This week's TLS (October 26) features a review by Eric Griffiths of the second volume – Against the Christians – of John Haffenden's biography of the poet and critic William Empson. On October 17, 1986, we published a group of nine unpublished poems by Empson: the latest and most personal of them "Letter vi. A marriage", from which the following extract is taken.

from Letter vi. A Marriage

. . .

Envisioning however the same beauty in taxiboys
And failing to recognize in one case
What with drink and the infantilism of the Japanese type
The fact that it had not yet attained puberty
I was most rightly (because of another case
Where the jealousy of the driver seemed the chief factor)
– Not indeed technically, named only in vernacular newspapers,
And who knows who knows –
Deported from that virtuous and aesthetic country;
Life being as strange as this traditional theme.

I remember only once bathing in the sight of your eyes
Paying some attention to this bloodless series
– One would think to the first – the grey eyes open
Large milky lit fastened steadily on me
Not knowing what to think of what might come next
Supposing I was ever to stop haranguing the tea party;
There is a social weight on the traditional theme.

It seemed to me impossible to admit that such a signal
(Of which I was certain, which you would now certainly deny)
So dissolving and so noble, had been even recognized,
Still less, having sent them to their owner out of a clownish honesty,
To make sensual capital out of writings
Of a sort so much lectured on
As to be practised with decency only for clinical purposes.
Life is allied to this traditional theme.

Nor am I sure I did not imagine a comparison
– I was at least hushed and ashamed by those perhaps misinterpreted eyes –
To the eyes I was to see not long after on my mother,
Thank God not since as yet, cool, liquid, larger than possible,
Expecting ill-treatment, inquiring, a young girl’s,
When after inducing a goodnatured virgin to seduce me
In a morass of mutual misunderstandings, I was kicked out
From a settled job, and hoped I had escaped from you.
But life was as strange as this traditional theme.

. . .

WILLIAM EMPSON

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