Gunn’s “Meat”: Notations on Craft

Thom Gunn has been writing poems in traditional meters and free verse close to thirty years, exploiting by turns the full range of Anglo-American poetic forms. Already an impressive poet as an undergraduate, Gunn unsettled the Oxford/Cambridge literary world of the early 1950’s with tough, brainy stanzas full of syntactic vigor and a verbal knottiness reminiscent of Donne, matched to a philosophically existential sensibility. By the time he got to Stanford and started working with Yvor Winters, Gunn’s searching imagination found expression in his experiments with syllabics—a deliberate, willed attempt to teach himself the unpatterned rhythms of free verse. Since then his poems have shown a virtuosity as much indebted to American innovators such as Williams, Pound, Creeley and Duncan, as to the poets of the English Tradition. As a master poet Gunn is a master of forms: he knows what different forms can do, what kind of effects they have, and how they might capture and give shape to imagination and experience. When does a poet who can write in couplets choose not to? How does the pressure of design urge life into a shape?

Reading “Meat” in its early incarnation as free verse (published here for the first time) against the final, more formal version included in Gunn’s new book The Man with Night Sweats shows us how a poet gets different effects from different forms, and how those effects change our experience of a poem.

The writing in both versions of “Meat” is characteristically chaste and unadorned, the diction terse, the images concise and the abstractions plainly elegant. About the first version, Gunn says that the poem “was completely finished, no rhyme or suggestion of rhymes.” Indeed, the free verse of the first version is so plain it seems quite stripped of sonic figures altogether. The poem catches the reader initially, not through euphony, cacophony, or rhyme, but through its darting, rhythmically quick observation of physical movement:

My brother saw a pig
rooting in a Cornish
field its eating and rooting
one athletic joy
the whole lovely body
wriggling through mud and weed

The shift in position of “rooting” between lines 2 and 3, and the race of syntax over a two- to three-beat line that often breaks between subject and verb or adjective and noun, create the effect of muscles flexing in activity; actions are piled on top of each other without subordination, so that rooting, eating and wriggling all happen at once, the verse movement jerking forward in its freedom from punctuation.

Observation of physical detail and its pleasures shifts to the poet’s enlargening rhetoric in the second paragraph, where a full sentence runs without stalling. The action of statement then shifts again (II.14–16) as comparison breaks into question and further assertion, lineated stiffly by phrasal blocks:

Not like this degraded meat
is it chicken or pork
tastes of the half-life

This clipped lurching is quite different from the speed of Gunn’s final proposition, which slides over a predominantly two-beat line:

To make this meat
worth eating you have to
add the succulent liberties
of tomato, onion

The poem in this first version is most engaging formally in the tension and release of its rhythms, the way rhetorical statement and descriptions of physical action come alive through line break and subtle modulations of tone. These effects that I’m describing are generally small ones, and I’m applying a lot of critical pressure to them, perhaps unfairly—although , I think, they are the poem’s real effects. It is not, however, a poem to judge, so much as it is a tool to help define the formal achievement of the final version.

Where the first version of the poem seems fresh in its initial spontaneous sensuality—a sensuality that seems immediate despite the claim in the first paragraph that the description is a second-hand account—the final version contains the traditions of the art, and through the measure and rhyme of its pentameter couplets gives a more ordered shape to speech. The first lines of the free-verse poem yank one into the physical with their paratactic stacking, and the way phrases trip into each other; in the metrical poem, one hears Gunn speak more than one sees the pig rooting—the description of physical action couples with abstraction, which is really the perception of intellect:

My brother saw a pig root in a field,
And saw too its whole lovely body yield
To this desire which deepened out of need
So that in wriggling through the mud and weed
To eat and dig were on athletic joy.
When we who are the overloads destroy
Our ranging vassals, we can therefore taste
The muscle of delighted interest
We make into ourselves, as formerly
Hurons digested human bravery.

Traditional measure and rhyme work harder and more effectively here towards dramatizing the action of the mind as it runs in the body of a sentence and connects idea and world—the way, for example, that “this desire which deepened out of need” links in sound to the purely physical action of “wriggling through the mud and weed.” As an utterance, the metered “Meat” seems itself to exercise more “athletic joy” in the life-generating activity of its syntax. The couplets can reinforce in their end-rhymes conceptual links (“To make this worth a meal you have to add/The succulent liberties it never had”), or heighten physical experience (". . .each creature forced to sit/Cramped in its boredom and its pile of shit"). The couplets throughout are distinguished by their combination of heroic snap and a more pre-Augustan freedom of movement.

In his essay on Ben Jonson in The Occasions of Poverty, Gunn writes that the occasion of a poem is “a starting point to which the poet must in some sense stay true. The truer he is to it, the closer he sticks to what for him is its authenticity, the more he will be able to draw from it in the adventures it produces. . .” The occasion of “Meat” is that of a social, moral judgment publicly uttered, and as such it seems to have a fuller, more lively embodiment in pentameter couplets. One feels in the free verse poem that the possibilities of how to shape speech are multiple and unsettled, and that the poem’s closure as the penultimate line drops is groped towards or stumbled upon. By the end of the final version, one’s ear is tuned to the counterpoint of rhythm playing against a pentameter line, and the anticipation of rhyme. The poem closes with an inevitability and finality that fits its occasion without stifling Gunn’s subtle music.