We all cry for love;
But what if we get it? To hold
In sex, and affection,
The adored human creature
Making of both a unit
In love, and procreate
Which is the end of love,
Drops one small image into
A widening universe.
Man’s love disintegrates
In the space void of him;
And gradually he comes
To know that he is small.
What is man’s love? To hold
Into despair the loving creature,
And propagate an image
Is the utmost. Beyond his tides
The chronic invalids
Of broken universes
Wait in derision on man.
Yet he was formed to love.
Earth cries, sun cries,
With the stark, hapless Gods
Phenomenal of matter
In space, to this end.
But when man reaches this
And grows into himself,
He dwindles to his size.
His spaces melt into him
He occupies no area.
Love then is the space of destruction,
And but for the harmonies
Of despair, he is nothing.
Weep, then, to be a stone
Or a cold animal
In servitude to something
Other than consciousness
Which love brings; since that shape
Or measure, in awareness
Through love of what we are,
Is that measure of space death is.
Jon Silkin gestures towards the metaphysical poets in this early poem, first published in 1961. The title might make you think of mechanical devices like the pulley, which, in the eponymous poem by George Herbert, becomes a figure for God’s compassionate relationship with mankind: then there’s the measuring of Sin and Love which occupies The Agony.
“Measure” most famously appears as a noun in the opening of John Donne’s death-defiant love-poem The Relic: “All measure and all language I should pass,/ Should I tell what a miracle she was.” The opening of that sublime couplet reminds us that “measure” can mean, in prosody, the metrical foot, or poetic rhythm generally. That’s not the primary meaning of “measure” in Silkin’s poem, but it lingers behind the scenes.
Silkin’s debate revolves around the question of love’s significance. What happens when we get the thing “we all cry for”? Although “sex” and “affection”, and the frankly emotive “adored human creature” are terms that acknowledge love’s value, the poem’s clipped lineation and plain, abstract diction insist on detachment. Love makes sex and affection (and, it’s hinted, also the man and woman) “a unit” and leads to procreation, but it’s this process which “Drops one small image into/ A widening universe”. The extended sentence brings all the complicated process that is its subject to an unexpected head in the simple verb, “drops”.
To drop is to let go of something, lose it, discard it and, of course, to give birth. Silkin’s strange, compelling phrase, “one small image”, minimises the significance and solidity of the new life, so the negative connotations cling to the verb. It’s as if a coin had been dropped in a deep pool. The thought is repeated in the answer to the question “What is man’s love?” This time, it’s “To hold/ Into despair the loving creature,/ And propagate an image …” And this is “the utmost”, the best that can be achieved.
How do we hold someone into despair? I want to read “into” as “unto” but the line says something more than that. “To hold into despair” suggests that “hold” is a verb of motion, and implies that someone, the beloved, is being transported by the lover into some terminal state of hopelessness.
What sense of the world informs these lines? As an English Jewish poet, born in 1930 and serving as a conscripted soldier for two years after the second world war, Silkin was always aware of human evil in its more extreme forms. Perhaps, besides the Holocaust, there’s an additional personal narrative darkening the thought. Silkin’s most-anthologised poem, Death of a Son, tells us that his first child died as an infant.
Those “chronic invalids/ Of broken universes” seem not only to embody the destructive in human nature, but a pathetic, unchosen incompletion. In tune with Judeo-Christian tradition, the poem tells us that mankind “was formed to love” but, echoing the first line, “Earth cries, sun cries” and so do the “stark, hapless Gods/ Phenomenal of matter.” In worship too, it seems, we make a U-turn into materialism, or otherwise come to an intellectual dead end. Even more frighteningly, now, man “dwindles to his size./ His spaces melt into him/ He occupies no area.” Cleverly paced, the poem repeats its questions and answers, and slowly, cumulatively, reaches the ultimate bleak insight that “Love … is the space of destruction,/ And but for the harmonies/ Of despair, he” (man) “ is nothing.”
The exhortation “Weep, then, to be a stone/ or a cold animal …” suggests unconsciousness to be the preferable condition, and that we should cry for this, rather than love. The word “cold” here is unexpected. Silkin writes in many poems with sharp sympathy for animals. Perhaps “cold” indicates an assumed lack of imaginative dimension to animal sexual conduct. Perhaps it signifies physical death.
Love for Silkin, as for generations of poets, is heightened consciousness, but, in The Measure, the delights of the condition are quickly bypassed. Love is Eros without Agape, and the metaphysical focus is interior. We’re forced to see “what we are” and, painfully conscious of the mortal limitations that result in loss, we measure, through love, the power of death.
Silkin’s poems have a didactic, even rabbinical, quality at times. His sermons can be knotty and difficult to follow, and sometimes sound a little portentous. But this poem, written when he was around thirty, and first published in The Re-Ordering of the Stones, has the manner of a restrained cri de coeur. Its argument is incontrovertible, like a newly delivered prophecy.
Reading his newly published Complete Poems, a big book made bigger by the editors’ inclusion of previously uncollected work, we are reminded, despite the fact that the last collection appeared in 2002, of what poetry used to be. I’m not lamenting the passing of the good old days: poetry can travel farther, and its tonal range is wider, than when Silkin and his distinguished generation (including Geoffrey Hill and Ted Hughes) led the way, but, at the same time, it can seem to have lost ambition. We’re lucky still to have Hill faring forward, taking risks. Silkin died comparatively young but, as this volume reveals, he was able to amass a huge, varied and highly original legacy. And one of its achievements is to remind us that poetry and abstract ideas are not necessarily doomed to separation in their “broken universes”.
- This piece was corrected on Tuesday June 23 to say that Silkin served as a conscripted soldier after rather than during the second world war.
