A month after this poem appeared in the TLS, Michael Hamburger, in a review of the second collections of both Elizabeth Jennings ("A Way of Looking") and Philip Larkin ("The Less Deceived") drew attention to an important similarity between them. Both poets, he said, "are careful not to take their seriousness too seriously", a quality for which they, together with Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn and John Wain, were included in Robert Conquest’s Movement-launching anthology "New Lines" the following year. Although Jennings came to resent the association on the grounds that, unlike the other contributors, she was Catholic and female, it is easy to see, in this poem, why it happened: if her admired Henry Vaughan haunts this submerged religious parable, so too does the Larkin of "Home Is So Sad" and "Mr. Bleaney". And it is that Larkinesque voice of secular dread and the small, domestic consolations with which we seek to allay it that prevent the poem from tipping over into too neat an allegory.

G. S. Fraser once said he could imagine Jennings putting on white gloves before she sat down to write. But although there can be something forbidding about her purity, there is just enough give, here, in her iambic quadrameters to allow the visionary to shade into the vernacular. Writing about Jennings in 1970, Terry Eagleton said her poems always needed to guard against "an impulse to generalized, excessively proverbial statement". And that is what this one does: the last word – "untenanted" – may reinforce other religious clues – boxes carried off, ghosts, dread – or it may simply leave us where we started: in an empty house.

Moving House

Soon the house will be filled again,
Our boxes have been carried off,
The walls are bare, we only leave
White patches where our pictures hung.
Dust settles widely now among
The places where we used to move.

And though we are most glad to go
We want to leave some hint behind,
Nothing so powerful as a ghost
But some part of us to remind
New tenants whom we do not know
That the old house is not resigned

To wind and dust and spaces cut
Clean where our furniture was put.
We want to flourish our old selves
And frighten the new owners, but
We quite forget they will be glad
To find some trace upon the shelves
Of our own past, that what they dread,
Like us, is space untenanted.

ELIZABETH JENNINGS (1955)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "Homage to Goa" by Derek Mahon, click here.

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