Meeting Mr Gascoyne

I first saw the poet, David Gascoyne,  across a crowded room in the Primrose Hill Community Centre in London. It was my first ever attendance at a poetry reading (when I was at university) drawn by his name on the bill - one of three Surrealist poets (though in truth all three had drunk at the well of the unconscious and moved on).

I had only the description of the poet, Kathleen Raine, to go on and this was not a description of physical characteristics but of character and quality of being. There was a tall man, quietly standing to one side, at the far end of the room, with an air of such collected vulnerability and searching presence that I knew it could be no other. There he was in his signature bow tie waiting to speak, to read. He read beautifully (not always a characteristic of poets with their own work) and I had my admiration confirmed.

Later we were to meet (at a conference) and hold a long conversation about Christianity, existentialism and that quality of being that is presence - that sees into the suchness of things and their significance. He was a gentle soul, much wracked by depression and long periods of poetic silence, even as he began young.

His first volume of poems had emerged when still in his teens. Beginning as a 'surrealist', it had led him to an appreciation of the mystery of things and how this rested and was completed by faith in Christ. It was a faith utterly individual, wrestled from misfortune, but deeply held. It was held in the face of a world disintegrating into the chaos of conflict and later a world where materialism crowded out the spirit, a move that could only alienate. 

In this darkening, David's was a mind and heart always seeking a redemptive touch, a hopeful (and challenging) sign of redemption.

Snow in Europe

Out of their slumber Europeans spun
Dense dreams: appeasements, miracle, glimpsed flash
Of a new golden era; but could not restrain
The vertical white weight that fell last night
And made their continent a blank.

Hush, says the sameness of the snow
The Ural and Jura now rejoin
The furthest Arctic's desolation. All is one;
Sheer monotone: plain, mountain; country, town:
Contours and boundaries no longer show.

The warring flags hang colourless a while;
Now midnight's icy zero feigns a truce
Between the signs and seasons, and fades out
All shots and cries. But when the great thaw comes,
How red shall be the melting snow, how loud the drums!