Background to the poem

Thinking of a snail, what comes into your mind? An enemy of plants and vegetables? Something comical, repulsive or edible?

The closely observed snail in the first verse of this poem is seen deep within nature. Gunn writes of ‘grass’, ‘water’, ‘rain’ and ‘a wood’, but the snail’s journey is anything but easy. He ‘pushes’ through the night, and the grass is heavy with rain, making progress even slower than usual. Does Gunn’s choice of a strictly observed seven‑syllable line with its odd line breaks and enjambment give a sense of the snail’s difficult but deliberate journey?

It is, of course, very tempting to see the poem in metaphorical terms. Is the snail’s journey applicable to the way a person might choose to approach life? Patient, persevering and focused, does the snail offer an example of an inherent passion to succeed? Is the journey every bit as important as the destination?

About Thom Gunn

Born in Kent, Thom Gunn moved to America in 1958 after National Service and a degree at Cambridge, and settled in San Francisco for the rest of his life.

His first two collections of poetry were seen as impressive and unsettling works of exceptional promise that looked at rebellion and violence in verse that was formal and controlled. His poetry shows a willingness to write in both highly metrical and free verse.

Gunn taught in America for a while but then devoted himself to writing full time. America in the late 1960s and ’70s allowed him no longer to conceal his homosexuality, and the work of his middle period reflects his experimentation with drugs and involvement with aspects of a hippie counterculture. However, as the AIDS epidemic began to kill many of his friends in the 1980s, he produced poems that were full of heartbreaking loss and sadness.

Read more about Thom Gunn in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography