Gerard Manley Tuncks

Extract

It is Narcissus who sees in the unrippled water the transfiguration flash back of its liquid clearness. He is like a god, so perfectly is his vision proportioned to his seeing, so uniquely has the element reserved for him a significance which is for him alone. Completely and wholly it is for him, but for the pool he gazes on is this interchange of light and of looks anything less than the end possessed, the entelechy and the consummation of its being? For this it was made, that it should receive this imprint of light from above and so render it. A clarity-in-general become indelibly this clarity, uniquely its and his. The word which utters it is a new thing in the scale of creation.

It seems to me that poetry ceased to form itself upon the Liturgy in order to form itself upon the poet's own likeness seen in the mirror of the world. (Or is the’ statement “simplicist,” a priori, slick?) Tuncks, then, in his naked individuality, creeps out from Choir to choose between the apple-orchards and the wilderness. It has commonly been one or the other, according, perhaps, as the sense of sight in his non-spatial anatomy lies nearer the heart or the intelligence, or to the liver, source of black bile and sombre landscapes. So with his note-book Gerard Manley Tuncks searching the inscapes of clouds and flowers, the ash-tree and “weeds in wheels” for the reflection of his own countenance which is in the eyes of Jesus Christ, but vicariously in “the bluebell I have been looking at. I can tell the beauty of our Lord by it.”