Samuel Tongue

Is this a balancing?

It's quite a prophetic voice or a kind of...

Kind of like a Zen koan type.

There seems to be a spiritual element to this one in a kind of spiritual discipline in the way that the things are being viewed.

Poverty in its perfection, hungering for its strictness.

And then it goes into the more concrete imagery of a Greek farmer in the orchard with the white almond blossoms falling and falling and then jumping to the stark and precious winters in Paris.

So it jumps around geographically and historically.

It goes through different time as well.

dark like petals on the last of the 19th century, famous bronze bells, ancient buildings, small stone bridges and regal fountains.

So again, for quite a short piece, it's very grandiose, the register and the vocabulary.

can very much tip over into the grandiose.

When we were thinking about this as a group, one of the participants said that it felt like a very confident poem, which was interesting because there was a lot of ambiguity in the language and in those kinds of spiritual images, but actually to be able to write things like, yeah, falling wordlessly in the dark, like petals on the last of the 19th century,

That's big, that's heavy, that's quite a reach for a poet.

The other kind of elements of linking the experience with ancient buildings and regal fountains and stone bridges, this was quite robust and confident language, which was intention.

It kind of felt like it was intention with that question that the title opened with, how much of that is left in me?

a kind of seeking for security and gravity and history, whilst also acknowledging that within those seemingly solid things there's a lot of insubstantial emptiness.

And that final line, what freshness in me amid the loneliness.

This sense that both things can be true.

You can hold together the negative capability of that kind of Keatsian negative capability, that freshness and loneliness can be held in this character, this central voice that runs through the poem.

So, yeah, this was just a very brief sojourn into the ways in which we discussed these two poems of Jack Gilbert's.