Gaudete by Ted Hughes Page A

pistol out there in front of him
    As if it were a fixture he were hanging on to, outside a
                                                                           window,
    Over a night-drop.
    His gold hair seems to sweat.
    His sunlamp bronze sweats.
    His pale-eyed stare is brittle and impotently severe, like
                                                         the stare of a lizard.
    His pistol sinks its aim
    Over Lumb’s powerful gymnast’s shoulders.
    The sweat-figured muscles
    Of the half-twisted torso, and the long sinewy legs
    Are an unexpected development.
    Dunworth has difficulty
    Adding this body to the familiar long-jowled monkish
                                                                             visage
    That watches him unmoving, as if expecting
    To see him do something typically stupid.
    Those hooded heavy eyes weaken him
    Like a load of ironweight.
    Dunworth gazes back at his wife
    Almost forgetting where he is or what he is doing.
    He is helplessly in love.
    He stands there, in his child’s helplessness,
    As if he had searched everywhere and at last somehow he
                                                                  had found her.
    An irresponsible joy chatters to be heard, somewhere in
                              the back of his head, as he gazes at her,
    Feeling all his nerves dazzle, with waitings of vertigo,
    As if he were gazing into an open furnace.
    At the same time he tightens on the butt and trigger of
                                          the pistol, readjusting his grip,
    As if the terrible moment were approaching of itself.
    In the remaining seconds
    He studies her lips and tries to separate out the ugliness
                                                                            there,
    Which he remembers finding regrettable.
    He tries to isolate the monkey-crudity of her hairline,
    Her spoiled chin, all the ordinariness
    That once bored him so much,
    But he feels only a glowing mass.
    He stands there, paralysed by a bliss
    And a most horrible torture –
    Endless sweetness and endless anguish.
    He turns the pistol towards his own face
    And puts the muzzle in his mouth.

    Lumb is stepping towards him.
    Dunworth closes his eyes and tries to clench his strength
    Which slips from him like water.
    Lumb takes the pistol out of his hand.
    Dunworth
    Sits in a huddle on the floor.
    His eyes, squeezed close, refuse the features of his trap,
    Squeezing the ball of tight dazzling blackness behind his
                                                                              eyes.
    His face is numb as rubber,
    His body sunk in a depth of happening which holds it like
                                                                        concrete.
    The Reverend Lumb has left.
    Opening his eyes, Dunworth sees his wife’s stockinged
                                                                 ankles and shoes
    Passing close.
    When he looks up she is fully dressed and tugging a comb
                                                              through her hair.
    She ignores him and goes to her room.
    He follows and tries the door but it is already locked.
    He leans at the door, emptied, merely his shape,
    Like a moth pinned to a board,
    While the nectars of the white lilac
    And the purple and dark magenta lilac
    Press through the rooms. 

Betty
    Naked at her dresser