Desert Island Poems: 'The Friendship of Young Poets' by Douglas Dunn

"...the oars/ drops scales of perfect river like melting glass."

The Friendship of Young Poets

by Douglas Dunn

There must have been more than just one of us,

But we never met. Each kept in his world of loss

the promise of literary days, the friendship

of poets, mysterious, that sharing of the books

And talking in whispers in crowded bars

Suspicious enough to be taken for love.

We never met. My youth was as private

as the bank at midnight, and in its safety

No talking behind backs, no one alike enough

To be pretentious with and quote lines at.

There is a boat on the river now, and

Two young men, one rowing, one reading aloud.

The shirt sleeves fill with wind, and from the oars

Drop scales of perfect river like melting glass.

The achievement of Douglas Dunn’s poetry is in its balance of the down-to-earth with the uplifting. What strikes me about looking back at his poems is his knack for imagery; I’m thinking of the glinting trowel in On Roofs of Terry Street, or the two lovers sitting silently at a kitchen table in a rented house in Modern Love, waiting for the cat. Poetry as ‘memorable speech’? We need look no further.

The Friendship of Young Poets

However the poem which has stayed with me the most is The Friendship of Young Poets. First of all, it’s an exquisite poem, a form of upside-down sonnet, beginning with the sestet and ending with a split octet. Indeed the fact that it’s upside down, could be said to symbolise the idea that his friendships in poetry, whether this was with Larkin, Heaney, Mahon or Longley (as explored in depth in Fran Brearton’s article ‘On The Friendship of Young Poets’, in Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry, CUP, 2011) came later in life, not in his youth. The first line, in any other poem, with its sense of finality could be read as a fitting epiphanic last line, as he melancholically yet quizzically asserts ‘There must have been more than just one of us/ but we never met.’  The form of the poem, then, symbolises how the speaker's route into poetry was neither conventional nor, indeed, routine.

The Poem's Form

The irregular and partial nature of the rhyming in the poem, which becomes more regular as we move through it, with the last quatrain ending with two pairs of half rhymes, the consonantal ‘and’ with ‘aloud’, and sibilant ‘oars’ and ‘glass’, serves to build an idea of a speaker who has grown into poetry, as the poem becomes more self consciously poetic by rhyming. This furthers the idea that the friendship of young poets generates more crafted verse. Longley, whose friendship with Dunn is often cited, supports this idea, as quoted by Brearton, ‘Friendship was the important thing… Creative spirits seldom occur singly.’^[1] Brearton herself points out that the friendships of young poets seem to bring about ‘the competitive and critical dialogue that helps bring the mature poetic voice into being.’^[2] I’d argue Dunn shows this maturation over the course of this poem, as it travels through isolation into friendship.

Preoccupations

On that note, while it’s entitled The Friendship of Young Poets, one of its major preoccupations is the speaker’s solitude, and struggle to be part of a poetry community; poetry, in fact, has almost sidelined them. After all, the speaker says in the shortest, starkest sentence in the poem, and maybe in all of Dunn’s poetry: ‘We never met.’ This phrase is repeated from the second line adding to its gravity. Poetry is presented as almost something to be ashamed of and hidden away, only to appear under the cover of darkness or ‘the bank at midnight’.

When we are introduced to the ‘two young men’ (we note they’re not yet fully grown men, implying a sense of incompletion or immaturity) in the final quatrain, there is still a sense of distance: are these two men the speaker is watching and envying, still unable to enter into their community? After all there is no mention of the personal pronouns ‘we’ the speaker has hitherto used. Or has the time now shifted (‘There is a boat on the river now…’) and we are watching the speaker watching himself in the boat either rowing or being read to, having progressed from his ‘youth’? There is a lovely ambiguity to these lines at the end, and we are unable to identify whether the speaker has found acceptance or is still watching on from the riverbank alone, fascinated by the young poets on the boat. At any rate the speaker never specifies that it is him on the boat and there is a sense of distance in the observation. Dunn specifically uses the pronoun ‘Their (shirt sleeves)’ to describe the young men on the boat, when he could have used ‘Our’ to make the poem more personal. As a result of this, the final quatrain is enigmatic, and reinforces a sense that the speaker may still feel that poetry is something for other people, and isn’t entirely at ease with being included in its community, as beautiful as the ‘melting glass’ may be. The fact that the poem is not quite a conventional sonnet, that the men are ‘young men’ and the river is like ‘melting glass’ all serve to paint a picture of incompleteness, unease, of a world coming into being, not yet fully realised, mirroring the speaker’s feelings.

The Final Line

The final line is among the most arresting of Dunn’s poetry with the oars which ‘drop scales of perfect river like melting glass’. First of all the iambic rhythm mimics the motion of the rowing, harking back to Wordsowth’s boat stealing passage from The Prelude (Book I) in which ‘I struck and struck again’, giving a sense of movement and progress, reinforcing the idea that the speaker (if it is indeed him in the boat) is now moving forward in life having found acceptance and vocation. Indeed there is almost something nineteenth century and Romantic about how their ‘shirt sleeves fill with wind.’ Brearton goes as far as to say ‘there may be a 1890s homoeroticism’^[3] to the scene. The use of ‘drop scales’ is noteworthy as we get the idea of an animal shedding its skin, growing, transforming, shedding its former self just as the speaker hints at this new life of poetry that he’s found. ‘Scales’ also has connotations of music, giving the strokes against the water a sense of sound and adding an aural dimension to the poem. ‘Drop’ is an interesting choice as it at once suggests something accidental and clumsy, but also something precise and intentional, as well as gesturing towards a sense of loss. The ‘perfect river’ suggests it is being disrupted by the rowers and the melting glass is a beautiful image, with melting glass being in the process of becoming something, (neither raw material nor finished product) just as the speaker is perhaps in the process of becoming a poet or, at least, lover of poetry. That this is the final image of the poem is poignant as we get a sense that the moment the poem is portraying is hardening, crystallising, setting in front of us, having now cooled into a finished, crafted poem, and a beautiful object in itself.

Personal Response

As a student on the MLitt in Creative Writing in 2008, not only was I lucky enough to meet Douglas but I also made a group of friends, ‘talking in whispers in crowded bars’ and ‘alike enough to be pretentious with’, with whom I still keep in touch and share poems. Even though Douglas was no longer teaching on the course at that time, he agreed to look at a few of my poems: one about a talking crab apple tree; a half-baked pantoum; and another which I seem to have erased from my memory. Very graciously, he went carefully through each one, expressed a mild antipathy for inanimate objects that talk in poems, and told me to stick at it. On another occasion he came to talk to us as a group about how long it takes to mature as a poet and the challenges of keeping going. So, while my friendships with young poets have been invaluable, there was a lesson there, too, about the role of older poets, and how important it is to learn from their life of craft, and to take their advice, especially when it comes to trees that talk and questionable pantoums.

^[1] Michael Longley in ‘On the Friendship of Young Poets’, by Fran Brearton, in Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry, (Cambridge University Press, 2011) p. 265/266

^[2] Ibid p.265

^[3] Ibid p.265