With the dry vehemence of the unreal.
So I in the idea of your arms, unwon,
Am as the real in the unreal undone.
Those lines remind me of William Blake's:
What is it men in women do require
The lineaments of Gratified Desire
What is it women do in men require
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
Thom Gunn was delighted to see his epigram "Jamesian" on the New York City subways, as part of the Poetry in Motion program of the Poetry Society of America:
Their relationship consisted
In discussing if it existed.
He was even more delighted one day to be on a subway car where someone had written next to the poem, with a broad-tip marker, the words:
Yeah, and I ain't been getting much either!
Gunn's pleasure in this response recalls another epigram, by a poet he admired, Ben Jonson:
Pray thee, take care, that tak'st my booke in hand,
To reade it well: that is, to understand.
(Robert Hass's translations of Buson, Basho and Issa appear in his book "The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson & Issa." Ecco. Copyright © 1994 by Robert Hass. Dudley Fitts's translations of Ammianus and Meleagros appear in "Poems from the Greek Anthology." New Directions. Copyright © 1938, 1941, 1956 by New Directions. Cunningham's epigram appears in "The Collected Poems and Epigrams of J.V. Cunningham." Swallow Press, Inc. Copyright © 1942, 1947, 1950, 1957, 1960, 1964, 1967, 1971 by J. V. Cunningham. "Jamesian" appears in Thom Gunn's "Collected Poems." Farrar Straus Giroux. Copyright © 1994 by Thom Gunn.)
