"I know a man.
As I said to my friend, because I am always talking,
John, I said, which was not his name,
the darkness surrounds us.
What can we do against it, or else, shall we?
And why not buy a goddamn big car?
Drive, he said, for Christ's sake,
look out where you're going."
[CHEERING]
Thank you.
Yeah.
Well, let me tell you something about that particular--
one of the only times that I've ever had the honor,
really, I suppose, in an American--
an issue on American writing of the London Times Literary
Supplement.
This particular poem came into their discussion.
And the reviewer--
I only want to suggest to you the difficulties
of the possible confusions that can
come of trying to read into a poem more
than it's actually stated in it.
But this particular reviewer felt
that John had some equivalence to John the Baptist
and felt that, therefore, the speaker must
be Christ and ended up by making a parallel with one
of Auden's poem.
It's something of like Christian advice
to undergraduates on the dangers of abstract thinking.
But I don't think it's that.
I mean, again, I don't think the poet or man, whatever
to call him, I don't think the man
who writes the poem is always the best man to ask
as to what literally it means.
It means a very complex thing to him.
I mean, he wrote it.
He has particular needs of his involved.
He may not be able to say what it means in any quote objective
way at all.
For me, that poem quote means simply
a wish to think of some way happily
to get some ease and some reliefs
and then the sense of a friend coming in
as qualification of that, simply to watch out
what all this is leading to, which I suppose is partly
the exercise of friends.
And all the poems of this period involve this character.
This one, this next one, "Wait For Me,"
the underlying sections came from one of these marriage
handbooks that I remember--
I don't remember who wrote it.
I think it was a--
I think a woman author, and it was simply
a guide for marital happiness.
And this was literally, the section involving her advice to
The wife.
And this italicized part here is where
it was the literal instruction-- to give a man his manliness;
provide creature comfort for him and herself;
preserve essential hypocrisies, in short,
to make a home for herself.
This was the advice.
And so this-- I wanted to see if you could get to--
if you could get a qualification acting
against that actual statement at the same time
it was being said.