Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on February 19, 2011.

Thom Gunn was born in Britain but is associated more often with San Francisco and the excesses of American bohemianism than with the country of his birth. Yet his poetry has always seemed to me to be uniquely influenced by his British roots. It is something in both his word choice and his perspective.

Gunn wrote in both traditional poetic forms and free verse. He seems equally at home in either… remarkably so. One of the many signs marking Gunn as a very good poet.

Gunn suffered through many tragedies and many demons. These sufferings and demons are reflected in his work in the usual ways. Yet what shines through in his poetry is his poetic ability: his ear and eye.

“Considering the Snail” is typical of one kind of Gunn poem. The rhyme scheme is so loose and lightly rendered  that a first you do not notice it. And yet it holds the poem together,  like the unseen frame of a house, hidden behind sheet rock and stucco: “green” rhymed with “rain,” “progress” with “across.”

The words Gunn chooses to describe “the life” of the snail complete the poem: desire, passion, fury, stirring…. so much emotional language and urgency for a creature so utterly without urgency and passion. In an ordinary moment recreated by the poem, observer and the observed, reader and snail, merge into one in an extraordinary way.

Enjoy!

Considering the Snail

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.