inwardness. Cf. ‘For Signs’ and contrast ‘Sunlight’ in Gunn’s Moly, pp. 88–89 and 98–99 below.

  Livy – Titus Livius (59 BC–AD 17) – wrote a monumental history of Rome in 142 books, of which only 32 survive.

  The poem appears to be a not wholly successful attempt to write in accentual verse.

  ‘Elvis Presley’

  Composed in San Antonio, Texas, 1955, after hearing a Presley record on a jukebox.

  ‘[T]he poem is about the young Elvis Presley … of “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel”’ (JC, p. 29). He described the poem as saying ‘that art is one of the ways in which we can overcome the inadequacies of the condition we find ourselves living in’ (JH, p. 40).

  ‘The Allegory of the Wolf Boy’

  Composed 1956.

  Probably a response to the contemporary fashion for horror films such as The Werewolf (1956) and I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). G confirmed in conversation that the poem was about growing up as a gay youth and feeling compelled to live a double life.

  ‘Jesus and his Mother’

  Composed before leaving England, 1954.

  The ‘garden ripe with pears’ suggests a fifteenth-century Italian painting, such as by the Venetian artist Carlo Crivelli (d. 1495/1500). Compare ‘Expression’ (p. 129).

  ‘To Yvor Winters, 1955’

  Composed at Stanford, 1955–56.

  Winters (1900–68) is best known as a fiercely combative literary critic with a powerful code of stoical humanism. G admired such critical books as his In Defense of Reason (1947) but valued his poetry still more. In 1966 G listed the modern poets he most admired as Pound, Hardy and William Carlos Williams. ‘Eliot, Winters, Lowell etc,’ he continued, ‘come slightly lower – they do not experience so directly. On the other hand, they do try to understand their experience – which I suppose as a human being one ought to do – but the attempt to understand removes some of the vividness of the experience’ (TT, 5 May 1966). In other comparable lists he included Wallace Stevens and D. H. Lawrence. The emphasis on understanding is something he shared with Winters.

  The conflict between direct experience and considered reflection, central to Winters’s poetry and criticism, runs all through G’s work. It accounts for the contrasts in his versification and for the emphasis in the late work on openness and closure (see ‘Duncan’, pp. 181–82). In 1999 he edited Winters’s Selected Poems for the Library of America and elsewhere described him as ‘a man of great personal warmth with a deeper love of poetry than I have ever met in anybody else’ (OP, p. 176). He also thought Winters a great teacher, though as he developed he grew wary of him ‘from something of an instinct for self-preservation. The man was too strong …’ (OP, p. 178).

  Winters bred Airedale terriers for competition and admired the great boxer Joe Louis. In the introduction to his last book, Winters eloquently compares ‘the poet to the breeder of dogs and to the boxer, and the critic to the judge of both’ (Forms of Discovery, Athens, OH: Alan Swallow, 1967, xix).

  ‘Vox Humana’

  Composed 1956–57.

  Latin: ‘the human voice’. It is also the name for one of the stops on an organ. The poem, however, is a kind of riddle, to which the answer must be something like destiny, or even identity.

  Alexander the Great, a heroic figure with homosexual associations, was a preoccupation of G’s; he is G’s persona in ‘From an Asian Tent’ (p. 47). Sentenced to death for corrupting the young, Socrates was obliged to take hemlock, which is a poison. The ghost of Caesar appeared to his assassin, Marcus Brutus, before the Battle of Philippi (42 BC), to anticipate his defeat and death. The encounter is enacted in Julius Caesar 4.2. This list of classical heroes – mostly filtered through Shakespeare’s Greek and Roman plays – relates to another poem in SM, ‘A Plan of Self-Subjection’ (CP, p. 46):

  As Alexander or Mark Antony

  Or Coriolanus, whom I most admire,

  I mask self-flattery.

  ‘Vox Humana’ is one of G’s first experiments in syllabic metre, in which the syllables are counted but not the accents or feet.

  My Sad Captains

  Published by Faber & Faber in 1961. The book is in two parts. ‘The first is the culmination of my old style – metrical and rational but maybe starting to get a little more humane. The second half consists of a taking up of that humane impulse in a series of poems in syllabics’ (OP, p. 179). Part I has an epigraph adapted from Troilus and Cressida: ‘The will is infinite and the execution confined, the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit’ (3.2.79–82). The epigraph to Part II is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon: �
�I looked back as we crossed the crest of the foothills – with the air so clear you could see the leaves on Sunset Mountains two miles away. It’s startling to you sometimes – just air, unobstructed, uncomplicated air.’ G attributed his change of manner in the second section to the influence of William Carlos Williams. In the syllabic poems, he said, ‘I found a way, with Williams’ help, of incorporating the more casual aspects of life, the non-heroic things in life, that are of course a part of daily experience and infinitely valuable’ (PR, p. 151). See G’s essay ‘A New World: The Poetry of William Carlos Williams’ (OP, pp. 21–35).

  G claimed that writing in syllabic verse was ‘a way of teaching myself about unpatterned rhythms – that is, about free verse’ (OP, p. 179). He learned much about the distinction between free verse and metre from an essay by D. H. Lawrence: ‘It seems to me that the freer forms – and that includes syllabics – are hospitable to improvisation or the feel of improvisation. Lawrence … speaks of free verse as poetry of the present: that is, it grabs in the details and these are probably very casual details of the present, of whatever is floating though the air, whatever is on the table at the time, whatever is underfoot, however trivial – trivial but meaningful. Whereas metrical verse, he says … has the greater finish, because in a sense it deals with events or experience or thinking that are more finished. Finished in both senses: in a punning sense, it’s also more over and done with. He calls it “poetry of the past”’ (PR, p. 165). In another context he says that the poems are ‘more open to the sensory, to the process of life rather than the meaning of life’ (Bancroft 3:26). (For the Lawrence essay, see also Introduction, pp. xxxi–xxxii.) It was not until such poems as ‘Yoko’ (pp. 123–25) that G attempted a free-verse line comparable to Lawrence’s or to that of Lawrence’s master, Walt Whitman.

  In an unpublished interview of 1959, he compared the themes of this book with his earlier themes: ‘Alvarez said that the theme of my first book was “doubt” and that of my second “choice”. What comes after “choice”? … Well, I think, and hope, it will be “conduct”.’

  ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’

  Composed 1958. (Gunn had spent several months in Rome in 1954.)

  The setting is a sixteenth-century church in the Piazza del Popolo in Rome. It contains two frescos by Michelangelo da Caravaggio (1573–1610), one of them a Conversion of St Paul, depicted in dramatic chiaroscuro. In the Acts of the Apostles, Saul of Tarsus is a Jewish leader who persecutes Christians. Struck down by a vision on the Damascus road, he is converted to Christianity. In sign of the change in his life he changes his name to Paul. For Ananias and other details of the story see Acts 9.1–20.

  Caravaggio’s paintings, including those G alludes to, are often marked by homosexual feeling, and his life seems to have been short and dramatic. At the time of his death he was busy avoiding arrest for murder. He died young and in mysterious circumstances, though, as G later realised, there is no evidence for the legend of his death referred to here.

  When he wrote MSC, G had begun to see the limitations to his idea of the heroic. As he observed, this poem notices not only St Paul but ‘the poor old women praying in the chapel. So that to some extent I’ve gone out into the world, away from the first two books and the blustering heroism of people who are self-regarding. I praised and exalted such people as if there were no other way of getting outside oneself … Getting outside oneself was one of the things I learned from Williams …’ (JH, p. 42).

  ‘Innocence’

  Composed in Berlin, 1960.

  G was much preoccupied with innocence. For a positive account of innocence, see ‘Three’ (pp. 90–91) and the note to it (p. 236).

  G said that the story of this poem was taken from ‘a book called Autobiography of an SS Man, translated by Constantine FitzGibbon, which showed how somebody who began as a humane person could commit an atrocity. I dedicated it to Tony White … since we had discussed this kind of thing’ (JH, p. 45). ‘I should point out that dedicating a poem to someone does not necessarily mean that it is about him’ (CP, p. 490). For Tony White, see Introduction (p. xxvi), the poem ‘Talbot Road’ (pp. 144–50) and the note for it (pp. 252–53).

  G composed the poem in Berlin. It took an exceptionally long time to write because it gave expression to so many moral problems. G attempted to justify it in a long letter to Tony Tanner, who had criticised an early draft of it:

  In it I’m trying to deal with a problem I’ve never before fully faced in a poem, the problem of the consequences of energy (which I admire) without moral sanction.

  No, I am not trying to sell the SS man as something fine in his own way. But I am trying to show how like he is to most people, or rather how easy it would be for most people to (in the right circumstances) be in the SS … I think there is ultimately rather little difference, in war, between the attitude a soldier has toward killing (which is never clean, a neat hole thro the forehead) and that he has toward atrocity. By attributing innocence to this man I am not exonerating him or the SS, but I am attacking innocence.

  In the first 3 stanzas, I am deliberately keeping myself from judging against the boy (except in the line about ‘hardening to an instrument’ which is more against the SS than him), because I am trusting the last two stanzas to do the work for me. Surely those 2 stanzas show that the ‘courage, endurance, loyalty, and skill’ are virtues meaning nothing without the virtue of wisdom (vide. Plato passim), and that innocence is not, as popularly supposed, a virtue, but a mere vacancy, into which anything can be put, including horrors.

  Lines 6–7: ‘… guilt’s vague heritage / Self-pity and the soul …’ Though G was attracted to stoicism and so not especially prone to self-pity, he was nevertheless preoccupied with it. Of Ben Jonson’s poem ‘Ode to Himselfe’, he wrote: ‘It is a poem of self-pity, and (in spite of all that I was taught at Cambridge) self-pity is something people feel often enough for it to be a subject worth writing about’ (OP, p. 115). As James Campbell points out in his interview with G, the reference to Cambridge here is striking. G is thinking of the very moralistic literary criticism which he admired at university, especially that of F. R. Leavis: ‘Anybody who took Leavis’s lectures will remember the way he’d say “self-pit-teh” when talking about, let’s say, some poem by Shelley – “Ode to the West Wind”, perhaps … I think he thought self-pity was a limitation in moral fibre’ (JC, p. 23). But as G would point out in conversation, if you can’t feel sorry for yourself, you probably can’t feel sorry for others either. Moral failure of that kind is the subject of this poem, which is very much a critique of G’s earlier attitudes, heroic, stoical, existentialist or Leavisite. Of the gentler, more humanistic self that emerges in MSC, he said jokingly: ‘I was less of a fascist. I had been a Shakespearean, Sartrean fascist!’ (PR, p. 165).

  ‘Modes of Pleasure’

  Composed 1960. Originally titled ‘With Good Humor’.

  There are two poems with this title in MSC, both of them about sexual adventurers. G said they were ‘about going to the leather bars’: ‘I was reading the poems of Rochester [John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, a major poet of the seventeenth century] at the time I wrote “Modes of Pleasure,” so that might have something to do with it. I saw this poem as being a bit like Rochester’s, though they probably aren’t at all [alike]. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic’ (CH).

  ‘The Byrnies’

  Composed 1957–58.

  The heroes are Viking invaders. G wrote: ‘a byrnie is a chainmail shirt; a nicker was a water monster’ (CP, p. 490). Rereading William Golding’s The Inheritors in 1962, G realised that this poem ‘owes a lot in conception’ to Golding’s book (F&F, 25 August 1962). In 1971 he thought it ‘as good as I have got’ (Bancroft 3:26).

  ‘Claus von Stauffenberg’

  Composed 1958.

  Von Stauffenberg (1907–44) was the leader of the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler in 1944. W
hen the plot failed, he was arrested and executed. The analogy with Brutus (line 16) derives from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with its portrait of the idealistic assassin. Shakespeare’s Roman plays had an enormous influence on G’s youthful sense of stoical heroism. Cf. ‘Epitaph for Anton Schmidt’ in ‘Misanthropos’, pp. 70–71.

  Line 13: ‘The maimed young Colonel.’ Stauffenberg had lost his right hand and all but two of the fingers on his left.

  Line 17: ‘Over the maps a moment.’ Stauffenberg planted his bomb while attending a briefing given by Hitler and senior Nazi leaders. There were maps on the table.

  ‘Flying Above California’

  Composed 1960.

  After six years in the United States, G was becoming a regional poet, as much a Californian as Wordsworth was a Cumbrian. (Cf. ‘Night Taxi’, pp. 151–53. In both poems the proper names are crucial.)

  ‘Considering the Snail’