Background to the poem

Amidst some striking and surreal images, poignancy is generated by the sense of the poetic persona’s suffering. Complex, uncertain feelings also seem to lie under the angry, emotional surface. For example, in a poem whose two stanzas neatly balance each other, the potent anger of ‘Criminal, I damn you for it’ is counterbalanced, perhaps even contradicted, by the final words of the line, ‘(very softly)’.

Is this phrase evidence that the anger is mixed with residual tenderness? The tone of this poem is hard to pin down and perhaps softness can, like quietness, be menacing, for the poem ends with an emphatic denunciation of the lover’s behaviour when the speaker damns him. The title, though, suggests she does not shirk responsibility for the part she played in this disastrous relationship. Her choice was ‘badly’ made.

The sequence of surreal images, in which parts of the body are mixed, such as ‘I have the lens and jug of it!’ and ‘my brain’s clear retina’, suggest displacement and confusion. There is something undeniably disturbing in the series of images that culminates in the lover imagined as a sort of greedy vampire, or a cannibal consuming the speaker’s ‘spirit’ and ‘brain’.

About Rosemary Tonks

Rosemary Tonks produced two slim volumes of verse and several novels between 1963 and 1974 while living an affluent, sociable life, then disappeared entirely from view. At the age of twenty she married a wealthy banker, and his work took them to Karachi, before they returned to live in Hampstead. It seems that in the early 1970s Tonks became disillusioned with modern life, retreated from the world completely and stopped publishing. She lived an exceptionally private and reclusive life for the next forty years, while rumours periodically emerged regarding her whereabouts. It was only after her death in 2014 that it became clear she had been living alone in a house in Bournemouth since 1981.

Influenced by French symbolist and surrealist poets, Tonks has a distinct style and voice and is very much a poet of urban life and, specifically, London life. She writes lyrically, colloquially and dramatically about relationships in the city.