by an accident of flowering
than all their timely descendants.
1995
2. The Austro-German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875?1926) overcame thirteen years of writer's block in Duino Castle (near Trieste), where he wrote a famous series of elegies. THOM GUNN 1929-2004
The son of a London journalist, Thomson Gunn was educated at University College School, London, then Trinity College, Cambridge, and Stanford University, where he studied under the antimodernist, classically inclined poet Yvor Winters. In a poem addressed to Winters, he wrote: 'You keep both Rule and Energy in view, / Muc h power in each, most in the balanced two.' The poems of Gunn's Fighting Terms (1954) and The Sense of Movement (1957) aimed for the same balance. They were influenced by the seventeenth-century English poet John Donne and the twentieth- century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and introduced a modern Metaphysical poet able to give powerfully concrete expression to abstract ideas. Along with Philip Larkin, he was seen as a member of 'the Movement'?English poets who preferred inherited verse forms to either modernist avant-gardism or high-flown Romanticism. In the second half of My Sad Captains (1961), he began to move away from the will- driven heroes and the tight-fitting stanzas of his early work into more tentative explorations of experience and more supple syllabic or open verse forms. 'Most of my poems are ambivalent,' he said. Moving from England to San Francisco, he experimented with LS D and moved also from poems presumably addressed to women to poems frankly homosexual. The Man with Night Sweats (1992) ends with a sequence of poems remarkable for their unflinching directness, compassion, and grace about
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MY SAD CAPTAINS / 2583
the deaths of friends from AIDS. Gunn was a poet of rare intelligence and power in all his protean changes.
Black Jackets
In the silence that prolongs the span Rawly of music when the record ends, The red-haired boy who drove a van In weekday overalls but, like his friends,
5 Wor e cycle boots and jacket here To suit the Sunday hangout he was in, Heard, as he stretched back from his beer, Leather creak softly round his neck and chin.
Before him, on a coal-black sleeve 10 Remote exertion had lined, scratched, and burned Insignia that could not revive Th e heroic fall or climb where they were earned.
On the other drinkers bent together, Concocting selves for their impervious kit, is He saw it as no more than leather Which, taut across the shoulders grown to it,
Sent through the dimness of a bar As sudden and anonymous hints of light As those that shipping give, that are 20 Now flickers in the Bay, now lost in night.
He stretched out like a cat, and rolled The bitterish taste of beer upon his tongue, An d listened to a joke being told: Th e present was the things he stayed among.
25 If it was only loss he wore, He wore it to assert, with fierce devotion, Complicity and nothing more. He recollected his initiation,
An d one especially of the rites. 30 For on his shoulders they had put tattoos: The group's name on the left, The Knights, And on the right the slogan Born To Lose.
My Sad Captains
On e by one they appear in the darkness: a few friends, and
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2584 / THOM GUNN
5a few with historical names. Ho w late they start to shine! but before they fade they stand perfectly embodied, all 10the past lapping them like a cloak of chaos. They were me n who, I thought, lived only to renew the wasteful force they spent with each hot convulsion. The y remind me, distant now. 15True, they are not at rest yet, but now that they are indeed apart, winnowed from failures, they withdraw to an orbit and turn with disinterested hard energy, like the stars. 1961 From the Wave It mounts at sea, a concave wall Down-ribbed with shine, An d pushes forward, building tall Its steep incline. 5 The n from their hiding rise to sight Black shapes on boards Bearing before the fringe of white It mottles towards. 10Their pale feet curl, they poise Wit h a learn'd skill. It is the wave they imitate Keeps them so still. their weight 15Th e marbling bodies have become Half wave, half men, Grafted it seems by feet of foam Some seconds, then, 20Late as they can, they slice the face In timed procession: Balance is triumph in this place, Triump h possession. Th e mindless heave of which they rode A fluid shelf Breaks as they leave it, falls and, slowed, Loses itself.
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TH E MISSIN G / 258 5 25 Clear, the sheathed bodies slick as seals Loosen and tingle; And by the board the bare foot feels The suck of shingle. 30They paddle in the shallows still; Two splash each other; Then all swim out to wait until The right waves gather. 1971
Still Life
I shall not soon forget The greyish-yellow skin To which the face had set: Lids tight: nothing of his,
5 No tremor from within, Played on the surfaces.
He still found breath, and yet It was an obscure knack. I shall not soon forget
10 The angle of his head, Arrested and reared back On the crisp field of bed,
Back from what he could neither Accept, as one opposed,
is Nor, as a life-long breather, Consentingly let go, The tube his mouth enclosed In an astonished O.
1992
