Selected Poems of Thom Gunn

by Thom Gunn

  ‘Rites of Passage’

  Composed February–November 1968.

  G used to say that this poem was influenced by the Californian rock group the Doors, and the lyrics of the group’s lead singer, Jim Morrison. No particular lyric seems to be referred to in the poem, but a song G especially admired, ‘The End’, includes these suggestive verses:

  Can you picture what will be

  So limitless and free,

  Desperately in need of some stranger’s hand

  In a desperate land?

  Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain

  And all the children are insane

  All the children are insane,

  Waiting for the summer rain.

  The song, like G’s poem, goes on to allude to Oedipal desire: ‘And he came to a door, and he looked inside. / “Father.” “Yes, son.” “I want to kill you. / Mother, I want to fuck you.”’ There can be no doubt that in ‘Rites of Passage’ G uses such myths and the Freudian account of them to deal with the complexities of his own childhood and growth to manhood. The poem is an LSD pastoral, but there is much evidence of the tradition of metamorphic poetry mentioned above. The transformation of the speaker may remind us of both Ovid and Shakespeare, especially Bottom’s metamorphosis in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Furthermore, in such lines as ‘See Greytop how I shine’, as the poet Robert Wells has pointed out to me, one can perhaps hear echoes of Native American songs, especially those admired and imitated by Yvor Winters (see Introduction, pp. xxvii–xxix) and his wife, the poet and novelist Janet Lewis. (See G’s essay ‘As If Startled Awake: The Poetry of Janet Lewis’, SL, pp. 66–73.)

  ‘Moly’

  Completed April 1970.

  It was originally called ‘The Witch’, and later, ‘The Witch’s Drink’. The witch in question is Circe from Homer’s Odyssey. See the epigraph, which refers to the Circe narrative in Homer’s poem.

  G summarised the poem’s situation as follows: ‘Odysseus’ seaman … has been turned to a pig – and realises he has always had a potential piggishness in him. He searches for the moly, in the hope that it will return his piggishness to its [proper place], subordinated by “the human title”, and my thought is that he will be able to control his piggishness – something everybody contains – the better from having recognized it’ (Bancroft 3:18).

  Line 26, ‘human title’: In a notebook, G writes: ‘I see the human title as both something primitive & sophisticated’ (Bancroft 3:18). The phrase comes from The Two Noble Kinsmen (1.1.224–32) by Shakespeare and John Fletcher:

  1st Queen: Thus dost thou still make good the tongue o’

  th’ world.

  2nd Queen: And earn’st a deity equal with Mars –

  3rd Queen: If not above him, for

  Thou being but mortal mak’st affections bend

  To godlike honors; they themselves, some say,

  Groan under such a mast’ry.

  Theseus: As we are men,

  Thus should we do; being sensually subdued

  We lose our human title.

  ‘For Signs’

  Mainly written in November 1968 but completed early in 1969.

  It was originally called ‘Moon Poem’, and later ‘The Moon & the Field’. As a ‘moon poem’, ‘For Signs’ contrasts with ‘Sunlight’, the last poem in Moly; G wrote of ‘the rhythm of the book’ as running from moonlight to sunlight (CW, August 1971). It was influenced by the revival of astrology in the 1960s. ‘The title comes from the Bible, God setting the sun and moon in the sky “for signs, and for seasons” [Genesis 1.14] … The moon was in Scorpio when I was born, I am told, and I am further told that that means sexual perversion … Part 1 is me awake in moonlight, Part 2 is dreaming, Part 3 is an essay on the moon …’ (TT, 25 December 1968).

  G wrote: ‘by a chicken bowl I simply meant a bowl from which chickens on a farm eat or drink’ (CP, p. 490).

  ‘Three’

  Composed August 1967.

  In the 1973 article ‘Writing a Poem’, G wrote:

  A few years ago I found myself preoccupied by certain related concepts I wanted to write about … They were a familiar enough association of ideas, it’s true – trust, openness, acceptance, innocence – but I felt them all the more vividly and personally the more signally I failed to get them into a poem … Then one day I was walking on a hill going down to the Pacific, which it met at a narrow, partly-sheltered beach. I came to the beach from the bushes and was confronted by a naked family – father, mother and small son. The son rushed up to me very excited, shouting ‘hi there, hi there’ in his shrill voice, and rushed away without waiting for an answer. I walked off and felt very happy about the comeliness of the scene: it had, too, a kind of decorum that made my mind return to it several times in the next few hours. I mentioned it to some friends that evening and to others the next day, and the day after that I realized that I wanted to write a poem about the naked family. I didn’t know any more than that I wanted to preserve them on paper in the best way I knew, as a kind of supersnapshot, getting my feeling about them into my description of them. It wasn’t till the poem was finished that I realized I had among other things found an embodiment for my haunting cluster of concepts, though I hadn’t known it at the time.

  (OP, pp. 151–52)

  ‘From the Wave’

  Composed early 1967, completed April.

  The title recalls ‘On the Move’ (pp. 15–16), which it ‘in some way’ answers (JH, p. 47). The shift from bikers to surfers is significant. ‘The poem was about a rather chilly January walk along a dull beach in San Francisco with some friends. We were suddenly astonished by the appearance of a bunch of surfers. A few days later, and I was in England on a visit … so most of it was written by my aunts’ stove in [Snodland, Kent,] England’ (Letter to Michael Vince, 25 January 2000).

  ‘Street Song’

  Completed May 1969.

  The first draft is entitled ‘Dealer’s Song’. It is followed in G’s notebook by the mysterious sentence ‘Alyosha is a dealer’ – presumably a reference to Dostoevsky’s saintly hero Alyosha Karamazov (Bancroft 3:10). Alyosha is also rather mysteriously present in the late poem ‘A Wood near Athens’ (pp. 190–92).

  This is the spiel of a dope pedlar: ‘not a poem taking sides. It is no more an encouragement to take drugs than [Robert Browning’s] “Porphyria’s Lover” is an encouragement to murder’ (G, quoted in Worlds: Seven Modern Poets, ed. Geoffrey Summerfield, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974, p. 266). The poem is modelled on Elizabethan pedlars’ songs as adapted for sophisticated purposes by John Dowland in ‘Fine knacks for ladies’ and Thomas Campion in ‘Cherry Ripe’, and imitated by Shakespeare in Autolycus’s songs from The Winter’s Tale. Dowland’s song, with its beautiful central line ‘It is a precious jewel to be plain’, was praised by Yvor Winters, notably in ‘The Audible Reading of Poetry’ from his book The Function of Criticism. This essay was of major importance to G, both in his use of metre and in his public readings.

  Line 1, ‘I am too young to grow a beard’: recalls Hermes with ‘the down just showing on his face’, in the epigraph to Moly from Homer’s Odyssey.

  Line 6, ‘Keys lids acid and speed’: drug slang – ‘keys’ and ‘lids’ are measures of marijuana, ‘acid’ is LSD and ‘speed’ is amphetamine.

  Line 10, ‘Acapulco Gold’: In a letter to a friend, G writes: ‘I have a lot of the best ever grass – it is known as Acapulco Gold and is $15 a lid, it is that good’ (TT, ?30 May 1968).

  Line 21, ‘Pure acid – it will scrape your brain’: ‘I won’t turn into an angel and I won’t go mad, but it does burn the chromosomes very nicely and doing so cleans a nice hole in the brain which can be filled by what one chooses to put there’ (TT, undated letter, prob. 13 January 1969).

  ‘Grasses’

  Composed during 1969, completed September of that year.

  Originally titled ‘Kirby’s Cove’, then ‘The Fort at Kirby’s Cove’. G called it ‘my first French Symboli
st poem’ (TT, 13 February 1970).

  ‘The Discovery of the Pacific’

  Composed autumn 1968 to mid-1969.

  Originally called ‘The Opening of the West’. The published title recalls that of a rejected poem of this period called ‘The Discovery of San Francisco’. It was about adolescent lovers and was presumably meant to be paired with this one.

  ‘[T]hese two are part of the … wave of 1967-ers crossing America for the Summer of Love in San Francisco’ (TT, undated, ?1969).

  ‘Sunlight’

  Composed April 1967.

  ‘[M]y favourite poem by myself’ (F&F, 24 August 1992). Soon after writing the poem, G said: ‘I’m very aware … of the division between that part of a man that seeks to define – defining is a process of choice, so of limitation, so of rejection – and that part of him that seeks to accept the world. I do not think that they should exclude each other – if they do, the man is impoverished – and both parts are always there in any one man. But certainly it is likely that one will dominate over the other. In the past, I’ve written a lot about the defining impulse – to the point of tedium, I expect. In this next poem, which is about the sun, I realised after I had written it that I had been trying to make amends. Here I am examining the idea of acceptance. Behind it, in particular, is my memory of a huge gathering in Golden Gate Park [in San Francisco], at the end of which [Allen] Ginsberg and [Gary] Snyder and a crowd of twenty thousand people chanted to the setting sun. This is my own address to the sun’ (BBC, 19 December 1968).

  G, who thought of himself as neither religious nor spiritual, accepted that ‘Sunlight’ could be described as a hymn: ‘… the sun is like a god. At the same time I do say in the poem that it has flaws and it’s all going to burn out one day … It’s finite … but, to take a line of Stevens’s from “Sunday Morning”: “Not as a god, but as a god might be”’ (PR, p. 167).

  Jack Straw’s Castle

  Published by Faber & Faber in 1976. This highly varied collection was designed to contrast with Moly. ‘Much of Moly was about dreams; this was about nightmares … the drug dreams of Moly have all gone sour in Jack Straw …’ (PR, p. 176). ‘[T]here’s a lot of uneasiness in the book … there’s a great line from a song by [the psychedelic rock group] The Grateful Dead – “Having a hard time living the good life” – and that could be an epigraph to Jack Straw’s Castle’ (JH, p. 52). Where Moly evokes a peaceable kingdom visited by angels, the sequence ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’ is dominated by the Furies.

  The poems in the book’s first section are quite close to the world of Moly, with its utopian vision of America, but already with ‘Iron Landscapes’ there is a political threat to the ‘dream of righteous permanence, from the past’. Like the Moly poems, these are strictly metrical in form. The nightmarish poems in the second section are in experimental free verse, very loose in structure and, in the present editor’s judgement, not very convincing. Among G’s least successful works, none of them is included in this selection. I have sought to represent that side of the book with the title sequence alone. The third and final section of JSC consists mainly of autobiographical pieces, often with English settings and characters. G originally thought of calling these pieces ‘English poems’. He was thinking of writing a prose autobiography at the time and succeeded in writing three essays in autobiography: ‘My Suburban Muse’, ‘Cambridge in the Fifties’ and ‘My Life up to Now’, all included in OP.

  JSC is also the book in which G comes out as gay.

  ‘Diagrams’

  Composed April 1970, while he was completing the Moly poems. Earlier titles include ‘Manhattan’ and ‘Sky Men’.

  A number of photographs exist which show men of the Mohawk nation working high up on the Empire State Building in New York at the time of its construction.

  ‘Iron Landscapes’

  Composed May–June 1973. Originally titled ‘American iron/ Iron Architecture’, then later ‘Metal Landscape/American iron (and French Copper)’.

  ‘Iron Landscapes’ was written during the Watergate scandal that brought about the fall of President Richard Nixon in 1974. The United States, still entangled in the last stages of the Vietnam War, was troubled by recurrent anti-war and antigovernment protests.

  ‘LACKAWANNA’ is indeed the name on the ferry building. Its importance to this poem about the polity and people of the United States, though, is in its evidently Native American origins. The aboriginal inhabitants of North America shadow this collection and feature prominently in the previous poem, ‘Diagrams’.

  ‘Last Days at Teddington’

  Composed 1971.

  On a recent visit to Britain, G had stayed with his brother, Ander, at his home in Teddington, near Richmond upon Thames. Ander and his family were on the point of moving house.

  ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’

  Begun in about September 1973, completed 1974.

  ‘Night Work’ seems to have been an alternative title at one stage, but the present title was an option from the beginning.

  From late 1972 onwards there are occasional references in G’s notebooks to gorgons and ghouls, the dark side of drug culture, nightmare and the (Charles) Manson family (see p. xxxvii). He had also been reading Dante, in particular the Inferno, and at one point he notes: ‘I’d like to write a poem that was about leather, cocaine, gardening, Dante, the Grateful Dead, cats, and Caravaggio’ (1973, Bancroft 3:32): all long-standing obsessions and enthusiasms of G’s, most of which are gathered into ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’. In another note about ‘the central section’, G says: ‘It is a poem about sickness, so this must be the central sickness – the central self-destructiveness, oneself stoking the fires that burn the self in a central courtyard’ (Bancroft 3:34, notebook XIV). The same notebook includes this remarkable note:

  the (sudden) unavoidable realization of how self-destructive I am … when I have always – always – assumed I was the opposite. Maybe needs thinking out in terms of dreams, also in relation to my confusion of values.

  How do I work out the relation of my in general hippie values, I mean I do believe in love & trust etc, & then the other thing? I say that s & m [sadomasochism] is a form of love. I think it is, but I don’t think that goes quite deep enough.

  In notebook XV (Bancroft 34:36, begun 10 July 1974), G notes an answer to George Orwell’s question ‘does one “accept” the concentration camps?’: ‘one accepts them in the sense not of approving them but in the sense of acknowledging that one is part of them – they are a room in my castle.’ He adds: ‘also the idea of being loose in one’s own castle’.

  The first drafts of sections 1 and 2 of the published text are preceded by a note dated 13 September:

  Idea for an open series:

  Freaks/Spectral Mutations/Spectral Faeces

  i.e. freaks of the imagination, but also a glance at the sense of ‘deformed people’, and more than a glance at the sense of heads as freaks

  So: grotesques, or irrational images rising from trips and dreams. Night-work (isn’t that Freud’s phrase?).

  G also wrote: ‘the Oxford Dictionary defines Jack Straw as “a ‘straw man’; a man of no substance, worth, or consideration”. A pub in Hampstead is called Jack Straw’s Castle, but I just took the name and intended no allusions to Hampstead in the poem’ (CP, p. 491). In an interview, G also mentioned that ‘one of many songs that I like from the Grateful Dead [is] called “Jack Straw”’ (PR p. 176). At a poetry reading G gave when he was still working on the poem, he remarked that the castle stands for the body: the building in which one’s consciousness resides. While he was writing it, he was moving house: ‘I had a series of anxiety dreams. I had moved into the wrong house. I had moved in with the wrong people. Once to my horror I found I was sharing an apartment with [President] Nixon. Very often I would keep discovering new rooms in the house that I’d known nothing about’ (WS, p. 11).

  The poem includes many literary references, though not ones which need to be picked up: ‘I was r
eading Dante at the time, so lots of references to the Inferno come in … The kittens changing into the Furies came from Through the Looking-Glass, when the kittens change into the Red Queen and the White Queen and so on. There’s a bit from Kidnapped when David Balfour’s walking up some stairs and suddenly there’s a great gap’ (PR, p. 176). Another influence from childhood reading is probably Beatrix Potter’s uncharacteristically disturbing story The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, or The Rolypoly Pudding. As a small boy, G identified with the mischievous hero of that story, Tom Kitten, who, exploring the chimney of a house, loses himself in its dark recesses and is then kidnapped by rats.