David Gascoyne*

David Gascoyne (1916—2001) is an English poet whose first poetry collection appeared when he was just sixteen. He travelled to Paris in 1933 and became not only influenced by the surrealist movement, but became its spokesman to Britain — translating the poetry of Salvador Dali, Benjamin Peret, and André Breton.

Gascoyne also became a significant poet himself, writing original surrealist verse in his well-received second book of poems Man’s Life Is This Meat. By his third collection, however he had lost faith in surrealism, and began writing the mystical poems of an anguished Christian seeker. Elizabeth Jennings wrote, “I do not think … he really found his own voice or his own individual means of expression until he started writing the poems which appeared in the volume entitled Poems, 1937–42…”

The following poem is one of them, which was written in 1938.

Kyrie

Is man’s destructive lust insatiable? There is
Grief in the blow that shatters the innocent face.
Pain blots out clearer sense. And pleasure suffers
The trial thrust of death in even the bride’s embrace.
The black catastrophe that can lay waste our worlds
May be unconsciously desired. Fear masks our face;
And tears as warm and cruelly wrung as blood
Are tumbling even in the mouth of our grimace.
How can our hope ring true? Fatality of guilt
And complicated anguish confounds time and place;
While from the tottering ancestral house an angry voice
Resounds in prophecy. Grant us extraordinary grace,
O spirit hidden in the dark in us and deep,
And bring to light the dream out of our sleep.

The following is one version of a piece by Gascoyne from his New Collected Poems, although I’ve encountered a significantly different version elsewhere.

The Son of Man is in Revolt

The Son of Man is in revolt
Against the god of men.
The Son of God who took the fault
Of men away from them
To lay it in himself on God
Has nowhere now to rest God’s head
But in the heart of human solitude.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about David Gascoyne: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

David Gascoyne

David Gascoyne (1916—2001) is an English poet often associated with the surrealist movement. His first poetry collection appeared when he was just sixteen. He became a friend and collaborator with Salvador Dali, and wrote the influential 1935 book, A Short Survey of Surrealism.

Gascoyne's life has been described as a long search for meaning. At nineteen he became a member of the Communist Party, but became disillusioned when he saw how communists behaved; he also later found surrealism dissatisfying. He suffered from mental illness and was addicted to amphetamines for years, but he managed to break the habit. His 1956 book Night Thoughts evidences his turn from surrealism, toward metaphysical and religious poetry.

When he was a patient in Whitecroft Hospital on the Isle of Wight, he met his wife Judy who was a volunteer. She said:
---------"One of my favourite poems was called 'September
---------"Sun'. I read it one afternoon and one of the
---------patients came up to me afterwards and said 'I
---------wrote that', I put my hand on his shoulder and
---------said 'Of course you did, dear'. Then of course
---------when I got to know him I realised he had."

David Gascoyne once said, "The poet's job is to go on holding on to something like faith, through the darkness of total lack of faith...the eclipse of God."

Ecce Homo

Whose is this horrifying face,
This putrid flesh, discoloured, flayed,
Fed on by flies, scorched by the sun?
Whose are these hollow red-filmed eyes
And thorn-spiked head and spear-stuck side?
Behold the Man: He is Man’s Son.

Forget the legend, tear the decent veil
That cowardice or interest devised
To make their mortal enemy a friend,
To hide the bitter truth all His wounds tell,
Lest the great scandal be no more disguised:
He is in agony till the world’s end,

And we must never sleep during that time!
He is suspended on the cross-tree now
And we are onlookers at the crime,
Callous contemporaries of the slow
Torture of God. Here is the hill
Made ghastly by His spattered blood

Whereon He hangs and suffers still:
See, the centurions wear riding-boots,
Black shirts and badges and peaked caps,
Greet one another with raised-arm salutes;
They have cold eyes, unsmiling lips;
Yet these His brothers know not what they do.

And on his either side hang dead
A labourer and a factory hand,
Or one is maybe a lynched Jew
And one a Negro or a Red,
Coolie or Ethiopian, Irishman,
Spaniard or German democrat.

Behind his lolling head the sky
Glares like a fiery cataract
Red with the murders of two thousand years
Committed in His name and by
Crusaders, Christian warriors
Defending faith and property.

Amid the plain beneath His transfixed hands,
Exuding darkness as indelible
As guilty stains, fanned by funereal
And lurid airs, besieged by drifting sands
And clefted landslides our about-to-be
Bombed and abandoned cities stand.

He who wept for Jersualem
Now sees His prophecy extend
Across the greatest cities of the world,
A guilty panic reason cannot stem
Rising to raze them all as He foretold;
And He must watch this drama to the end.

Though often named, He is unknown
To the dark kingdoms at His feet
Where everything disparages His words,
And each man bears the common guilt alone
And goes blindfolded to his fate,
And fear and greed are sovereign lords.

The turning point of history
Must come. Yet the complacent and the proud
And who exploit and kill, may be denied—
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry—
The resurrection and the life
Wrought by your spirit’s blood.

Involved in their own sophistry
The black priest and the upright man
Faced by subversive truth shall be struck dumb,
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry,
While the rejected and condemned become
Agents of the divine.

Not from a monstrance silver-wrought
But from the tree of human pain
Redeem our sterile misery,
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry,
That man’s long journey
May not have been in vain.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about David Gascoyne: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.