Slow Waker

I look at the nephew,
eighteen, across the breakfast.
He had to be called and called.
He smiles, but without
conviction. He will not
have tea, oh OK,
if it’s no trouble,
he will have tea.

His adult face is brand-new.
Once the newness
clears up and it has got
an expression or two
besides bewilderment
he could be a handsome
devil. He could be
a carpenter, a poet, it’s
all possible…
impossible. The future
is not a word in his mouth.

That, for him, is the trouble:
he lay in bed caught deep
in the mire between
sleep and awake, neither
alert nor resting,
between the flow of night,
ceaselessly braiding itself,
and the gravelly beach
that our soles have thickened on.
Nobody has ever told him
he is good-looking,
just that his feet smell.

He paces through alien London
all day. Everything
is important and unimportant.
He feeds only by osmosis.
He stares at the glint
and blunt thrust of traffic. He
wants to withdraw.

He wants to withdraw into
a small space, like
the cupboard under the stairs
where the vacuum cleaner is kept,
so he can wait, and doze,
and get in nobody’s way.

Thom Gunn, born in Gravesend, Kent, in 1929, published his impressive first collection, Fighting Terms, in 1954, and moved to San Francisco in the same year. Co-opted by UK critics to the Movement – a poetic school known for formal rigour, plain-speaking and general down-to-earthiness – Gunn is perhaps the Movement poet least defined or confined by its principles. His subsequent collections reflect American poetic influences and a more direct identification with gay culture. While never abandoning the use of formal techniques, he was able to bring that discipline into 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 and discursive style. As a character sketch of a young man, it presents a cool objectivity towards his subject from the outset. The boy is “the nephew”, as breakfast is “the 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 life-stage with its own psychology and biology. Emotion is kept at bay: the “newness” of the boy’s face is a condition that will one day “clear up” – the verb suggesting a case of acne. Among possible looks, “he could be a handsome / devil”, but the tone of the compliment more than hints that we shouldn’t count on it. The 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 sentimentalising youth as an icon of promise.

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 “caught deep / in the mire between / sleep and awake, neither / alert nor resting”. How much fresher it is to pair noun and adjective, “sleep and awake”, instead of the drearily correct “sleep and waking”. The contrast between the states is laid bare by this simplest of innovations.

Long-term familiarity between the nephew and the speaker is implied by the memory of the beach that “our soles have thickened on” and topped up by the gentle 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, dazzled, over-absorbent, as a jetlagged tourist might be. “Everything / is important and unimportant”. It’s the way a city feels to a newcomer, as perhaps the dazzle of possible selves feels to an adolescent.

Now the speaker’s affection, though undeclared, is increasingly clear from the intensity with which he imagines the overwhelmed consciousness, and the desire for withdrawal. The young man who “feeds only by osmosis” is a kind of chrysalis; he needs a dim, secluded place in which to develop. The cupboard under the stairs is a womb-like privacy, the opposite of the glinting, thrusting city, and perhaps also preferable to the enforced sociability of the visit to an uncle. What seems a touchingly modest desire, to “wait, and doze, / and get in nobody’s way” recognises an organism’s need for time and stillness. The seeming depersonalisation of the teenage nephew in this poem seems one more instance of the depth and humanity of the poet’s understanding.