Love-and-Death                                                            Page 10

The "kind brother of flesh.. .speechless, blind ...the eyeless beginning of the

world... blind, kind flesh" is a link back to 'Woman To Man" with its "eyeless

labourer in the night" and "the blind head butting at the dark" but now it is not

birth that is so described but death. In the dream-like state of "The City

Asleep" the "beloved" could be another person, or a part of the poet herself, or

the whole sleeping city of life. The descent into the grave, described in graphic

detail, involves the whole cycle of death, corruption and regeneration. There is

nothing in this process from which "we" are excluded. Even the "white grave-

worms" are identified as "we". And the whole seething mass of corruption

"aches and swells towards its flower in love."

"The City Asleep" (C.P.49) is a Jungian dream sequence expressing

unvarnished truth, which Jung believed emerges in dreams. The poem flows,

apparently unconsciously, through a series of disconnected though associated

symbols and images. The "mask of stone" changes to "Rain, like a giant

room."  The stone mask falls to reveal flesh that becomes "naked and

continuing seed". The unconscious stream of associations moves in sleep that

"has swallowed sight", through the dark of "senseless flesh, / simple and

vacant" to the "the untouched quick of life" where all "are one". The "dream-

continues further still, through the Underground" to dissolution: "through

stone towards the buried water", down to the worms where the flower of life

begins to rise up to the surface again.

This flower is celebrated in "Dark Gift" (C.P. 71):

The flower begins in the dark

where life is not.

Death has a word to speak

and the flower begins.

The root goes down in the night

and from the night's mud

the unmade, the inchoate

starts to take shape and rise.