Poems
Poem 3: 'One Flesh'
Extract
Lying apart now, each in a separate bed,
He with a book, keeping the light on late,
She like a girl dreaming of childhood,
All men elsewhere -
The Poet: Elizabeth Jennings (1926-)
Elizabeth Jennings was born in Lincolnshire in 1926. When she was 6 the family moved to Oxford, where in the late 1940s she studied at the University, along with other celebrated writers from the period such as Kingsley Amis and John Wain. She still lives in Oxford and lives an unconventional, monastic life that has earned her the nickname 'The Bag Lady of Oxford'. She is a highly respected and well loved poet whose devout Catholicism informs a formal and elegant poetry that has many admirers.
The Poem
In 'One Flesh' Elizabeth Jennings looks at a different sort of love from the urgent passions of Marvell or the comic pleading of John Cooper Clarke. When she imagines her elderly parents in their bedroom she recognises that the sexual passion that created her has cooled and changed into a loving relationship where they are 'strangely apart, yet strangely close together'. Time in this poem is a far more gentle force than the helter-skelter rush threatening the lovers in 'To His Coy Mistress'. In 'One Flesh' Jennings acknowledges that a long-lived love between two people can be a more lasting thing than a few brief moments of youthful passion - a relationship where silence lies betweeen them 'like a thread to hold / And not wind in' and the surging force of time becomes 'a feather / Touching them gently.' This is a tremendously tender and compassionate poem, reminding us that Jennings writes out of a deep religious conviction.
What Simon Armitage Said
'She could almost be talking about two people that have died. You can really see them lying there together in a tomb... quite peaceful... quite tranquil... and in that sense she's commemorating the relationship of her parents.
'Love and sex don't have to be the same thing. In the Andrew Marvell poem he's really promoting the idea of passionate love but this is a different kind of love, a quiet love, a peaceful love at the end of passion.'
Simon Armitage - Passwords 1998
© 2000 Channel Four Television Corporation
