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Note on The Kiss

I thought of Francis Bacon, but this leads off, more obviously, from Rodin’s statue The Kiss.  I read, in the Daily Telegraph on the train back from Crewe on the 2^nd June 1999, of the transfer of The Kiss, weighing 3 tons and worth £10 million, from the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) to Lewes Town Hall for a few months.

My poem follows a Rilke pattern because:

(a) I wanted to write a poem inspired by the Rilke poems I’d recently translated, but different enough in style;

(b) Rilke was told by his friend Rodin to get out there and look at things and get on with a day’s work, as sculptors and painters do.  Rilke followed his advice to great effect, and I wanted to commemorate the Rodin-Rilke connection.  Ted Hughes has also written a blood-and-guts poem about kisses (Lovesong), and I’d heard this recently on the radio.  But let’s not ignore Hughes’ debt to Rilke.  I’ve heard Trakl mentioned too, but I’ve not read Trakl.

That’s incidental.  This is not an exercise.  I wanted to capture the ravenous desire to be complete, to show love as carnivorous,   and why it is so.  Even before modern candour, lovers drank each other’s beauty, devoured kisses.  It may be our secret dream within orgasm to become the other sex.  I can’t see that any sexual orientation or behaviour has cured the wound in the side which makes us all only half-human.

Alan Marshfield

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