The Antagonism

By Thom Gunn 1929–2004 Thom Gunn

to Helena Shire

The Makers did not make

The muddy winter hardening to privation,

Or cholera in the keep, or frost’s long ache

Afflicting every mortal nation

From lord to villagers in their fading dyes

—Those who like oxen strained

On stony clearings of the ground

From church to sties.

They sought an utterance,

Or sunshine soluble in institution,

An orthodoxy justified, at once

The dream and dreamer warmed in fusion,

As in the great Rose Window, pieced from duty,

Where through Christ’s crimson, sun

Shines on your clothes till they take on

Value and beauty.

But carved on a high beam

Far in the vault from the official version

Gape gnarled unChristian heads out of whom stream

Long stems of contrary assertion,

Shaped leaf ridging their scalps in place of hair.

Their origins lost to sight,

As they are too, cast out from light.

They should despair.

What stays for its own sake,

Occulted in the dark, may slip an ending,

Recalcitrant, and strengthened by the ache

Of winter not for the transcending.

Ice and snow pile the gables of the roof

Within whose shade they hold,

Intimate with its slaty cold,

To Christ aloof.

Thom Gunn, “The Antagonism” from Boss Cupid. Copyright © 2000 by Thom Gunn. Used by permission of Straus & Giroux, LLC., www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved. Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Source: Boss Cupid (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000)

Biography

An English poet who has been a long-time resident of California, Thom Gunn combines a respect for traditional poetic forms with an interest in popular topics, such as the Hell's Angels, LSD, and homosexuality. While Gunn wrote most of his early verses in iambic pentameter—a phase when his ambition was "to be the John Donne of the twentieth century"—his more recent works assume a variety of forms, including syllabic stanzas and . . .

Continue reading this biography