On the beach at Fontana
Wind whines and whines the shingle,
The crazy pierstakes groan;
A senile sea numbers each single
Slimesilvered stone.
From whining wind and colder
Grey sea I wrap him warm
And touch his trembling fineboned shoulder
And boyish arm.
Around us fear, descending
Darkness of fear above
And in my heart how deep unending
Ache of love!
from Pomes Penyeach, James Joyce, 1927
Reading online journals, you soon notice how many people find verses to express
their feelings and to help them cope with the stresses of life. What I
notice most of all is firstly how appropriate and exact these choices usually
are, and secondly how few of them I recognise. That's probably because
I am completely out of touch with popular culture. I was brought up on
the classics, and on this page I am going to put up a few extracts from
(mostly gay) poets that I like. These are all very standard choices, and
if you already like gay poetry you probably won't find anything new here.
But if you would like a brief introduction to some of the best classical
gay poetry I hope you'll like some of these.
If you have comments, or suggestions for additional entries on this
page, please email me.
Far and away the best gay poetry was written by Shakespeare. That is not to say that Shakespeare himself was gay.
If he was, he was even deeper in the closet than me, and in his sonnets he goes to great
lengths to cover his tracks and to hide his own sexual preferences. Shakespeare's
sonnets deserve a whole page to themselves [still under construction],
but meantime here is a sample:
Sonnet 63
Against .. my love shall be as I am now,
With Time's injurious hand crushed and o'erworn;
When hours have drained his blood, and filled his brow
With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn
Hath travelled on to age's steepy night,
And all those beauties whereof now he's king
Are vanishing, or vanished out of sight,
Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
For such a time do I now fortify
Against confounding Age's cruel knife,
That he shall never cut from memory
My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life.
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.
Sonnet 126
O thou my lovely boy, who in thy power
Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle hour;
Who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st
Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow'st.
If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,
As thou goest onward still will pluck thee back
She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill
May Time disgrace, and wretched minutes kill.
Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure!
She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure;
Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.
from Shakespeare's Sonnets, 1609
Added some years later: It doesn't look as though the page on Shakespeare's sonnets will ever get written now. But from time to time I have commented on one of them in my online journal. Click for links to comments on
- Sonnet 144 Two loves I have, of comfort and despair
- Sonnet 19 Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paw
- Sonnet 20 A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted
- Sonnet 64 When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
- Sonnet 109 O, never say that I was false of heart
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
is often thought of as a gay poet, though he is too large and varied a
character to fit neatly into any category. In fact, there is only a small
proportion of his work that seems to show a gay orientation (mostly in
the collections called Calamus and Drum-Taps). When asked
whether his poetry had any homo-erotic content, he denied it completely
and claimed that his sexuality was "normal". Hmmm, judge for yourself:
When I Heard at the Close of the Day
When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been
received with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for
me that followed,
And else when I caroused, or when my plans were accomplished,
still I was not happy,
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect
health, refreshed, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear
in the morning light,
When I wandered alone over the beach, and undressing
bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on
his way coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my
food nourished me more, and the beautiful day passed well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at
evening came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters
roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as
directed to me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the
same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was
inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast - and that night
I was happy.
from Calamus, 1860
Most of Whitman's poems are too long to include here, including my favourite,
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, the great lament that he wrote in the days after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln "for the dead I loved so well, For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands". Another Whitman favourite of mine is the Song of the Open Road. Here are just the first few and the last few lines. (Actually, when I read this poem, I seldom get beyond line 4, "Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune". How's that for a positive attitude to life? It always makes me stop and think about my own attitudes.) If you like this extract, go and look up the 208 lines I have omitted:
Song of the Open Road (abridged for TV serialisation)
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with complaints, libraries, criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
...
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book
on the shelf unopened!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearned!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer
plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
A E Housman (1859-1936)
was the first gay poet that I discovered as a teenager. His verse has a
depressive tone that suited my mood then. It also has the quality of being
instantly memorisable, and I learned a lot of it by heart. Here are a few
selections from his collection A Shropshire Lad.
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XIII
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free."
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
"The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
'Tis paid with sighs a-plenty
And sold for endless rue."
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.
XL
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
LVII
You smile upon your friend today,
Today his ills are over;
You hearken to the lover's say,
And happy is the lover.
'Tis late to hearken, late to smile,
But better late than never:
I shall have lived a little while
Before I die for ever.
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XIV (first three verses)
There pass the careless people
That call their souls their own:
Here by the road I loiter,
How idle and alone.
Ah, past the plunge of plummet,
In seas I cannot sound,
My heart and soul and senses,
World without end, are drowned.
His folly hath not fellow
Beneath the blue of day
That gives to man or woman
His heart and soul away.
XXII
The street sounds to the soldiers' tread,
And out we troop to see:
A single redcoat turns his head,
He turns and looks at me.
My man, from sky to sky's so far,
We never crossed before;
Such leagues apart the world's ends are,
We're like to meet no more.
What thoughts at heart have you and I
We cannot stop to tell;
But dead or living, drunk or dry,
Soldier, I wish you well.
LX
Now hollow fires burn out to black,
And lights are guttering low:
Square your shoulders, lift your pack,
And leave your friends and go.
Oh never fear man, nought's to dread,
Look not to left nor right:
In all the endless road you tread
There's nothing but the night.
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And here is one more poem of Housman's (No. XII from his Last Poems),
in which he protests at the repression and intolerance of homosexuals in
Britain in the years following the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde.
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
was killed in the last days of the first world war. He is best known as
a war poet, and some of his best poems were set to music in Britten's War
Requiem. Here is one of them, a bitter protest against the senseless
slaughter of the war in which he was forced to take part.
The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Owen was gay, and there are several poems in which he is open about this.
One of these is Maundy Thursday, which also shows a healthily sceptical
attitude to religion.
Maundy Thursday
Between the brown hands of a server-lad
The silver cross was offered to be kissed.
The men came up, lugubrious, but not sad,
And knelt reluctantly, half-prejudiced.
(And kissing, kissed the emblem of a creed.)
Then mourning women knelt; meek mouths they had,
(And kissed the Body of the Christ indeed.)
Young children came, with eager lips and glad.
(These kissed a silver doll, immensely bright.)
Then I, too, knelt before that acolyte.
Above the crucifix I bent my head:
The Christ was thin, and cold, and very dead:
And yet I bowed, yea, kissed - my lips did cling.
(I kissed the warm live hand that held the thing.)
W H Auden (1907-1973) was a gay British poet, whose work has had a new lease of popularity since
the movie Four weddings and a funeral. In it, the funeral was for
a gay man whose boyfriend gave the funeral oration in which he read a poem of Auden's:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let airplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
No. IX of Twelve Songs, 1936
And here is a chilling poem that Auden wrote in 1939, as the darkness enveloped
Europe. As you read it, remember that gays as well as Jews were victims
of the holocaust.
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.
The consul banged the table and said:
"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.
Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go today, my dear, but where shall we go today?
Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said:
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread";
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.
Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying: "They must die";
We were in his mind, my dear, we were in his mind.
Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.
Went down to the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.
Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.
Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors;
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.
Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.
No. I of Ten Songs, 1939
Thom Gunn is a gay English
poet, but he has lived in California for so long that he sounds more American
than British. Of the three poems below, San Francisco Streets is
a nice piece of social observation, Courage, a Tale is just for fun.
Memory Unsettled
could hardly be more different. It comes from a sombre, Aids-haunted collection
called The Man with Night Sweats and is based on a true incident.
Along with a couple of other poems in the collection, it was written in
memory of a graduate student, Charlie Hinkle. RIP.
San Francisco Streets
I've had my eye on you
For some time now.
You're getting by it seems,
Not quite sure how.
But as you go along
You're finding out
What different city streets
Are all about.
Peach country was your home.
When you went picking
You ended every day
With peach fuzz sticking
All over face and arms,
Intimate, gross,
Itching like family,
And far too close.
But when you came to town
And when you first
Hung out on Market Street
That was the worst:
Tough little groups of boys
Outside Flagg's Shoes.
You learned to keep your cash.
You got tattoos.
Then by degrees you rose
Like country cream -
Hustler to towel boy,
Bath house and steam;
Tried being kept a while -
But felt confined,
One brass bed driving you
Out of your mind.
Later on Castro Street
You got new work
Selling chic jewelry.
And as sales clerk
You have at last attained
To middle class.
(No one on Castro Street
Peddles his ass.)
You gaze out from the store.
Watching you watch
All the men strolling by
I think I catch
Half-veiled uncertainty
In your expression.
Good looks and great physiques
Pass in procession.
You've risen up this high –
How, you're not sure.
Better remember what
Makes you secure.
Fuzz is still on the peach,
Peach on the stem.
Your looks looked after you.
Look after them.
from The Passages of Joy, 1982
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Courage, a Tale
There was a Child
who heard from another Child
that if you masturbate 100 times
it kills you.
This gave him pause;
he certainly slowed down quite a bit
and also
kept count.
But, till number 80,
was relatively loose about it.
There did seem plenty of time left.
The next 18
were reserved for celebrations,
like the banquet room in a hotel.
The 99th time
was simply unavoidable.
Weeks passed.
And then he thought
Fuck it
it's worth dying for,
and half an hour later
the score rose from 99 to 105.
from Jack Straw's Castle, 1976
Memory Unsettled
Your pain still hangs in air,
Sharp motes of it suspended;
The voice of your despair -
That also is not ended:
When near your death a friend
Asked you what he could do,
'Remember me,' you said.
We will remember you.
Once when you went to see
Another with a fever
In a like hospital bed,
With terrible hothouse cough
And terrible hothouse shiver
That soaked him and then dried him,
And you perceived that he
Had to be comforted,
You climbed in there beside him
And hugged him plain in view,
Though you were sick enough,
And had your own fears too.
from The Man with Night Sweats, 1992
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Finally, something by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado. There is no gay connection here, but this poem means a lot to me. I learnt it from a fellow mathematician, Domingo Herrero from Argentina. I only met Domingo a couple of times, at math conferences, but he had such a warm and outgoing personality that I think of him as a friend. He used the first four lines of this poem as the epigraph for a major research paper. Sadly, Domingo died of a brain tumour at the age of 50.
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en la mar.
Proverbios y Cantares XXIX, 1909
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Wayfarer, your footsteps are
the way, and nothing more;
wayfarer, there is no way,
you make the way by walking.
By walking you make the way,
and when you look behind
you see the path which never
again is to be trod.
Wayfarer, there is no way,
just a wake upon the sea.
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