Poem of the Week: Slow Waker by Thom Gunn | Books – Extremalby Menu Business Economy Entrepreneurship Personal Finance Entertainment Books Celebrity Music TV Sports Golf NCAAB SOCCER Technology Artificial intelligence Internet Mobile Contact Us About Us Important Links Cookie Policy US DMCA Terms and Conditions Privacy Policy Menu Poem of the Week: Slow Waker by Thom Gunn | Books Posted on May 16, 2022 by mangakiko slow wake up I look at the nephew, eighteen, through breakfast. He had to be called and called. He smiles, but conviction. He does not drink tea, oh alright, if you do not mind, he will drink tea. His adult face is new. Once the novelty clears up and has an expression or two in addition to bewilderment could be handsome evil. He could be a carpenter, a poet, is everything possible… impossible. The future is not a word in his mouth. That, for him, is the problem: lay in bed trapped deep in the mud between sleep and wake up, either alert or resting, between the flow of the night, twisting endlessly, and the gravel beach that our soles have thickened. no one has ever told him He is good looking, only his feet smell. Stroll through alien London all day. Everything is important and not important. It feeds only by osmosis. He looks at the flash and forceful traffic push. Have wants to retire. want to retire to a small space like The cupboard under the stairs where is the vacuum cleaner kept, so I can wait and doze, and not disturb anyone. Born in Gravesend, Kent, in 1929, Thom Gunn published his impressive first collection, Fighting Terms, in 1954 and moved to San Francisco the same year. Co-opted by British critics of the Movement, a poetic school known for formal rigor, directness, and general simplicity, Gunn is perhaps the Movement poet least defined or limited by its principles. His later collections reflect American poetic influences and a more direct identification with gay culture. Although he never abandoned the use of formal techniques, he was able to bring that discipline to his freer structures, as this week’s poem demonstrates. First published in The Passages of Joy in 1982 and included in Collected Poems, 1993, Slow Waker combines formal precision with a certain easy, discursive style. As a character sketch of a young man, he presents a cold detachment towards his subject from the start. The child is “the nephew”, as breakfast is “breakfast”. The indeterminacy of his condition is established: he seems both asleep and awake at the table, and confusedly changes his mind about the offered cup of tea. As the narrative progresses, it becomes an inquiry into adolescence: adolescence as an experimental stage of life with its own psychology and biology. Emotion is kept at bay: the “newness” of the child’s face is a condition that will one day “clear up” – the verb that suggests a case of acne. Among possible looks, “it could be a handsome / devil”, but the tone of the compliment more than suggests that we should not count on him. Objectivity is a beautiful kind of tact. The narrator seems to be giving his subject space to be both everything and nothing. He resists the adult habit of sentimentalizing youth as an icon of promise. The antitheses continue. The suggested adult roles of carpenter and poet (perhaps not entirely antithetical professions, admittedly) are both “possible” and “impossible”. When the third stanza returns to the backstory of the first, the young man in bed is “stuck deep / in the mire between / sleeping and waking, neither / alert nor resting”. How much cooler it is to pair noun and adjective, “sleep and wake”, instead of the sadly correct “sleep and wake”. The contrast between the states is exposed with this innovation, the simplest. The long-term familiarity between nephew and speaker is implied by the memory of the beach where “our soles have thickened” and is completed by the cute joke about the boy’s feet that ends the verse. The nephew has been a visitor before, and perhaps in a different setting. Was the beach in California? Is the nephew American? Those questions may be relevant to the next stage of the narrative, which finds him in London, dazed, too absorbed, as a jet-lagged tourist might be. “Everything / is important and not important.” It’s the way a city feels to a newcomer, like perhaps the dazzle of possible selves feels to a teenager. Now the speaker’s affect, though undeclared, is made increasingly clear by the intensity with which he imagines the overwhelmed conscience and the desire for withdrawal. The young man who “feeds only by osmosis” is a kind of chrysalis; he needs a secluded and dark place in which to thrive. The cupboard under the stairs is a matrix intimacy, the opposite of the glittering, sweeping city, and perhaps also preferable to the forced sociability of visiting an uncle. What seems like a touchingly modest desire to “wait and doze, / and get in the way of no one” acknowledges an organism’s need for time and stillness. The apparent depersonalization of the teenage nephew in this poem seems yet another example of the depth and humanity of the poet’s understanding. Share this: Twitter Facebook More Reddit Pinterest Telegram WhatsApp Related Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * Comment * Name * Email * Website Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Search Search Recent Posts World Events And Wise Forex Trading Currency Trading – How To Read Currency-Pair Quotes Is Trading E-Currency a Legitimate Business? Why is a Coin Grading Service Important? 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