[Steve Bucknell]

Night Thoughts looks very exciting. His last major work, it reads to me like an attempt to integrate the energy of his early surrealism with the spiritual depth and formality of his later verse. It was meant as a piece for radio, part in verse, part in prose. As Jennings writes on Night Thoughts: “For the truth is that his lyric gift is an entirely personal not a dramatic one. His subjects are always dramatic but his treatment is meditative; he moves by monologue not by dialogue, he is more interested in the fears and aspirations which men share than in those emotions where they show themselves to be most diverse.”

I can’t resist quoting this section from early on in Night Thoughts:

Can you believe,
O foreigner I’m thinking of, woman unknown to me,
Lying awake somewhere in Europe, can you now
Believe you have friends lying alone,
In darkness, overseas, who can imagine how you feel
And wish, and wish—ah, what? What can be done
For anyone, what can we do alone, alas, how can
The lonely people without power, who hardly know
How best to help neighbours they know, help those
Who surely would be neighbours like themselves, if they but knew
How to break through the silence and the noise and the great night
Of all that is unknown to us, that weighs us down in between
One lonely human being and another? Who can hear
My thoughts, or know how my heart grieves, or feel
That I just like themselves long to believe
That lonely human beings love each other?”

Very powerful, expressing deep personal and social concerns. It’s a piece that reads well in the context of the global 99% movement that is rising up around us. Gascoyne would have loved the expressions of solidarity that movement has engendered.

This is Skelton’s summing-up:

"Night Thoughts is David Gascoyne’s most ambitious work to date, and his greatest single achievement. In it he moves easily from Dantesque nightmare to social satire, from free-flowing prose to classically neat verse, and throughout the whole drama retains absolute control over his various themes and symbols. It is a study of our urban civilisation and also of the universal condition of man. It sums up, in its exploration of solitude and despair, many of his earlier perceptions, and places him alongside Yeats, Eliot, Auden and MacNeice as one of the select company of British poets who have attempted, and achieved, the construction of a major new form.” Introduction to Collected Poems 1963.

Steve.