Thom Gunn - A Village Edmund

This is further material salvaged from the old website.




A Village Edmund

Gunn removed this poem from the second edition of Fighting Terms and it is thus now quite hard to find. But find it I eventually did, in the Poetry Library, a photocopy of the Fantasy Press booklet it first appeared in, kept in a box in the librarian’s office.

One can find reasons why Gunn might have decided to leave it out. It is a bit heavy handed in its celebration of the ‘tough’, a theme that recurs throughout the early poems. It is stylistically flawed, perhaps no more so than the awkward inversion of line 11. The fox and chickens metaphor is a bit dubious. Some lines might be thought a bit prosaic, etc, etc. So it’s not a great success but is of interest nonetheless.

There are aspects of it to like, like line 4 and the last lines. It works on its own immature terms. Perhaps the apparent idolatry of brutishness is undermined by the ‘village’ status of the Edmund who is only a bully in his own backyard.

I reproduce it here in case anybody else spent as much time looking for it as I did. Perhaps Google will find it for Gunn’s readers now.


A Village Edmund

‘Rough and Lecherous’ – King Lear

Swaggering up the high street, thumb in his belt
Young Edmund was let loose upon the town.
A fox not eating the chickens that he killed,
A bastard creature they’d overlooked to drown.
And nobody ever knew what he felt.

Terribly he resented a chance word,
Yet a few tough boys risked hanging on his.
Spry on their feet and ready to run from the place
They worked in his shadow any project he pleased,
And cleared the mangled chickens from off the yard.

‘Look at him,’ said at the window crowding girls:
He stood at the corner randy and rowdy and rough,
Or elbowed others out of the way in the street.
He bided his time, if they wanted him enough
They knew where to come for a fox that tears and spoils.

One girl he fancied as much as she fancied him.
‘For a moment,’ she thought, ‘our bodies can bestride
A heaven whose memory will support my life.’
He took her to the deserted countryside,
And she lay down and obeyed his every whim.

When it was over he pulled his trousers on.
‘Demon lovers must go,’ he coldly said
And walked away from the rocks to the lighted town.
‘Why should heaven,’ she asked, ‘be for the dead?’
And she stared at the pale intolerable moon.