Their pale feet curl, they poise their weight With a

learn'd skill.

It is the wave they imitate Keeps them so still.

Shell

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A man becomes what he is by choosing how he shall act—by deliberately engaging in universal movement, in the process of change. If he declines to act with change, change will act on him—he will become a swine, senseless, inert, potentially bestial. These are, on any estimation, issues of the first importance.

Many of the poems describe visions of universal flux. They are epiphanies: 'the course of a wind through grasses', a cascade of `rivering images', the might of the ocean 'down•ribbed with shine', The sunlight veining that wave is the god of these visions, the source of all vital energy, governing the stream of change. It is also the antithesis of moonlight, which presides over so many of Gunn's early poems and whose world—obsessive, introspective, ruled by the past—is renounced here in the magnificent 'For Signs'. The sun, by contrast, stimulating our senses, extends them beyond ourselves into the outside world, In so doing, it reveals a world independent of subjective imaginings, rinsed and luminous. Finally, sunlight flooding into the deepest recesses of the world is the traditional symbol of in- telligence, exploring it and striving to com- prehend it.

Making sense of it : the evidence of the senses becoming intelligible to the mind; for the chief virtue of these poems is in the way they derive meaning from sensation. In 'The Messenger', a man gazes into a flower that 'completes him through his sight'; it is a mo- ment of sensuous rapture, and yet :

Later the news, to branch from sense and sense, Bringing their versions of the flower in small Outward into intelligence.

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