"Sunlight" by Thom Gunn

Mea culpa: Several times I refer to "Sunlight" as "Sunshine." Blame it on the LSD (which was called "Orange Sunshine"). 

Text of poem here

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

-Let me know what you think I should teach!

-On The Morning Of Christ's Nativity by John Milton

-The Gas Poker by Thom Gunn

-The Movement

-Syllabics as gateway drug

-Lucy In the Sky With Demanding Forms

-Thom Gunn, Renaissance man

-Golding's Metamorphoses

-Philosophical religions

-A cursory and woefully incomplete history of Platonism

-Adonais by that son-of-a-Bysshe Percy Shelley

-An Essay On Man by Alexander Pope

-Plato's Symposium (see the famous Diotima section)

-Christmas Day 2023 was the day I learned the sun was green

-Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens 

-A song of experience in search of deeper innocence

Transcript

Versecraft 5-7: “Sunlight” by Thom Gunn

Hey everyone and welcome to this week’s show, and a merry yuletide to those of you who celebrate. Make sure you don’t ring out the Christmas season this year without a recitation of John Milton’s “On The Morning Of Christ’s Nativity.” 

Before we get started today, dear listeners, I’d like to make a request of you. I don’t want to reveal too much, but there’s a strong possibility that yours truly and a certain M.B.S. will be running an online class together in the new year. What that class will be about, we’re not sure yet. That’s why I would love to hear from all of you: if you were to enroll in an online poetry class, what would YOU want to study? From metrical prosody to rhetorical tropes to traditional forms to poetic genres, everything is on the table. If you have any ideas, suggestions, or requests, please email me at versecraftpodcast@gmail.com. 

To all of you who have donated or bought merchandise in recent weeks, I’d like to say thank you so much for your support. If you too are caught up in the giving spirit and would like to join those noble individuals in donating to the show or boasting your own Versecraft shirt, please see my links in the show notes. If you find yourself hesitating because you figure that other people are pulling all the weight, please don’t—I really do appreciate every contribution I receive, and you can trust me when I say that I’m nowhere near to making a comfortable living off of this yet. If you love the show but you’re not able to show your support financially, please show it verbally— word of mouth is the best way to for this show to find the people it is made for, and I appreciate every single one of you who goes out of their way to spread tidings of meter and rhyme. Thank you.

Today’s poet, Thom Gunn, is one of the finest craftsmen of verse to come out of England in the 20th century. He is a man defined by contrasts: Cambridge and San Francisco, Discipline and Hedonism, Form and Formlessness, Traditionalism and Bohemianism, Academia and Psychedelia, exuberance and tragedy. As with his contemporary Robert Lowell, his work functions like a barometer of the tremendous shift in modern culture from tweed to turtleneck which occurred between the first and second half the 1900’s. However, where Lowell’s work negotiated between the hermetic aestheticism of the New Critics and the bleeding heart authenticity of Confessionalism, Gunn’s made bridges between a stern neo-Renaissance formalism, partially informed by Yvor Winters, and the quasi-mystical, hedonistic liberation of sixties counterculture. He liked to think of himself as John Donne in a leather jacket, and that is pretty much what he was— as comfortable in the realm of 16th century scholarship as in a BDSM gay bar, his intriguing synthesis of interests, his rage for both dissolution and order, made for a body of work unique in the canons of poetry. 

Gunn, who lived from 1929 to 2004, was born in Kent, England to well-educated, journalist parents who encouraged him to read and fall in love with Renaissance poetry. When Gunn was a teenager, his mother committed suicide by sucking gas through a pipe, and he found her body. It took him nearly fifty years to articulate this traumatic experience into his poetry. In his late poem “The Gas Poker” he writes:

One image from the flow
 Sticks in the stubborn mind:
 A sort of backwards flute.
 The poker that she held up
 Breathed from the holes aligned
 Into her mouth till, filled up
 By its music, she was mute.

         To cope with his grief, the young Gunn threw himself obsessively into literature. His precocious erudition, and idolization of poets like Donne and Shakespeare, served as a foundation for his initially conservative aesthetic sensibility. After a short stint in the army and a brief flirtation with being a novelist in Paris, Gunn read English at Trinity College Cambridge, and came out with his first book, Fighting Terms, the year he graduated at the age of 24. With its unprecedented combination of formal rigor and dashing biker imagery, the book was a sensation, and Gunn was swiftly grouped together with other neo-formalist British writers such as Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, and Elizabeth Jennings, who were collectively known, rather vaguely, as “The Movement.” 

         Despite this early celebrity in his home country, Gunn and his American partner Mike, who had been called for the draft, moved shortly thereafter to California, where Gunn had elected to study with Yvor Winters at Stanford. At this moment, the teacher and student were largely birds of a feather: both desired poetry that was formally rigorous, emotionally disciplined, morally insightful, and imagistically precise, and for a time Winters considered Gunn one of his most promising students. This began to change however as Gunn, who after his time at Stanford moved to nearby San Francisco, began to spend more and more time among the omnipresent hippies and beatniks, and indulged lavishly in American sex, drugs, and rock’n roll, even as he earned his keep by teaching English at Berkeley. 

Ironically, it was Winters himself who had given Gunn the means by which to take his poetry in a freer direction. From Winters he had inherited an interest in syllabic verse, and after composing about half of his third collection, My Sad Captains, in syllabics, Gunn felt he had developed the confidence and the ear to attempt free verse. I have often heard metrical poets complain that they feel themselves incapable of writing free verse—I personally would never want to, but Gunn sets a practical example: if you want to ease yourself into the chaos of writing prose as poetry, syllabic verse is a good gateway drug. 

However, even after being bitterly disowned by Winters, to say that Gunn now became another Allen Ginsberg would be a complete mischaracterization. For one thing, Gunn’s naughty Californian influences were more along the lines of Robert Duncan and Gary Snyder, and for another, Gunn never actually gave up writing poetry in meter and rhyme. From his middle period until his death, his work presents us an intriguing hybrid of free and formal techniques which exhibit a technical mastery which has merely expanded in its range. Our poem for today actually comes from Gunn’s acid-laced, post-Wintersian period, and as you will see, it is just as highly-wrought as anything we’ve discussed on this show. 

Gunn continued to live in San Francisco for the rest of his life, utilizing his spacious, cheaply bought Victorian mini-mansion as a commune, literary salon, and pleasure palace all rolled into one. As he got to be more intimately acquainted with San Francisco gay culture, his poetry, which had never been shy about sexuality, came to be more and more concerned with documenting and praising homosexual life and love, though never in the mode of self-indulgent confession. In the wake of the AID epidemic, in which Gunn lost several friends in ruthless succession, he released a poignant book of elegies, The Man With Night Sweats, which was widely praised and has come to be his most famous collection. 

As a man of dashing good looks, adventurous spirit, and insatiable sexuality, Gunn unfortunately did not take old age well. After he retired from teaching, he developed severe writer’s block, began to drink heavily, and abused amphetamines in order to maintain the libido and stamina he desired, engaging in days-long orgies well into his seventies. Such a lifestyle was, of course, impossible to sustain. At the age of seventy-four, he was found by his house mates dead in his room, with a cocktail of drugs in his blood. Of all the modern poets who have nobly chosen to embrace artistic order as a means to combat and compensate for personal disorder, there is perhaps no more vivid example than Thom Gunn. 

Our poem for today, “Sunshine,” is a beautiful Neoplatonic panegyric to the sun, and comes from Gunn’s sixth collection, Moly, which is the work of his most influenced by and concerned with psychedelic experience. It is also a book which marks a conscious return to meter and rhyme after the mostly free verse experiments in his previous book, Touch. Gunn explained his stylistic renascence in the following terms: “The acid trip is unstructured, it opens you up to countless possibilities, you hanker after the infinite. The only way I could give myself any control over the presentation of those experiences, and so be true to them, was by trying to render the infinite through the finite, the unstructured through the structured.” Amen to that.

  Moly was Gunn’s favorite book that he wrote, and “Sunshine” his favorite poem that he ever wrote. The poem itself has nothing explicitly to do with drugs, but the spirituality it embodies was almost certainly inspired by acid trips. It was written in 1967, before the term “sunshine” became a slang term for LSD in California, but by the time it was published in Moly in 1971, the connotation was unmissable— a fact which Gunn himself found an amusing and happy coincidence. The poem goes like this:

Sunlight

Some things, by their affinity light’s token,

are more than shown: steel glitters from a track;

small glinting scoops, after a wave has broken,

dimple the water in its draining back;

Water, glass, metal, match light in their raptures,

flashing their many answers to the one.

What captures light belongs to what it captures:

the whole side of a world facing the sun,     

re-turned to woo the original perfection,

giving itself to what created it,

and wearing green in sign of its subjection.

It is as if the sun were infinite.

But angry flaws are swallowed by the distance;

it varies, moves, its concentrated fires

are slowly dying—the image of persistence

is an image, only, of our own desires:

desires and knowledge touch without relating.

The system of which sun and we are part,

is both imperfect and deteriorating.

And yet the sun outlasts us at the heart.

Great seedbed, yellow centre of the flower,

flower on its own, without a root or stem,

giving all colour and all shape their power,

still recreating in defining them,        

enable us, altering like you, to enter

your passionless love, impartial but intense,

and kindle in acceptance round your centre,

petals of light lost in your innocence.

         Everything about this poem reveals Gunn’s Renaissance influence: the alternating rhyming quatrains, the highly wrought perfection of the rhymes, which alternate consistently between feminine and masculine, the utter absence of enjambment, the concern with astronomical phemomena, the apostrophe to a non-sentient object, the devotional turn at the end of the poem, the Neoplatonic metaphysics, all of it. If it weren’t for the modern diction and syntax, some roughage in the meter, and the references to modern science and technology, this poem could have been written not in 1967 but 1567— which, incidentally, was the year that Arthur Golding published his famous and beautiful translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a text which, via the influence of Ezra Pound, had a significant influence on Gunn’s thematic concerns in Moly. 

The poem consists of seven quatrains, for a total of 28 lines, twice the length of a sonnet. Like a sonnet, it has a volta, which Gunn places at the beginning of the fourth stanza. In addition to having twice the scale of a sonnet then, the volta is placed at the inverse position that an Italian sonnet would have: not at four 7ths of the way through the poem, but three 7ths. 

Metrically, the poem is unmistakably iambic pentameter, though Gun is rather liberal about his placement of trochaic substitutions, employing them frequently and at every position save the forbidden fifth. Anapests make four appearances, and there is one amphibrach in the second foot of line fifteen due to the caesural effect of the m-dash. Most notable of substitutions is the tertius paeon cadence at the end of line nineteen: “is both imperfect and deteriorating.” The deterioration of the rhythm here of course mirrors the deterioration of the sun, and is a tasteful choice. 

Let’s now go back and read the first three quatrains again:

Some things, by their affinity light’s token,

are more than shown: steel glitters from a track;

small glinting scoops, after a wave has broken,

dimple the water in its draining back;

Water, glass, metal, match light in their raptures,

flashing their many answers to the one.

What captures light belongs to what it captures:

the whole side of a world facing the sun,     

re-turned to woo the original perfection,

giving itself to what created it,

and wearing green in sign of its subjection.

It is as if the sun were infinite.

In the first quatrain, Gunn speaks beautifully of lustrous things. While all objects seen by the eye reflect light from their surfaces, only some things are “more than shown,” and reflect not only their own color and shape, but the appearance of light itself which illuminates them; that is, they shine, and give direct evidence of a light source—they are thus “light’s token.”  Gunn gives both an industrial example, a train track, and a natural one, the breaking of waves on a beach. You would be hard pressed to find any California poet who doesn’t write about the sea. Curiously, the same can’t be said for East Coast poets. Gunn goes on to say that lustrous objects “match light in their raptures.” At its root, “rapture” means “to seize,” and here Gunn intends to suggest that just as light envelops and thereby “seizes” objects, so too do reflective surfaces “seize” the light in turn. We also of course have the implication of rapture in the mystical sense, of being spiritually transported by divine love, and here the effect is less of a pathetic fallacy and more a statement of pan-psychism—the speaker actually is suggesting that the objects in the world are in some sense alive and rapturous, and are in loving dialogue with God just as they reflect back the light of the sun. There is also, via hypallage, the suggestion that we who view the glittering objects also feel a sense of rapture, of being mentally held by the light. I will return to the idea of these objects “flashing their many answers to the one” in a moment. 

When Gunn elegantly states that “what captures light belongs to what it captures,” he is saying not only that what captures and reflects light becomes primarily a vehicle for the beauteous display of light, but he also alludes to the sun’s role as the shaper and sustainer of everything on Earth. Just as Mufasa tells Simba that he rules over everything that the light touches, so too, everything that the sun touches is influenced by it, and in some sense belongs to it. Not only is solar energy responsible for the existence of all life and weather on Earth, but the gravitational pull of the sun is the reason why earth exists as it does in the first place, and therefore all non-sentient objects on earth are beholden to the sun as well. 

Given that the sun is responsible for the existence of everything on Earth, that its light illuminates the world, warms it, and sustains its creatures, that it hovers far above us, is the most brilliant thing that we will ever see, and is not only beautiful in itself but lends beauty to other things, it is an absolute shoe-in as a metaphor for God. When Gunn says that glittering objects “flash their many answers to the one,” he is explicitly comparing the sun to the Neoplatonic idea of God, which is called “The One,” and which theologically operates quite similarly to the sun. 

But let me provide some context here. Most of you are probably at least somewhat familiar with the Greek philosopher Plato, founder of a system of philosophy later called Platonism. Plato’s philosophy was dualistic—he believed that there was first and foremost a transcendent world of ideas, ideas formulated by what Plato called the Demiourgos, meaning craftsman, his word for God. Then there is our world, the material world, which is but a shadowy reflection of the world of ideas, inferior in every way. Following in the footsteps of Pythagoras, who believed the world was essentially a simulation generated by numbers, Plato was a pioneer of the philosophical outlook known as Idealism, the belief that the material world we sense and interact with is of an ontologically lower class, if not entirely illusory, compared with another transcendent, intangible, abstract realm, sometimes identified as a mental realm. If you are a solipsist who believes that your entire of experience of reality is just a dream that your mind came up with, this too is a form of Idealism. 

After Plato’s death, his followers at the Academy developed his ideas in new directions. For a time, ostensibly following the example of Socrates, Platonism became specialized into an extreme form of skepticism. Later, in the first century B.C.E., Plato’s original doctrine was revived, and synthesized with complementary ideas from Aristotle, Pythagoras, and the Stoics into a transitional ideology known as Middle Platonism, exemplified by the philosopher Plutarch. It was during this time, influenced by Neopythagorean mysticism, that Platonism began to take on overtly religious qualities. This religious trajectory would culminate in Neoplatonism, the Western world’s greatest philosophical religion. 

 I define a philosophical religion as a philosophy—a system of beliefs derived from reasoning from first principles— which extends its moral branch, its code of conduct, into injunctions about how its followers ought to develop and enrich their relationship to absolute reality, and provides a devotional practice to that effect. It is a religion based on natural theology—in other words, a religion that does not require faith in a supernatural narrative, only faith in the axioms and chain of reasoning which the philosophy provides. Philosophical religions are relatively prevalent in Eastern cultures: Vedanta Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism are prominent examples. In the West, they have always been a small minority amidst the dominance of either naïve polytheism or Abrahamic monotheism. Nevertheless, they have had an impact in the realm of ideas vastly disproportionate to their followings. The three principal Western ones, all Greek, have been Pythagoreanism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism. Of these three, Neoplatonism was by far the most influential, exerting an enormous effect on the development of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim theology and the artistic and mystical philosophies of the Renaissance. 

Neoplatonism was formulated in the 3rd century C.E., and pioneered by the most significant Greek philosopher since Aristotle: a man by the name of Plotinus. Plotinus reformed Platonism in many ways, but the most important and essential thing he did was collapse Plato’s Dualism into a Monism, the belief that reality consists of only one substance. The material world, Plotinus argued, is not ontologically separate from the world of ideas. Nor are the ideas, ultimately, even actually separate from each other. All things of all descriptions and all realms of being are manifestations of one ultimate, infinite, eternal, omnipotent source, a source indescribable both because it contains all description and is beyond all distinction, which he called The One. Like the sun, The One radiates or emanates being out from itself. Just as light becomes fainter the farther it travels from its source, so too does being itself become more and more attenuated, fragmented, and imperfect the farther it strays from the One, despite the fact that all being is fundamentally “made of” the One. Percy Shelley illustrates this idea using a different light metaphor in his greatest poem, Adonais, where he says: 

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

               It is from this doctrine of emanation from the One that we get the idea, explored by Alexander Pope in his Essay On Man, of the Great Chain of Being: From the One comes forth the Divine Intellect, then the World Soul, then particular souls, then animal and plant souls, then base matter. Plotinus believed that all things sought reconciliation and renewed closeness to The One, and our existential mission was to pursue this spiritual renewal. For Plotinus, as for Plato, the perception of beauty was key to spiritual enlightenment, for the pleasure taken in beauty is the pleasure of the soul recognizing its own divine origins through perceiving its kinship with the divine goodness of that which it perceives. As Plato outlined in The Symposium, adoration of one kind can lead to perception and adoration of higher kinds. It is this belief which runs throughout the troubadours, Dante, and the entire tradition of Petrarchan love poetry—love for the beloved is a path to divine love, and should be venerated as such. 

               We are now better equipped to understand Gunn’s language in this and the following passage. The shiny objects “flash their many answers to the One,” showing their kinship with the One by dint of their beauty, which is borrowed from the light of the almighty sun. “What captures light belongs to what it captures.” Gunn then goes on to state the Neoplatonic imperative: the side of earth facing the sun has “re-turned to woo the original perfection,” literally turning in order face the sun and, through love, return to the original perfection of the One. 

               The world wears green “in sign of its subjection,”—that is, the world is only covered in greenery because plants require chlorophyll to photosynthesize. The green color of plants shows their dependence on the sun. Incidentally, the leading hypothesis for why plants are mostly green is that by rejecting green light, which lies in the middle of the color spectrum and is the color most emitted by the sun, plants are able to better regulate their energy input from fluctuating extremes of sunlight and shadow. We perceive the sun as yellow or orange due to Earth’s atmospheric conditions, and if we were in space we would perceive it as white, due to the intensity of its overall luminosity. In actuality though, the sun is an extremely light shade of green, and plants reflect this fact.  

Let’s now back and read through the entire poem once again:

Some things, by their affinity light’s token,

are more than shown: steel glitters from a track;

small glinting scoops, after a wave has broken,

dimple the water in its draining back;

Water, glass, metal, match light in their raptures,

flashing their many answers to the one.

What captures light belongs to what it captures:

the whole side of a world facing the sun,     

re-turned to woo the original perfection,

giving itself to what created it,

and wearing green in sign of its subjection.

It is as if the sun were infinite.

But angry flaws are swallowed by the distance;

it varies, moves, its concentrated fires

are slowly dying—the image of persistence

is an image, only, of our own desires:

desires and knowledge touch without relating.

The system of which sun and we are part,

is both imperfect and deteriorating.

And yet the sun outlasts us at the heart.

Great seedbed, yellow centre of the flower,

flower on its own, without a root or stem,

giving all colour and all shape their power,

still recreating in defining them,        

enable us, altering like you, to enter

your passionless love, impartial but intense,

and kindle in acceptance round your centre,

petals of light lost in your innocence.

         The volta at the fourth quatrain leads Gunn from the heights of Neoplatonic rapture to a sober assessment of reality. As with infatuation, it is only our distance from the object of affection, combined with our own wishful thinking, which allows for us to imagine it as perfect. The sun is nothing more nor less than a continuous explosion of plasma, a conflagration which can only last as long as there is fuel to burn. Unlike previous, possibly excusable flirtations with the pathetic fallacy, the term “angry flaws” seems to me entirely unnecessary. 

         Gunn goes on to say that “desire and knowledge touch without relating”—that is, while a certain amount of knowledge is necessary in order to spark desire, the facts of life are not at all affected by what we desire. An intimation of divine beauty is not enough to guarantee that we will attain unity with such a thing. Gunn then points out that not only the sun, but all things are subject to entropy—nevertheless, the sun remains inspirational due to its might and longevity relative to us, a hint of what it would be to find a higher power.

         In the penultimate stanza, we leave cynicism behind, and return to the dreamy mysticism of the beginning as Gunn addresses a prayer to the sun—it is as if, despite realistic considerations, there remains an existential value in embracing the sun as a token of a higher power, and in willing ourselves to be changed by it. We are strongly reminded of Wallace Stevens’s lines in “Sunday Morning,” which I think it is impossible Gunn could not also have been thinking of: 

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men

shall chant in orgy on a summer morn

their boisterous devotion to the sun,

not as a god, but as a god might be,

naked among them, like a savage source. 

Gun compares the sun to a flower, and we may suspect that psychedelic hippiness is afoot. The sun is a seedbed because it is the origin of life. It is “without root and stem” not only because it is suspended in the sky, but because, in its role as the token of God, it has no origin—it is eternal, self-caused. In the final line of this stanza, “still recreating in defining them,” we have a lovely pun which works on several levels. All things pass away, but the magnanimous power of the sun, or God, is always in the process of recreating life, and life itself is defined by this cycle. From a Platonic standpoint, this is to be forever making copies of eternal ideas. Finally, we are given the idea of creation as recreation—God creates reality for the sheer joy of it. It is the divine hobby. 

In the final quatrain, Gunn implores the sun to enable him to join it in spirit, to “enter your passionless love, impartial but intense.” That is, to become like the sun in giving and receiving generously and impartially, not out of desire, but simply due to one’s nature. He asks that he be able to “kindle in acceptance round your centre,” to join, like the planets, in the music of the spheres, and be annihilated in divine love—a “petal of light lost in your innocence.” In this final line, Gunn subverts the phrase “lost innocence” to grasp at a deeper wisdom. If the first stage of maturity is to lose one’s innocence about the world, the second and more profound stage of maturity is to attune oneself to the grand, playful, indifferent innocence which lies at the heart of existence— to become, as the mystics say, a holy fool. Gunn himself, intelligent as he was, was never able to reach such attunement—he worshiped at the temple of fleeting pleasures his whole life. The attempt however, to reach beyond one’s circumstances, to behold a vision of beauty and wisdom as yet unattained, is the basis of nearly all our great art, and whether or not one can live the ideals that one espouses, the eloquent articulation of such ideals for the benefit of all is a triumph in itself. 

With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend:

Sunlight

Some things, by their affinity light’s token,

are more than shown: steel glitters from a track;

small glinting scoops, after a wave has broken,

dimple the water in its draining back;

Water, glass, metal, match light in their raptures,

flashing their many answers to the one.

What captures light belongs to what it captures:

the whole side of a world facing the sun,     

re-turned to woo the original perfection,

giving itself to what created it,

and wearing green in sign of its subjection.

It is as if the sun were infinite.

But angry flaws are swallowed by the distance;

it varies, moves, its concentrated fires

are slowly dying—the image of persistence

is an image, only, of our own desires:

desires and knowledge touch without relating.

The system of which sun and we are part,

is both imperfect and deteriorating.

And yet the sun outlasts us at the heart.

Great seedbed, yellow centre of the flower,

flower on its own, without a root or stem,

giving all colour and all shape their power,

still recreating in defining them,        

enable us, altering like you, to enter

your passionless love, impartial but intense,

and kindle in acceptance round your centre,

petals of light lost in your innocence.