In 1954, Thom Gunn’s first collection of poems, Fighting Terms, appeared; a poem of his, “Jesus and His Mother” (destined for his second collection, three years later), appeared in the TLS at the same time . The association became a sustained and happy one, Gunn’s poems and review-essays appearing as often in the paper as his commitments as a lecturer at Berkeley, and his innate perfectionism, allowed. (He also received what were perhaps his severest and most appreciative reviews in the TLS, by Ian Hamilton and Hugh Haughton respectively: see NB, July 31.) In a sense, that association has outlived the poet himself, who died in 2005: last year, we reprinted his “Buchanan Castle, 1948”, published in the London Magazine thirty years ago, and never included in any of Gunn’s subsequent collections.

“Death’s Door” is a relatively late poem, published in the TLS in 1988, based on a cold conceit – the kind of seventeenth-century poetic device of which Gunn was a modern master. The title of the poem belies the nature of the event it describes: the entrance to the afterlife is not marked by something that swings discreetly open and shut, but by a more gradual procedure, in which earthly events have unearthly but interested spectators.

Nowadays, of course, the dead watch these events on television, after their “processing” (has the door already opened and shut as they pass through?), and doing so they come to learn their own remoteness from them — learn, in effect, to let go. Yet there is nothing sensationally grotesque about this. Instead, there is only the “limiting candour” that Gunn has described elsewhere, in a poem that also looks down on the world, viewing it from an airplane over the Pacific Ocean: “a cold hard light without break / that reveals merely what is “.

Death's Door

Of course the dead outnumber us
– How their recruiting armies grow!
My mother archaic now as Minos,
She who died forty years ago.

After their processing, the dead
Sit down in groups and watch TV,
In which they must be interested,
For on it they see you and me.

These four, who though they never met
Died in one month, sit side by side
Together in front of the same set
And all without a TV Guide.

Arms round each other's shoulders loosely,
Although they can feel nothing, who
When they unlearned their pain so sprucely
Let go of all sensation too.

Thus they watch friend and relative
And life here as they think it is
– In black and white, repetitive
As situation comedies.

With both delight and tears at first
They greet each programme on death's stations,
But in the end lose interest,
Their boredom turning to impatience.

"He misses me? He must be kidding
–This week he's sleeping with a cop."
"All she reads now is Little Gidding."
"They're getting old. I wish they'd stop."

The habit of companionship
Lapses – they break themselves of touch:
Edging apart at arm and hip,
Till separated on the couch

They woo amnesia, look away
As if they were not yet elsewhere,
But when snow blurs the picture they,
Turned, give it a belonging stare.

Snow blows out toward them, till their seat
Filling with flakes becomes instead
Snow-bank, snow-landscape, and in that
They find themselves with all the dead,

Where passive light from snow-crust shows them
Both Minos circling and my mother.
Yet none of the recruits now knows them,
Nor do they recognize each other,

They have been so superbly trained
Into the perfect discipline
Of an archaic host, and weaned
From memory briefly barracked in.

THOM GUNN (1988)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "The Gifts" by Norman MacCaig, click here.

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