Can a poet pretend that poetry has nothing to do with gilding lilies? Like Shakespeare's sonnet beginning "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun", "The Gifts" by Norman MacCaig eschews "impossible things", the baubles and fancies of the flattering imagination, for plain, brave monosyllables. "The good and ill that makes of me this man" are all that the poet can offer "you", whose "greedy vanity" requires this cold-water check on the understandable lust for more splendid "gifts". As with Shakespeare, the poet sounds all the cleverer for his rhetorical gesture. There is a hint of Donne here, too, with the lover entertaining (one hopes) his beloved with the ingenuity of his thought – perhaps the only true gift that can be made by a person who regards his partner as "flower, and stone".

This is one of only three of MacCaig's poems published in the TLS, all of which date from the 1950s, when he also wrote a handful of reviews for the paper. He died in 1996 at the age of eighty-five.

The Gifts

You read the old Irish poet and complain
I do not offer you impossible things -
Gloves of bee's fur, cap of the wren's wings,
Goblets so clear light falls on them like a stain.
I make you the harder offer of all I can,
The good and ill that make of me this man.

I need no fancy to mark you as beautiful,
If you are beautiful. All I know is what
Darkens and brightens the sad waste of my thought
Is what makes me your wild, truth-telling fool
Who will not spoil your power by adding one
Vainglorious image to all we've said and done.

Flowers need no fantasy, stones need no dream;
And you are flower, and stone. And I compel
Myself to be no more than possible,
Offering nothing that might one day seem
A measure of your failure to be true
To the greedy vanity that disfigures you.

A cloak of finest silk in Scotland - what
Has that to do with troubled nights and days
Of anguished happiness? I had no praise
Even of your kindness, that was not bought
At such a price this bankrupt self is all
I have to give. And is that possible?

NORMAN MACCAIG (1956)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "Norfolk" by John Betjeman, click here.

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