After the first phase,
after passionate nights and intimate days,
only then would he let me trace
the frozen river which ran through his face,
only then would he let me explore
the blown hinge of his lower jaw,
and handle and hold
the damaged, porcelain collar-bone,
and mind and attend
the fractured rudder of shoulder-blade,
and finger and thumb
the parachute silk of his punctured lung.
Only then could I bind the struts
and climb the rungs of his broken ribs,
and feel the hurt
of his grazed heart.
Skirting along,
only then could I picture the scan,
the foetus of metal beneath his chest
where the bullet had finally come to rest.
Then I widened the search,
traced the scarring back to its source
to a sweating, unexploded mine
buried deep in his mind, around which
every nerve in his body had tightened and closed.
Then, and only then, did I come close.
Understanding can be overrated for it privileges an ascendancy at times that may be to the detriment of humility and doubt. We do not always understand what we are experiencing in life, nor why we are experiencing whatever is occurring. Too much supposed ‘understanding’ makes us complacent about life’s learnings and takes away our capacity for wonder. And whilst considering the dangers of ‘understanding’ what about AWE? we take ourselves and others often for granted, forgetting that we are all unique, unrepeatable and singular.
This poem restores the AWE to INTIMACY. It reminds us that another human body is special and communicates the palpable AWE you can sense when another is truly and unforgettably held and touched. Each of us is a human landscape. We contain worlds within us, in our eyes as F Scott Fitzgerald reminded us in his novel Tender is the Night...
In academic terms understanding may suffocate ambiguity and playfulness, reducing our capacity to wonder and perhaps to feel awe. This poem is on the AQA syllabus, and as such, is available for the scrutiny of GCSE students everywhere. Yet as we read the poem we may feel a confusion. Is it a poem about romantic erotic love or it is a poem about injury and suffering? How can we judge where it ‘fits’ in terms of subject matter and genre?
Reading a poem however, necessitates a respect for finding the ‘event’ of the poem. What is going on and how is this event important in terms of the poem’s language and mood?
Here with Armitage I notice the repetition of the refrain:’only then.’ I wonder why this is repeated and what it is singling out as being special for our scrutiny.
I also notice this apparent confusion between the poem being an evocation of love and the poem being an exploration of physical suffering, all ‘mapped out’ or drawn so to speak on the body. ‘Written on the Body’ to borrow Jeanette Winterson’s title for one of her novels.
I also wonder at the tender connection between the speaker and the prostrate figure whose physical self is being explored. Who is speaking and why are they talking in this way over the injured male figure?
The poem reveals a human being who has suffered a horrible list of injuries, yet whose main source of suffering is finally identified as being the mental turmoil described as the ‘unexpoloded mine buried deep in his mind’ . So the gradually permitted intimacy that the speaker achieves through gently travelling along the beloved’s body, finally comes to the most dangerous ‘source’ or ‘origin’ oft hem all, the mind. The mind as a ‘mine’: something about to explode and to destroy any external healing that has taken place. Indeed it is as if any external healing is mere gesture compared to the intensity of the mind-mine.
The tenderness of this poem is profoundly affecting. The suffering male seems almost a fallen saint, or a Christ -like figure suffering, crucified mentally by a heartless world. The word ‘close’ plays with notions of intimacy, with proximity, with ‘truth’ itself. How ‘close‘ are we to others and what can’t they tell us about their lives, their fears, their private nightmares?
In many ways this poem reminds me of the tender intimacy offered to to the mysterious, burnt figure of ‘The English Patient’ in the Booker Prize winning novel of that name. Being ‘close’ is ironically tragic, as intimacy can only ever be temporary and reminds us of how very alone we all are finally.