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Gunn's in Santa Maria DelPopoloLi Jian aa China University of Geosciences , Wuhan, ChinaPublished online: 30 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Li Jian (2003) Gunn's in Santa Maria Del Popolo, The Explicator,61:3, 177-178, DOI: 10.1080/00144940309597801

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00144940309597801

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WORKS CITED

Larkin, Philip. The Less Deceived. London: Marvel1 Press, 1955.

Watson, Stephen. “Darkness Encroaching.” Encounfer (April 1990): 30-37. . “Sunny Prestatyn.“ Thc, Whitsun Weddings. London: Faber and Faber. 1964. 35.

Gunn’s IN SANTA MARIA DEL POPOLO

In Thom Gunn’s “In Santa Maria Del Popolo,” the poet-attracted by Car- avaggio’s art (his use of the chiaroscuro technique, partially illuminating fig- ures against a dark background)-views his painting of the conversion of St. Paul. The painting depicts the biblical story from Acts 9:l-19-a story used as an example of, and justification for, every evangelical conversion experi- ence. Pre-eighteenth-century commentaries stress that it is solely through the miraculous reach of God’s saving grace that Saul is saved and converted as the Apostle Paul. Such commentaries led some religious believers to promulgate the doctrine of predestination: human beings cannot know right from wrong and must depend on direct guidance from God. However, anyone can claim to hear oracles from God and thus bypass the dilemma of human fallibility if he thinks he is saved and born again. As a result, some commit atrocities in God’s name, some condemn themselves because of failing to find evidence of being saved, and some are forced to pretend to be converted due to pressure of var- ious kinds.

The painter seems to have doubt about the arbitrary and undeserved nature of divine intervention, because he blacks out the world before he has set the candle on the ladder, R hich illuminates the dumb groom and falling Saul, and a pinto, still confused by the event, head bowed, right foreleg raised in step. The poet sees the shadow in the painting brimming with the shade in the church corridor. As the shadow in the painting obliterates the cacophonic background and sets forth only Saul, the groom, and the horse, the gloom around the church obscures the surrounding and “makes visible the painting on one wall of this recess by Caravaggio” (lines 3-4).

“Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul” (1 I ) . However, in the picture, Saul lying on his back, still falling, struggles and lifts his arms to embrace what is or is not there. Is it fear or blind faith? The belief that the painter fal- ters is strengthened by the evidence that while he paints the conversion of Saul, he also paints whores, pudgy cheats, and sharpers. He paints these seamy sides of men as “an alternate candour and secrecy inside the skin” (18-19). By using the word “skin,” the poet seems to say that the conversion of Saul into Paul is only superficial, even inauthentic, or that this dark aspect

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is also human. What is truer is the thing lying under the skin. The fact that he is strangled by a nonconvert proves that he is right in his doubt. What is more, when he leaves the place illuminated by the oblique twilight and comes to the dim interior of the church, the poet sees some old women who, though sincere in their praying, are suffering from pains and are not saved by God’s light. They seem helpless, pained, and in despair, because they fail to get comfort from God and thus must sustain their aching heads in their own tiny fists. The poet here focuses on the old women perhaps to indicate that old people know more about life, and women, who are designated a social status below men and subject to more unhappiness, especially know that they must rely on themselves rather than on God. But their hands are tiny and powerless to sup- port their aching heads, and they still long for assistance from God. Thus they are in the church praying but too tired for the kind of “the large gesture of soli- tary man” (30). When there is only candlelight illuminating limited space, the poet is not enlightened, because the background is dark. When the sun arrives to pull the parts together, he is still not enlightened, because he sees the chaot- ic world. So Gunn comes to the conclusion that there is no philosopher’s stone, as he writes in “The Annihilation of Nothing”:

The power that I envisaged, that presided Ultimate in its abstract devastations, Is merely change, the atoms it divided Complete, in ignorance, new combinations. ( 1 3-1 6)

-LI JIAN, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, China

WORKS CITED

Gunn, Thorn. “In Santa Maria Del Popolo.” Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. 93-94.

. “The Annihilation of Nothing.” Collected Poems. 95.

Kloefiorn’s ON A PORCH SWING SWINGING

On a porch swing swinging I watch a warm Indian-summer moon give way to the long and sudden shadows of evening. From atop this well-tended slope I follow a colt on its way to horse cavorting on an inland sea

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