Considering the Snail
Poetry at The Junction, Ep 1.
What follows is a gently edited conversation I recorded with Joshua Weiner about Thom Gunn’s poem, Considering the Snail. You are cordially invited to read the transcript or listen to our conversation. You can listen here or wherever you get podcasts. This is the first episode in our series about poetry that matters. Enjoy!
Welcome to The Junction. I’m Daniel Lazar. The Junction is the intersection, the nexus, the junction, if you will, of my passions and curiosities.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve become increasingly curious and passionate about poetry. And no one has sparked this passion more than my friend, Joshua Weiner.
Joshua is a poet and a professor of English and creative writing in the MFA program at the University of Maryland. And over the years, Josh has hipped me to poems and ways of thinking about language that I might not have discovered without his gentle encouragement. So I’m grateful, truly grateful, that he’s joining me today. Josh, welcome to The Junction.
JW: Hey Daniel, it’s great to be here with you in the poetry space.
DL: So this is the first in what we both hope will become a series of conversations about and around poems. We’ll say more about the project as it unfolds. But for now, I just kinda wanna dive into a poem.
To inaugurate our project you selected Considering the Snail by Thom Gunn from his 1961 volume My Sad Captains. Can I be so bold as to humbly request that you read the poem to me?
JW: Well, I’ve been reading this poem for like 42 years, so I’m happy to read it for you, Daniel.
Considering the Snail
By Thom Gunn
The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,
pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later
I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.DL: Josh, of all the poems ever written, why did you select Considering the Snail as the first poem for our project?
JW: It’s a poem that I’ve been reading for decades. It’s been an important poem to me and is one of the poems that led me into writing and kind of showed me a path to writing that I felt like I could follow and be a part of and make mine. And the poem has so many qualities that have been instructive to me and that I’ve learned from.
And there’s something about the poem that continues to speak to me, that I continue to think about, that has some kind of mystery at the center of it, which keeps me wondering about things.
DL: Can you tell me a bit about Thom Gunn?
JW: Thom Gunn is probably one of the most important poets I’ve made some kind of connection to through poetry. He’s someone that I got to know and he became a friend and something of a mentor to me at Berkeley when I went out there in 1986. I went there specifically to make some kind of connection with him. And to, in my own mind, kind of apprentice myself to him. I took courses with him and served as his TA over a number of years and wrote a couple of theses under his direction.
Gunn was born in 1929, which is significant. He’s born kind of in the middle of a third generation of modernist writers. He was born and grew up in England. And coming into his adolescence, discovered that he’s gay. And this was a dangerous feeling to have in England at that time and in the United States as well.
And as he comes into writing poetry, he’s becoming a really bold, imaginative, inventive, exciting writer who’s really working through the lyric tradition of English poetry over 400 years or more.
He becomes a quick kind of master of traditional English metrics, often with end rhymes and complex stanza structures. He’s writing in a plain style. And he’s finding poets who are in the canon of English poetry, especially the poets of the Renaissance like John Donne and George Herbert, Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spencer, etc.
And he meets an American guy, Mike Kitay, they fall in love, and Thom follows Mike back to the United States.
He arrived in San Francisco around 1954. Living an out gay life was still not really possible in the United States, but there are pockets where one finds more freedom to live. And obviously San Francisco is one of those places. And so they settle into the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco.
Thom is at Stanford for a little bit with a really influential, important critic and poet and teacher of poets at that time named Ivor Winters, an American. But he’s also very invested in the lyric tradition in English, as well as other kinds of European poetry of compression and argument, a kind of hyper rationalism.
Gunn is having an adventure in America of many different dimensions. And one of them is really exploring his sexuality and also like what the possibilities are for living a gay life in partnership with somebody. They set up house in The Haight and he’s really investing himself in being in America.
So he’s reading American poets such as William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder and Robert Duncan and really paying attention to kind of more open, freer poetic forms, free verse basically. But he can’t do it really, because his ears are so tuned to the rhythms and meters of traditional English poetry. But he really wants to. So he starts to experiment with a poetic form which has a lot of clarity and definition to it, but is not as rigorous in its adherence to certain rhythms that are traditional in English poetry. And this form is called syllabics.
And that’s what Considering the Snail is, written in metrically. He’s working with counting the syllables of each line. And you can’t really hear it when one reads the poem out loud, the measure is a lot more subtle. And so he’s playing with that. It gives him this kind of in-between space between like traditional, essential syllabic meters of English poetry and free verse, which he hasn’t quite grasped yet how to do. He will become a master of free verse as well.
But this is this kind of in between where he measures where he has this openness. So every line is in seven syllables. But the poem is actually much more fluid than that and that’s just how Gunn is kind of working with what we call verse movement, the way that a sentence unfolds in relation to the measure.
This is incredibly exciting for him. And it’s one of the things that gives the poem its terrific, subtle, and quiet energy, which may be also kind of analogous and consonant with the power of the snail.
And so we can kind of move now into the center of the poem, which is the occasion of the poem, which is like seeing a snail and observing it and wondering about it.
Interestingly, the title is not The Snail. It’s not Ode to a Snail. It’s Considering the Snail. So in a way, the poem has two subjects and one of them is the object of the poem: the snail. It’s really about the moment of observation, perception, questioning, insight, identification with.
That’s an integral part of the subject is the act of reflection, the act of, of inquiry of imagination.
One of the great things about the poem is that Gunn in his modesty acknowledges or indicates in the way the poem moves that there is a mystery about the snail that he can’t really penetrate, that he doesn’t really know about. The insight into the snail’s phenomenal life, like there’s a limit to that. There’s something about the snail that he can’t know, that he can’t enter into. And that’s part of the drama of the poem.
There are these four words in the poem that alliterate. They all start with the same consonant sound and they’re not just paired acoustically, but they’re paired spatially too, if you saw the poem on the page. And the two, there are two pairs and one pair is power and purpose that’s at the center of the second stanza.
what power is at work, drenched there with purpose, knowing nothing.
This is not an accident. This is an understanding that comes up in the active composition of the poem.
So each of those words, power and purpose and passion and progress in their pairing show up in a parallel position on the line. This is like a kind of hidden aspect of the form. Well, I say it’s hidden, but actually it’s in plain sight. But it’s something that we wouldn’t necessarily notice just reading the poem for the first time or hearing it. There are many aspects of the poem structure that you can’t hear when you just hear the poem. You have to actually see it on the page.
DL: What do you think led him to write this particular poem?
JW: So it’s at a moment when Gunn has been in the States for about five years. He’s practicing with these more open metrics. He’s discovering what it’s like to live a kind of open gay life. He’s making all kinds of discoveries for himself, existential discoveries.
He’s also taking a lot of acid. That’s part of his discovery. He’s really part of the scene in San Francisco at this time. and, and his use of LSD is actually breaking down a lot of barriers, a lot of walls, and this is allowing him to kind of move into a new kind of embodiment of what his life is going to be like. So I actually imagine that he was tripping and came across this snail in the grass and just spent an incredibly long period of time just watching it slowly move through the grass.
And it’s typical of Gunn that he will take an experience like that, which is basically kind of formless, the LSD experience, and find within it a clear definition of what that experience was like for him and kind of then later bring that back to an active composition.
He didn’t try to write when he was on LSD. It would have been a disaster. But he holds on to the flavor and texture of these experiences and what he learns from them. And he brings those lessons back into a different quality of waking life and finds the forms of poetry in them.
So he’s learning how to drop a lot of the rhetoric of traditional English poetry and just observe and describe what he’s seeing. And that’s actually a hard lesson for him because the traditional English poetic lyric is just like a part of his DNA, you know? So he’s trying to learn new habits.
So the discovery of the snail’s slow passion and deliberate progress, I think this is where we hear Gunn really identify with the snail. He is making his own deliberate progress.
We also have to acknowledge something that’s a kind of deeper connotation in the poem, which is just Gunn’s sexuality. The way a snail comes out of its shell is just a phallic image, you know. It just kind of is. And that trail of broken white across the litter, in a deeper connotation is semen. It’s not that in the scene of the poem, but it has that value in Gunn’s imagination.
We can kind of reverse engineer this a little bit and cast forward if we wanted to to a poem from the 1970s called The Miracle, which recounts a kind of anecdote about a gay sexual encounter in the bathroom of McDonald’s. And there’s an image of semen on a guy’s boot in that poem. Gunn describes as a snail track. So the image kind of carries forward for him from this moment into the 1970s.
Beyond that, there’s such an interesting word in that second stanza that’s at the heart of Gunn’s question, what is a snail’s fury? That’s such an interesting question to ask about a snail, you know? It’s such an interesting word.
And that that word “fury” will bring forward the word passion later. There really may be something there for us in understanding Gunn’s question about the snail’s fury. That’s such a beautiful line where rain has darkened the earth’s dark, so simple in those repetitions and beautiful.
One of the actions of any poem is to make us notice words and their energies and their connotations and the different ways that they cut. Take for example, that word progress at the end of the poem. It’s such an interesting word to end this poem on the slow passion of that deliberate progress. Part of the meaning of the word is the history of the way that that word has been used over time. Gunn is very aware of this.
DL: So, you really did a bang up job of walking through the mystery that you alluded to at the head of this conversation. But also at the head of this conversation you said that you’d been reading this poem for four decades. Can you talk a little bit about how this poem has changed or somehow opened up for you over the decades you’ve been reading it?
JW: I first really connected with the poem, those pairings of power and purpose and passion and progress, they really spoke to me as a young person who was trying to write poetry, not yet a poet.
I guess I identified with Gunn’s trajectory as a poet and also my own attempts to move forward in my writing of poetry. And I could see that my passion was a slow passion. I’m a slow learner. And it requires a kind of deliberation, it requires a kind of intentionality.
As I got older, I saw the slow passion of that deliberate progress to kind of speak to other aspects of my life, like falling in love with someone, getting married, committing to a partnership, having children, raising children, looking for gainful employment. To do all that requires a lot of intentionality. New challenges that continue to call up new passions that require new levels, new kinds of intentionality.
DL: Yes! To help to drive this train into the station, could I get you to read the poem one more time?
JW: I’d love to! That’s like asking me if I care to have another helping of ice cream.
Considering the Snail
By Thom Gunn
The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,
pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later
I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.DL: Thank you so much for bringing this poem into my life. What a treat! I think a lot of people reading this or listening to it are gonna dig this poem. If someone digs this poem, is there another poem by him or or by another poet that they should check out?
JW: Well, I mentioned Marianne Moore, this wonderful book, Observations, which came out in 1924. There’s also a poem that Gunn no doubt knew from the mid 18th century by the English poet William Cowper called The Snail. So if you want to find more snail poems, there’s some great ones out there.
But I would also point you to that 1961 volume that this poem appears in, My Sad Captains. One of the things I didn’t mention is that it’s a kind of experimental book for Gunn because one half are poems in these traditional English metrics that I’ve been mentioning. And then the other half are in these syllabics that Considering the Snail is a part of. And so you can really see the sense of movement in Gunn’s own imagination and the kinds of skills that he is deploying in his writing of poems from the beginning of that book to the end.
I would also point to a really amazing poem of his called Tamer and Hawk. He speaks in the voice of the hawk and the tamer is his lover. And that’s in his debut book, which had the bold title Fighting Terms.
DL: Thank you for those references. Josh, thanks again for sitting with me, for engaging with this extraordinary poem, and for encouraging me to carefully consider what was there all along.
JW: Really fun. Thanks, Daniel. Thanks for indulging me.
Hey you! I’m trying to sustain the quality and frequency of The Junction. It’s a labor of love, but it is labor. It helps me when you subscribe. At the very least, enjoy a free subscription.
If you don’t want to become a paid subscriber, but support me and want to show it, PayPal me a one-time donation. If you don’t like PayPal, you can buy me a coffee.
If money is tight, you can still help. How? Share The Junction with someone who might appreciate it.
Oh, and you’re always invited to check out my other projects over here.
