Salvador Dalí, The Broken BridgeInspired by a recent listening experience, I have just retrieved my dog-eared copy of R. S. Thomas's Collected Poems, stacked up, half lost, in a now uncared for shelf in a forsaken home. It doesn't take me long to find an old favourite.
"He and She" is one of those poems that at once baffles and moves me. A rare love poem within an oeuvre extremely reluctant to any open displays of affection, it is both touching in its restrained tenderness, in its attempt to bridge the abyss that separates the poet from his female companion and from women in general, towards whom he felt a deep-seated anxiety and fear (and, as usual, there is a well-meant but possessive, smothering mother behind all this ambivalence and unease towards the feminine), and unsettling in its recognition, hinted at in the final lines, that the gap may never be fully bridged nor he ever unconditionally welcomed and welcoming - only just "not repulsed".
"He and She" is one of those poems that at once baffles and moves me. A rare love poem within an oeuvre extremely reluctant to any open displays of affection, it is both touching in its restrained tenderness, in its attempt to bridge the abyss that separates the poet from his female companion and from women in general, towards whom he felt a deep-seated anxiety and fear (and, as usual, there is a well-meant but possessive, smothering mother behind all this ambivalence and unease towards the feminine), and unsettling in its recognition, hinted at in the final lines, that the gap may never be fully bridged nor he ever unconditionally welcomed and welcoming - only just "not repulsed".
When he came in, she was there.
When she looked at him,
he smiled. There were lights
in time's wave breaking
on an eternal shore.
Seated at the table -
no need for the fracture
of the room's silence ; noiselessly
they conversed. Thoughts mingling
were lit up, gold
particles in the mind's stream.
Were there currents between them ?
Why, when he thought darkly,
would the nerves play
at her lips' brim ? What was the heart's depth ?
There were fathoms in her,
too, and sometimes he crossed
them and landed and was not repulsed.
R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems (J M Dent, 1993).
When she looked at him,
he smiled. There were lights
in time's wave breaking
on an eternal shore.
Seated at the table -
no need for the fracture
of the room's silence ; noiselessly
they conversed. Thoughts mingling
were lit up, gold
particles in the mind's stream.
Were there currents between them ?
Why, when he thought darkly,
would the nerves play
at her lips' brim ? What was the heart's depth ?
There were fathoms in her,
too, and sometimes he crossed
them and landed and was not repulsed.
R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems (J M Dent, 1993).
No comments:
Post a Comment