Glad you liked the Agard poem, Marilyn. Actually, this isn't simply a humorous poem and a humorous ending, and it makes me think that good endings often have an ambivalence about them which gives the effect of an open ending.
In Douglas Dunn's poem "A Removal from Terry Street" (from Terry Street, 1969) a man moving house takes a lawnmower away with him, and the narrator ponders over the fact that there are no lawns on Terry Street. The poem ends:
"That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass."
The critic, Ian Gregson writes: "the longing for grass in 'A Removal from Terry Street' is understood and endorsed".
- "'There are many worlds': The 'Dialogic' in Terry Street and After", in Crawford, Robert & Kinloch, David (Eds.), Reading Douglas Dunn (Edinburgh 1992), p.29
But this isn't the whole story. The longing is certainly EXPRESSED, but not necessarily "understood and endorsed".
Dunn himself writes:
"The last line of the poem is intended as ironic. That man, and his lawnmower, setting off for a new place, perhaps a better place, and perhaps some grass for him to look after, moved me; and yet I also saw this vignette as an image of vanity, of that man's touching faith in progress, and of my own unjustifiable cynicism in an environment which perfectly embodied the shame and wormwood of British society."
- King, P.R., "Three New Poets: Douglas Dunn, Tom Paulin, Paul Miles", Nine Contem¬porary Poets, (London 1979), p. 224
Thus we can see that "I wish him grass" is a subjective jump from the material presence of the lawnmower, a conceit. And Dunn is LAUGHING at the item's incongruity. A trace of the reduced laughter can be seen in the double "h" of "wish him", i.e. "hee, hee".
Duncan
[This message has been edited by Duncan Gillies MacLaurin (edited May 18, 2006).]
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