"Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart / Or squash it flat?"

— Amis, Kingsley (1922-1995)


Date
1953
Metaphor
"Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart / Or squash it flat?"
Metaphor in Context
Between the GARDENING and the COOKERY
    Comes the brief POETRY shelf;
By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology
    Offers itself.

Critical, and with nothing else to do,
    I scan the Contents page,
Relieved to find the names are mostly new;
    No one my age.

Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
    Landscape Near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
    So does Rilke and Buddha.

"I travel, you see", "I think" and "I can read"
    These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,
    Poem for J.,

The ladies' choice, discountenance my patter
    For several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
    A moral beckons.

Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
    Or squash it flat?

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;
    Girls aren't like that.

We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
    Can get by without it.
Women don't seem to think that's good enough;
    They write about it.

And the awful way their poems lay them open
    Just doesn't strike them.
Women are really much nicer than men:
    No wonder we like them.

Deciding this, we can forget those times
    We stayed up half the night
Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,
    And couldn't write.
Provenance
Reading
Citation
First published as "Something Nasty in the Bookshop," in A Frame of Mind: Eighteen Poems (Reading: University of Reading, 1953).

Text checked against Kingsley Amis, "A Bookshop Idyll," in Collected Poems, 1944-1979 (New York Review of Books, 1979), pp. 56-7.
Date of Entry
06/06/2023

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.