Night Thoughts (1956, first edition)

David Gascoyne's long poem for radio

Author

Publisher

Printing Details

First edition. Hardback in dustwrapper. 25.5 × 16cm, 48pp.

This is a long poem divided into three parts: The Nightwatchers, Megalometropolitan Carnival and Encounter with Silence. It was written to be spoken (the BBC commissioned it and produced it on the Third Programme in December, 1955), which gives it an agreeable easiness: the language is direct, the rhythms varied and supple, the images bold. What is remarkable about this easiness is that it comes not from a reluctance to go deep, but from profound familiarity with a tremendous theme: ‘Man benighted’ searching the silence for ‘a thing he has not thought of yet, that no one ever heard’.

The first part conjures up the fearful watchfulness of unhappy men; the second, their desperate escape from undefined fears into the ‘carnival’ of modern urban life; and the third, which moves from the city to a country garden, the encounter with silence from which comes the command ‘lift up your heart’. David Gascoyne’s acute awareness of the anguish of man’s condition makes the change of key at the end of his poem particularly moving. Only someone who has made us understand the full meaning of ‘despair’ could so stir us by the words: ‘I cry out of my darkness. I could not cry if I were in complete despair’.

Condition

Very good condition, with light wear to the wrapper's edges and a little tanning to the wrapper's edges.