After an absence from England, a poem of distances:
Words, Wide Night
Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.
This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.
La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills
I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you
and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.
‘Words, Wide Night’ by Carol Ann Duffy first appeared in her poetry collection ‘The Other Country’ (1990); a title that evokes to me the famous opening line of L.P. Hartley’s novel ‘The Go-Between’: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’.
And so the collection takes the reader on numerous journeys into the past, across the uncertain and shifting terrain of memory…
‘Words, Wide Night’, my favourite poem as a teenager, takes me back on just such a journey, into my past, as distant and as impossible to cross now as the dark hills of the poem.
Of course, in the poem, the uncrossable geographical distance between the lovers is matched by a similarly wide gap between words and feeling. Like the speaker, the final line stands alone and openly concedes this difficulty: ‘and this is what it is like or what it is like in words’.
How to express emotion in words? With ironic precision Duffy pulls off the trick of doing just that. As the poet Sean O’Brien wrote: ‘Poetry, like love, depends on a kind of recognition. So often with Duffy does the reader say, “Yes, that’s it exactly!”
Music is often said to escape such limitations. So, to finish, here is a young band, who seem to have discovered the poem at about the age I did, putting the words to music.
