Massachusetts Review, Inc

Massachusetts Review, Inc.
Rule and Energy: The Poetry of Thom Gunn

Author(s): Jay Parini and Thom Gunn
Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 134-151
Published by: Massachusetts Review, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25089258
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Jay Parini
Rule and Energy:

The Poetry of Thorn Gunn
Tn an early poem addressed to his mentor, Yvor Winters, Thorn
Gunn writes:
You keep both Rule and Energy in view,

Much power in each, most in the balanced two:
Ferocity existing in the fence

Built an exercised intelligence.
by
These potentially counterdestructive principles exist everywhere in his

not the of their but a tense cli
work, sapping poems strength creating
mate of balanced opposition. Any poet worth thinking twice about
possesses at least an energetic mind; but it is the harnessing of this
which makes for excellence. In Gunn's work an
energy apparently
unlimited energy of vision finds, variously, the natural boundaries which
make expression?and clarity?possible.
The exact balance of Rule and Energy occurs enough in even
rarely
the For the most a of either prin
greatest poets. part, superabundance
ciple damages the final product, so that one is left wishing that, say,
Ginsberg had Rule equal to his Energy or, conversely, that Wilbur
had less control over more content. This is not meant to
disparage
either both of whom have on many occasions achieved the pre
poet,
carious balance of great art. My purpose here is to suggest how Gunn,
over a has effected a balance of Rule and
roughly quarter century,
all his own, creating in the process a body of poems able to
Energy
withstand the closest scrutiny.
Gunn has lived in the U.S., mostly in San Francisco, since his gradu
ation from Cambridge in 1953. But his early poems, especially, reflect
his British heritage and the interest in "formalist" poetry characteristic
of poets identified with the so-called Movement. "What poets like
Elizabeth and I had in common at that time
Larkin, Davie, Jennings,
was that we were deliberately eschewing Modernism, and turning
back, though not very thoroughly, to traditional resources in structure
134
and method," says Gunn.1 This return to traditional resources was
common to the period of the early fifties in general, not only in
England, as the work of Ransom, Roethke, Wilbur and Lowell shows.
The traditionalist bent of Gunn's first book, Fighting Terms (1954),
tugs in opposition to his rebellious themes. The poet most often invokes
a soldier persona, an existential warrior in the act of self-definition.
"The Wound" is among the best poems here, the first in the book; its
speaker is variously Achilles or "the self who dreamt he was Achilles"
(Gunn's description) :
The huge wound in my head began to heal

About the beginning of the seventh week.
Its valleys darkened, its villages became still:
For joy I did not move and dared not speak;
Not doctors would cure it, but time, its patient skill.
The slightly "sprung" pentameter, the emblem of the wound that runs
through the poem, and the hallucinatory progress of the narrator/
persona together produce the wonderful tautness found in Gunn's
earliest verse. Achilles's "real" wound is the death of his friend, his
lover, Patroclus:
I called for armour, rose, and did not reel.
But, when
I thought, rage at his noble pain
Flew to my head, and turning I could feel
My wound break open wide. Over again

I had to let those storm-lit heal.
valleys
The poem represents a young man's via the form of dramatic

effort,
monologue, to distance himself from his subject; this stage is crucial in
any poet's development. The beginning writer rarely has sufficient space
between himself and his material. The use of a persona helps, for it
allows the poet to search for a to himself
sympathetic alter-ego, study
indirectly, safely. The poem acts as a grid through which the light of
self-expression passes; with luck, of the true nature
something poet's
remains.
1I am grateful to Mr. Gunn for me to quote from his

allowing unpub
lished autobiographical piece, "My Life Up to Now," from which most of
the prose passages from his work are taken. This essay will appear eventually
as an introduction to a of Gunn's work to appear in England,
bibliography
edited by Jan Hagstom.
135
The Massachusetts Review
The warrior-lover in these poems is self-consciously

figure aggressive
at times, but Gunn succeeds by sheer force of will in a poem like
"Carnal Knowledge," his most striking early poem:
Even in bed I pose: desire may grow

More circumstantial and less circumspect
Each night, but an acute girl would suspect
My thoughts might not be, like my body, bare.
I wonder if you know, or, knowing, care?
You know I know you know I know you know.
The knows himself to be a poseur, and

speaker self-contempt gathers
through the poem, leading ultimately to feelings of inadequacy: "I

know of no emotions we can share." He asks her, then, to abandon
him to his ineffectual stammering. Gunn affects a simplicity of diction

reminiscent of the Elizabethan "plain style," but it is also the casual
diction of an adolescent, full of a young lover's painful self-conscious
ness and disposition to emotional "Carnal Knowledge,"
complexity.
owing to its sheer verbal dexterity, stays in the mind where many of
the poems in Fighting Terms fade.
Among the accomplished poems from this early phase of Gunn's
career is "Tamer and Hawk," which treats of the Rule/Energy con
flict in tightly rhymed trimeter stanzas (though the last line in each
has two instead of three feet) :
I thought I was so tough,

But gentled at your hands
Cannot be quick enough
To fly for you and show
That when I go I go
At your commands.
The poem is a swift, bold stroke; its central conceit is a subtly worked
out metaphor?the hawk is possessed by but in turn possesses the tamer:
"You but half-civilize, / Taming me in this way." The theme of
possession and control, of the positive and of any in
negative aspects
tense relationship (whether between man and woman or poet and his
language), has rarely found more distinct expression. "Tamer and
Hawk" is equal to anything in Gunn's later volumes, and it points the
way to the direction of his next book.
The Sense ofMovement (1957) fulfills the promise of Gunn's first
book, displaying a new range of assimilated (or half-assimilated) voices
136
and the central of his work?the con
refining, somewhat, metaphor
flict of intellect and emotion. Having left Cambridge, Gunn passed
a in Rome and went to California, where he has remained.
nearly year
More importantly for his work, he began reading Yeats, whom he later
refers to as "the second most disastrous influence after Milton." Yeats
is disastrous because un assimilable; the Yeatsian cadences can be

only
not Yeatsian mannerisms a fatal attraction
parodied, imitated; possess
for because are too mimickable. But this over
young poets they easily
states the case (as does Gunn).
The Yeatsian manner lent a new richness to Gunn's verse. His
most widely anthologized poem, "On the Move," derives explicitly

from the master:
The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows

Some hidden and the gust of birds
purpose,
That spurts across
field, the wheeling
the swallows
Have in the trees and undergrowth.
nested
Seeking their instinct, or their or both,

poise,
One moves with an uncertain violence
Under the dust thrown a baffled sense
by
Or the dull thunder of approximate words.
The attribution of "some hidden purpose" to the animal world, the

seeking of "signs," the epithet "wheeling," the intense feelings con
trolled by a blank verse that is heavily enjambed: these traits recall
Yeats, specifically, though the influence is not overbearing. On the con
Gunn adds of his own to a modern tradition
trary, something great
(as do Roethke and Larkin in their own ways).
"On the Move" opens for examination the volume one
throughout
of Gunn's central ideas: that action is crucial to existential self-defini
tion and that individual freedom depends, necessarily, upon the freedom
of others. Poets are rarely philosophers; they "lift" ideas which seem
compatible, which affect their sensibility and set their own language in
motion. Gunn's arguments come, from Sartre's lecture
explicitly,
L'Existentialksme est un humanisme:
When a man commits himself to realizing that he is

anything, fully
not choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a
only
legislator deciding for the whole of mankind?in such a moment a man
cannot escape from the sense of and profound
complete responsibility.
There are many, indeed, who show no such anxiety. But one affirms
that they are disguising their anguish or are in flight from it.
merely
137
So Gunn's heroes race up the highway "as flies hanging in heat." Their
uniforms?leather jackets and goggles?lend an impersonality which
is terrifying to spectators. "They strap in doubt?by hiding it, robust?
/ And almost hear a meaning in their noise." Yet Gunn admires them:
"Men manufacture both machine and soul," he asserts. This supreme
existentialnotion, that soul as well as machine has its ontological basis
in the creative will, lifts "On the Move" out of the realm of common
place observation or of the motorcyclists. "It is a part solu
glorification
tion, after all," the poet says. The Boys are, at least, self-defined; they
have chosen their form of life. Gunn concludes the poem:
At worst, one is in motion, and at best,
Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,

One is always nearer not still.
by keeping
A Zen master would no doubt object; nevertheless, Gunn isolates an

"belief" of our times: that motion is itself a positive quality,
important
a denial of an assertion of will over inert matter.
death,
Much of The Sense ofMovement was written while Gunn studied
at Stanford under Yvor Winters, and these poems reflect his teacher's
aesthetic to some extent. To "was an in
Winters, says Gunn, poetry
strument for exploring the truth of things, as far as human beings can
and it can do so with verbal exactitude than prose
explore it, greater
can Yet Gunn's notion of well the nar
manage." poetry goes beyond
row strictures of Winters, admitting a wider range of feeling. Indeed,
his belief that reality inheres in the particulars of experience almost
works Winters's dedication to abstract reason. Gunn's poetry
against
is not it explores concrete in a sensu
intellectual, finally; rather, reality
ous manner. poems in this book, in fact, could be called
The worst
"arguments." They make assertions about the human condition (as in

"Vox Humana") such as the following: "Much is unknowable." The
best work here embodies the texture of Gunn's own life, as in "At the
Back of the North Wind":
All summer's warmth was stored there in the hay;

the troughs of water froze: the boy
Below,
Climbed nightly up the rungs behind the stalls
And between the clothes he heard
planted deep
The kind wind bluster, but the last he knew
Was and filled his head, the smell of hay.
sharp
138
His sense-receptors come alive here, pricked by experience, registered
in clear These traits over into his next, and
tough, language. carry
better, book.
My Sad Captains (1961) can, without strain, be called a "water

shed" in Gunn's career. Its two the
parts neatly separate early style
(formal poetry about the creative will and self-determination) and the
later, freer style (largely concerned with the interplay of man and
nature and the of Gunn never abandons metrical verse,
necessity love).
but the echoes of Yeats and others disappear. Captains is possibly Gunn's
book to date.
strongest
Part I bears an epigraph from Shakespeare's Troilus relevant to my
overall theme: "The will is infinite and the execution confined, the
desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit." Again, Gunn's pre
occupation with Rule and Energy surfaces. The book opens with one
of his finest poems, "In Santa Maria del Popolo," a meditation on
Caravaggio's famous "Conversion of St. Paul." In the painting Paul
makes a crucial existential choice, and this appealed to the younger
Gunn; Paul sprawls before his horse, arms uplifted:
I see him sprawl,

Foreshortened from the head, with hidden face,
Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul.
O wily limiting the scene
painter,
From a of dusty forms
cacophony
To the one convulsion, what is it you mean
In that wide gesture of the lifting armsi1
Gunn's of an existential moment widens with this poem;

conception
where previously his self-defining heroes asserted themselves willfully,
even recklessly (as in "The Beaters," a poem about
sadists), here the
poet focuses on the act of contrition as an heroic Saul limits
gesture.
himself in becoming Paul, much in the way Caravaggio limits his scene
to "the one convulsion" or the way Gunn himself concentrates on one
image. These acts of limitation, in effect, gather the energies which

might otherwise disperse.
The Gunn who celebrated soldiers and motorcyclists is not quite
finished, however; most of the remaining poems in Part I resurrect
earlier personae. "Innocence" treats of a soldier's in
young schooling
indifference, "A compact innocence, child-like and clear, / No doubt
could no act could harm." The here can, be
penetrate, irony indeed,
called an advance from the celebration of the soldier-hero. "Black
early
139
Jackets" represents a critique of the heroic mode of The Sense ofMove

ment; the red-haired who drove a van on is meta
boy weekdays
morphosed on Sundays?becoming not an individual hero but a parody

of the rebel he affects, no longer possessing even the simple virtue of
movement which implies a physical if not metaphysical inclination
toward the future:
He stretched out like a cat, and rolled

The bitterish taste of beer upon his tongue,
And listened to a joke being told:
The was the things he among.
present stayed
Part I is the culmination of Gunn's early style, participating in the

same mode it criticizes.
The last stanza of "Waking in a Newly-Built House" could serve
as an to Gunn's mature
epigraph style:
rests on the things,

Calmly, perception
and is aware of them only in
their definition, their fine
precise
lack of even potential meanings.
From here on, Gunn will aim more to describe than to prescribe experi
ence. The poems in Part II, written in syllabics, move beyond the rigid
of formal verse; force on the poem a nerve
expectations syllabics
wrackingly regular irregularity: the reader feels the arbitrary restraint

of a given number of syllables per line. When syllabics work, the effect
is the lines seem cut off like raw, un
stunning, unsettling: fingers,
ban daged.
takes up the theme of perception, extend
"Flying Above California"
ing it:
Sometimes
on fogless days by the Pacific,

there is a cold hard light without break
that reveals what is?no more

merely
and no less. That limiting candour,
that accuracy of the beaches,

is part of the ultimate richness.
140
"That candour" is a new restraint, a new Rule to harness

limiting
Gunn's Energy of vision. The poet longs to see beyond what is there;
he wants to to revelation. But "exact
description give way seeing things
as are" Wallace Stevens's a necessary formal
ly they (in phrase) places
restraint upon the poet; he must learn to keep his eye on the object.
"La poete," says Andre Gide, uest celui qui regarded The hard light
of sustained attention will yield, for Gunn, a batch of his finest lyrics.
"Considering the Snail" seems to me the best poem in this book. The
poet's vision here filters through a wide-angle lens: "The snail pushes
through a green / night." A deep image unifies the poem, this magnified
view of a creature moving "in a wood of desire, / pale antlers barely
stirring / as he hunts." Gunn's old interest in will emerges for recon
sideration. There is no will here, perhaps: "I cannot tell," he admits,
"what power is at work, drenched there / with Gunn exam
purpose."
ines the life-force at its most elemental level, and this snail's low fury
is not finally of a different substance from that of the gang-boys gun
ning their motorcycles in "On the Move," merely of a different order.
The poet draws no or abstract conclusions from his
profound close-up
of the snail; he allows meaning to assert itself
subliminally. Surely the
snail is not really "self-defining"? It cannot be blamed for this fact.
Indeed, Gunn moves quietly here toward a poetry of celebration. His
early preoccupation with the heroic ideal is subtly undermined by the
snail's deliberate progress across a of litter.
heap
The thirteen poems in Part II are a cluster of Gunn's best work,
marked a for detail and sustained a new exactness
by passionate eye by
of diction; his imagery has a new sharpness, the poems glitter like cut
glass. "My Sad Captains," the title poem, the sequence; it is
completes
Gunn's farewell to the past, to his obsession with heroism. It constitutes
a deeply felt
elegy to his old self, taking its title from Mark Antony's
moving speech in Act II of Antony and Cleopatra:
Come,
Let's have one other night: call to me
gaudy
All my sad fill our bowls: once more
captains,
Let's mock the midnight bell.
For Gunn, "One by one they appear in / the darkness," his friends,
a few historical persons whom he felt close to at one "be
point. Now,
fore they fade they stand / perfectly embodied, all / the past
lapping
them like a cloak of chaos." Gunn's elegy is a tender yet fiercely self
critical piece, a farewell to what has been, a resolution to approach life
141
and art from now on with and humaneness.

greater flexibility
This new direction finds direct expression in Positives a
(1966),
event in Gunn's career, a collaborative sequence of poems and
unique
photographs done with his brother, Ander Gunn. "I had always wanted
to work with pictures," says the poet; he was looking for a "form of
fragmentary inclusiveness which could embody the detail and history
of that good year," a year spent home again in England. He also bor
rowed consciously from William Carlos Williams, whose openness of
form proved useful on this specific project and suggested a way into
Gunn's later verse.
The of free verse, of course, was with the attendant loss

problem
of metrical verse forces a to control his energies,
energy; poet language
as Gunn "it is the nature of the control exer
says very neatly: being
cised that becomes part of the life being spoken about." If the control
dominates the too bombast occurs. But, with
poet's energy thoroughly,
free verse, the danger lies "in being too relaxed, too lacking in con
in Positives tense and unconstrained
trolling energy." I find the poems
at the same time; their language adheres firmly to the images evoked,
images which move from birth to death, from childhood to old age,
always with compassion and wit. Although Gunn's sympathies lodge
with the downcast of the world, those on the fringe, there is
clearly
an acute worldliness about these an ironic bite that redeems them
poems,
from sentimentality, as in the following lines which gloss a photograph
of a woman a slice of cake a
eating through painful grimace:
You have no idea what a
hard life a rich leads.

person
What with servants and jewels,

and having to go to Harrods
every so as to
day
a big article
purchase
and help use up the
imports.
It's a relief sometimes

quite
to sit down for a while with
an and a slice
expresso tiny
of cake.
expensive
You have no idea, either,

how hard it is
seeming to lead such a life.
142
The following year Gunn published Touch (1967), establishing
what I take to be his "mature" mixture of free verse,
style?a syllabics,
and metrical verse in poems largely concerned with what Wallace
Stevens called a "sense of the world." Gunn writes,
poet's movingly,
of personal love, of sunlight, of his pity for mankind, of himself among
others. Touch begins with an invocation of the life-force itself, the
whose must assist "vulnerable,
goddess Proserpina, implacable energies
quivering" mankind. The forces of darkness cannot

contain her, "she
will allow / no hindrance, none, and bursts up / through potholes and
narrow flues / an outlet." These are necessary for the
seeking energies
man who would sustain his own?"without love, without hope, but /
without renunciation."
The poems in Touch present a sustained analysis of man's fallen
condition. In "No Speech from the Scaffold," for instance, the reader
watches a condemned man ("What he did is, now, / immaterial")
move through dewy grass, nodding to friends the last goodbyes, putting
his head on the block for chopping: nothing now matters, "rather, it is
his conduct / as he rests there, while / he is still a human." Gunn's
message is important and fresh. The efforts at self-definition which
obsess his personae reach outward here in the greater effort sim
early
ply to be human, which involves (as Bertrand Russell said beautifully)
"the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity
for the suffering of mankind."
The title poem itself, "Touch," is among Gunn's permanent achieve
ments. He addresses his sleeping lover as he lowers himself into bed,
"next to / you, my skin slightly / numb with the restraint / of habits
. . . the black frost / of outsideness." warmth overcomes
Eventually,
this separateness:
frosty
You turn and

hold me tightly, do
you know who
I am or am I
your mother or
the nearest human being to
hold on to in a
dreamed pogrom.
It is touch that loosens a whelm of human feeling which "seeps / from

our touch in / continuous creation." Two individuals touching, instinc
tively, in the darkness opens a conduit to that "dark / wide realm where
143
we / walk with everyone." Gunn writes here with magisterial control

of great emotion, and "Touch" is the best poem in this volume.
a series of linked about a man who survives a
Misanthroposy poems
global war and imagines himself alone in the world, occupies much
of the book. It is an ambitious and partially successful poem, central
to Touch as a whole, and worth treating at some length. The first
part is "The Last Man," a five-poem sequence in which the scene is
established. The narrator wants to survive, and he does so
by stripping
away those layers of disguise which were previously in a
of some use
"civilized world." He confines himself to one hill, avoiding "the mo
mentous rhythm / of the sea." He is not heroic; indeed, "If he pre
serves himself in nature, / it is as a lived caricature / of the race he
to survive." The he can trust, he learns, is dis
happens only feeling
gust. His poverty becomes, finally, "a sort of uniform." And he takes
pleasure merely in perception of, say, the starlight, realizing himself
to be condemned "in consciousness that its own end." He retreats
plots
to a remembrance of the sun, with its attendant "The clearest
hopes,
in the whole universe." This has a curious abstractness, a
light light
Platonic radiance, but it is unredemptive. The central character is re
duced here to a level of instinct where identification with the landscape

is complete: "Nothing moves / at the edge of the mind."
Six poems follow in "Memoirs of the World," in which the hero
recalls the world he has lost, his various disguises, poses ("Who was
it in dark glasses?"). He clings to perception: "I must keep to the
world's bare surface," stripped of everything in the end but pure con
sciousness. At this nadir, an upward turning begins, embodied in "Epi
taph for Anton Schmidt," which celebrates a man who "helped the
to from the Nazis and was executed. This example,
Jews get away"
redeems the whole it is enough for our narrator
somehow, section;
hero that one good man follows, "Elegy on the Dust,"
existed. What
pictures a world wherein everything human is erased: "They have all
come who sought distinction hard / to the universal knacker's yard."
This elegant poem ends by recalling Eliot's "Gerontion," each grain
of sand "hurled / In endless hurry round the world."
"The First Man" completes Misanthropos as its hero now creeps
"mole-like . . . over mounds of dirt." His human have di
qualities
minished: "If he is man, he is the first man lurking / In a thicket of
time." It is as if time has turned backward on itself, biting its tail like
the mythical world serpent. The last man has become the first man,
"An of His has no chance
unreflecting organ perception." humanity
144
to reassert itself until, amazingly, in the fourteenth poem, he looks from
his hill and sees a of a of men
smudge humanity, group approaching,
and his "Mouth struggles with the words that mind forgot." In the
next poem, men and women appear. The hero hides behind a
forty
rock?until he is moved by human compassion to help one poor soul
to his feet. The others, bewildered, pass him: "They turn and look at
me full, / and as
they pass they name me." This is truly "a bare world,
and lacks / history." Nonetheless, the hero asserts, speaking in the first
person:
an act of memory,
By
I make the recognition:
I stretch out the word to him
from which conversations start,
naming him, also, name.
by
In this act of naming Gunn discovers the origins of humanity; the word
becomes the vital link between one man and another, and a of
way
contact that the individual and inanimate sands hurled about the world
had no means for. The concludes with a meditation on the
sequence
Biblical "dust to dust" theme: "The touched arm feels of dust, mixing
with dust / On the hand that touches it." But Gunn draws his own
conclusion, suggesting that is not the point; survival is what
mutability
matters, plus "all there is to see." Per est
dpi percipere.
While Misanthropos is Gunn's centerpiece in Touch, I prefer many
of the other poems, such as "Snowfall," "In the Tank," and "The
Produce District," poems of exact marked a sense
observation, by deep
of controlling intelligence. They point the way toward Moiy (1971),
Gunn's most book to date.
personal
Most of these poems evoke Gunn's Californian experience in the late
sixties, "the time, after all, not only of fthe Beatles but of lsd as well,"
he writes. His fascination with lsd is apparent from the title; Moiy
of the herb to to pro
was, course, magical given Odysseus by Hermes
tect him when he entered Circe's house. The poet's drug experiences
opened to him new veins of reality; his concern with perception takes
on a stunningly new dimension; for lsd presented Gunn with intensely
fresh visions of both the physical world and his own nature. The old
problem of Rule and Energy became all the more acute as well; Gunn
writes: "The
acid trip is unstructured, it opens you up to countless possi
bilities, you hanker after the infinite. The only way I could give myself
145
control over the of these and so could be true

presentation experiences,
to them, was by trying to render the infinite through the finite, the
unstructured the structured."
through
Gunn uses formal meters and to the
rhyme restrain, precariously,
strange new feelings which attend this widening of consciousness. In
a brief statement prepared for the Book
Poetry Society {Bulletin 68,
London, 1971) the author writes of Moly: "It could be seen as a
debate between the passion for definition and the passion for flow."
These terms, of course, recollect Rule and Energy: the poet's feelings
are intense and threaten to overwhelm him, but his intellect
(and the
imagination) modify and restrain this passion with equal force; always,
the balance of opposites is sought after. There is constantly in this new
work that sense of "continuous creation" mentioned in a
"Touch,"
rare and irrepressible life-force beyond constraint but trapped, tempo
rarily, by the artist in his poem.
Gunn catches the sense of impending transformation in the opening
poems, such as "Rites of Passage," where he says that "Something is
taking place." Now "Horns bud bright in my hair. / My feet are
turning hoof." The transformation even into a pig is complete in
"Moly," the title poem. Having failed to discover that miraculous and
flower, the narrator has a
saving become, literally, pig, transmogrified
by Circe: "I push my big grey wet snout through green, / Dreaming
the flower I have never seen."
"For Signs" follows, a remarkable poem written with that luminous
clarity which always attends Gunn at his best:
In front of me, the of a fence

palings
Throw shadows hard as board across the weeds;
The cracked enamel of a chicken bowl
Gleams like another moon; each clump of reeds
Is with darkness and yet bristles whole.
split
The field survives, but with a difference.
The poet's eye is passive here, the eye of an Impressionist painter, wide,
open to fluctuations of atmosphere and light. But the imagination, as
Coleridge observed, takes what is given and transforms it, dissolves and
recombines that object; "the real is shattered and combined," says
Gunn. Outward vision gives way, rapidly, to inward: "I recognize
the inward stare." The of continuous creation can
pale long process
not be checked, but it has its own laws, seen here as analogous to
zodiacal fluctuations, this "Cycle that I in part am governed by." The
146
poem ends and with force:

cleanly
I lean upon the fence and watch the sky,

How light fills blinded socket and chafed mark.
It soars, hard, full, and edged, it coldly burns.
"From the Wave" is a central in a modest one.

poem Moiy, though
Its theme is controlled innocence, balance; though ostensibly a poem
about surfing, its theme again is Rule and Energy, this time with a new
metaphor. One could easily substitute poets for surfers in the follow
ing passage:
Their feet curl, poise their weight

pale they
With a learn'd skill.
It is the wave they imitate
them so still.
Keeps
A line from Theodore Roethke comes to mind: "This shaking keeps

me Herein lies the of art, that true art is eternal but
steady." paradox
created out of the temporal; the finer the balance of antinomies, the
finer the poem. "Balance is triumph in this place, / Triumph posses
sion," Gunn concludes. the innocence of the men
Capturing surfers,
wedded temporarily to nature, "Half wave, half men," the poet him
self rides easily on the waves of his emotion, tracking the waves steadily
with artful poise. He affects a model of linguistic control.
The antinomies of motion and stillness give way, in "Tom-Dobbin,"
to the of mind and Gunn creates a centaur
parallel opposition instinct;
like figure: half man, half horse. Only in the moment of orgasm does
fusion take place:
In coming Tom and Dobbin join to one?

a moment, as it is done:
Only just
A shock of whiteness, shooting like a star,
In which all colours of the are.
spectrum
Gunn explores this paradoxical union in a five-part sequence, in effect

a meditation on the possibility of union between lovers, "Selves floating
in the one flesh we are of."
Many of the later poems inMoiy re-create the mood of the late six
ties: hard rock music, ecstatic are beauti
drugs, experiences?all evoked,
fully. Gunn has written movingly of this period in his prose as well:
147
And now that the great sweep of

years the
is over, I cannot
acid un
learn the
things that I learned
during them, I cannot the vision
deny
of what the world might be like. Everything that we glimpsed?the
trust, the brotherhood, the repossession of innocence, the nakedness of
spirit?is still a possibility and will continue to be so.
Moly culminates in "Sunlight," a poem of lyric grace and verbal

control. "What captures light belongs to what it captures" sums up
Gunn's meaning; he captures sunlight, his metaphor for that luminous
concentration of experience in language which is called poetry; the
poem demonstrates Gunn's miraculous poise, his balance of conflicting
powers. The sun's "concentrated fires / Are slowly dying," but this
matters only a little. "The system of which the sun and we are part /
Is both imperfect and deteriorating." And yet, the sun "outlasts us at
the heart." He ends by hymning the sunflower, the "yellow centre of
the flower" which inherits the light, transforms color and shape, "Still
re-creating in defining them." Of the flower, he asks:
Enable us, altering like you, to enter

Your love, but intense,
passionless impartial
And kindle in acceptance round your centre,
Petals of light lost in your innocence.
In a sense, Jack Straw's Castle (1976) is an extension ofMoly. The

from the same source, that sense of "con
poems spring quasi-mystical
tinuous creation." These latest poems examine, in the eleven
especially
part title sequence, the consequence of self-consciousness and
heightened
the of human and communication. Gunn ranges
necessity community
widely here, from his English past to his Californian present, but a
strange new continuity obtains, as if the poet's life had ceased from
previous linearity. Past and present now inform each other?exist simul
taneously in the Bergsonian duree of the poem.
"The Geysers," a four-part sequence, is the heart of Jack Straw's
Castle, and its language is richly descriptive, physical, imagistic:
This is our bedroom, where we learn the air,

Our bags laid out in the valley's crotch.
sleeping
I lie an arm-length from the stream and watch
Arcs fading between stars.
The poet loosens, gradually, his grip on self-consciousness, and the

poetry itself loosens; meters break down as barriers break; the poet
148
enters that liminal border between himself and others in the bathhouse:
torn from the self

in which I breathed and trod
I am
I am raw meat
I am a god
An attitude of benevolence and communal love emerges as a solution

to self-confinement.
Yet its obverse, obsesses the poet in the title poem,
self-entrapment,
Straw's Castle." Whereas self-containment was, in his earlier
"Jack
books, seen as a positive move in the direction of existential self-defini
tion, now only anxiety attends this limitation:
isn't there anyone

anyone here besides me
sometimes I find myself wondering

if the castle is castle at all
a or merely
place apart,
the castle that every snail
must carry around till his death
Within the metaphorical castle, hero Jack examines each room in turn,
the cellars. One cannot be sure whether these are real rooms
especially
or the rooms of each dream; "dream occur, such as Charles
sponsors"
Manson the Medusa,
and adding to the nightmarish quality of the
poem. In fact, the poem may be thought of as a descent into the in
fernal regions of the unconscious mind. Jack drops into levels of sub
liminal mentality, digging away roots, delving into the foundations of
selfhood, entering into a pure world of necessity where "They, the
needs, seek ritual and ceremony / To appease themselves." The hero
gets trapped here, temporarily, where there is "nothing outside the
bone / nothing accessible." He says,
I sit
trapped in bone
I am back again
where I never left, I sit
in my first instant and where
I never left
at my centre.
petrified
149
Led by the demonic killer, Manson, who appears a second time, Jack
assumes that other than himself exists, even as the mere exis
something
tence of evil a moral context. A staircase appears, the
implies strange
exit to another realm; but there is another temporary set-back
symbolic
when this staircase ends at a sheer with which
drop-off, "bone-chips
must / at one time have been castle" heaped below it.
It is finally the urge to contact a reality beyond the castle's boundaries
which brings the sequence to its tensely beautiful and haunting conclu
sion. Jack wakens to realize that someone is in bed with him; he is no
longer alone: "So humid, we lie sheetless?bare and close, / Facing
but ass to ass." This merest contact, ass to ass, is a hinge
apart, leaning
between Jack and something other, a bridge, a way out. Is it a dream
or not? He shrugs: "The beauty's in what is, not what may seem."
And in any case, "With dreams like this, Jack's ready for the world."
So the not but with some
poem ends, conclusively, optimism.
In the re-creates in miniature the entire journey
essence, sequence
Gunn has undertaken from Fighting Terms to the present, from self
consciousness to an outward he the for
turning; recognizes possibilities
love, for attachment to the beautiful and terrible flux of "continuous

creation" in which all that matters iswhat Dorothy Parker, referring to
called "grace under pressure," what I call a delicate
Hemingway,
balance of Energy and Rule.
The final section of Jack Strawys Castle exhibits some of Gunn's
finest work to date, including "Autobiography," which recollects the
adolescence in Hampstead:
poet's
The sniff of the real, that's

what I'd want to get
how it felt
to sit on Parliament
Hill on a evening
May
studying for exams skinny
seventeen dissatisfied
yet sniffing such
a air, smell of
potent
grass in heat from
the sun
day's
"The Cherry Tree" moves from literal memoir to mythic time; Gunn
the tree for his metaphor of self-transformation, the meta
takes organic
for as the tree grows, it appropriates its surround
phor of inclusion;
ings, it participates in the flux:
150
it starts as a need
and it takes over, a need
to
push
push outward
from the centre, to
bring what is not

from what is, pushing
till at the tips of the push
something comes about
From metrical to free verse, Gunn shows himself capable of mastering

his of chronos into of a lan
experience, translating mythos, creating
guage at once and under control.
energetic supremely
Already Gunn is a poet of considerable status in contemporary British
poetry. He has added to the language a handful of lyrics which may
well survive the terrible winnowing process of time. And surely his
struggle for existential self-affirmation, his reaching beyond self-confine
ment into the realm of and love are central to our time if
community
we do not wish to become barbarians. His effort to rule by intelligence
the natural which too often, to self-mutilation and, worse,
energies lead,
the destruction of others, is exemplary. Thorn Gunn is, in short, an
essential one for whom we should be
poet, grateful.
151

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Rule and Energy: The Poetry of Thom Gunn

Rule and Energy:

You keep both Rule and Energy in view,

Ferocity existing in the fence

These potentially counterdestructive principles exist everywhere in his

The huge wound in my head began to heal

I called for armour, rose, and did not reel.

My wound break open wide. Over again

The poem represents a young man's via the form of dramatic

1I am grateful to Mr. Gunn for me to quote from his

The warrior-lover in these poems is self-consciously

Even in bed I pose: desire may grow

The knows himself to be a poseur, and

through the poem, leading ultimately to feelings of inadequacy: "I

him to his ineffectual stammering. Gunn affects a simplicity of diction

I thought I was so tough,

is disastrous because un assimilable; the Yeatsian cadences can be

most widely anthologized poem, "On the Move," derives explicitly

The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows

Seeking their instinct, or their or both,

The attribution of "some hidden purpose" to the animal world, the

When a man commits himself to realizing that he is

At worst, one is in motion, and at best,

Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,

A Zen master would no doubt object; nevertheless, Gunn isolates an

"arguments." They make assertions about the human condition (as in

All summer's warmth was stored there in the hay;

My Sad Captains (1961) can, without strain, be called a "water

I see him sprawl,

Gunn's of an existential moment widens with this poem;

image. These acts of limitation, in effect, gather the energies which

Jackets" represents a critique of the heroic mode of The Sense ofMove

morphosed on Sundays?becoming not an individual hero but a parody

He stretched out like a cat, and rolled

Part I is the culmination of Gunn's early style, participating in the

rests on the things,

wrackingly regular irregularity: the reader feels the arbitrary restraint

on fogless days by the Pacific,

that reveals what is?no more

that accuracy of the beaches,

"That candour" is a new restraint, a new Rule to harness

and art from now on with and humaneness.

The of free verse, of course, was with the attendant loss

You have no idea what a

hard life a rich leads.

What with servants and jewels,

It's a relief sometimes

You have no idea, either,

quivering" mankind. The forces of darkness cannot

You turn and

It is touch that loosens a whelm of human feeling which "seeps / from

we / walk with everyone." Gunn writes here with magisterial control

duced here to a level of instinct where identification with the landscape

control over the of these and so could be true

In front of me, the of a fence

poem ends and with force:

I lean upon the fence and watch the sky,

"From the Wave" is a central in a modest one.