Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"There's No Place to Sleep in This Bed, Tanguy" by Charles Henri Ford is a surreal and poignant dedication to Yves Tanguy, a prominent French surrealist painter known for his dreamlike, otherworldly landscapes. Ford's poem emulates Tanguy’s artistic vision through a series of vivid, enigmatic images that blur the line between reality and the subconscious. The work encapsulates a landscape filled with the bizarre, haunting, and paradoxical, creating a poetic space where coherence dissolves into abstraction.

The opening lines, “The storks like elbows had a fit of falling / She beat me over the head with a lung,” introduce a disjointed reality where living beings and body parts behave unpredictably. The comparison of storks, often seen as symbols of birth and new beginnings, to “elbows” in a fit of falling suggests a twisted rebirth or collapse, setting a tone of instability. The image of being struck with a lung is jarring and unsettling, blurring the boundaries between aggression and the internal workings of the body. It hints at a clash between the intimate and the external, evoking Tanguy’s landscapes where biological and inanimate forms intermingle.

The mention of “Somewhere a voice is calling Picasso / And the lasso of love has the ghost of a chance” weaves together elements of the surrealist circle, linking Picasso’s boundary-pushing art with the theme of love depicted as tenuous and spectral. The “lasso of love” suggests an attempt to capture or control affection, but its ghostly nature implies futility or a haunting absence. This coupling of artistic allusions and emotional tension aligns with the broader surrealist aim of probing the subconscious and exploring existential themes.

Ford continues with “The bewildering pathos of a bag of china candy / The hole in the rock where the sea lost hope.” These lines present an evocative pairing of fragility and despair. The “bag of china candy” suggests something that appears sweet yet is delicate to the point of breaking, embodying the precarious nature of joy. Meanwhile, the sea losing hope in a rock’s hole conjures a powerful image of a vast force confronting an unyielding void, symbolizing the loss of spirit against immovable circumstances.

The refrain, “There’s no place to sleep in this bed, Tanguy,” highlights the central metaphor of the poem—a bed as a place not of rest but of disquiet. This line implies that the surrealist world Ford evokes is not a place for comfort or respite but one teeming with unresolved tension and disjointed existence. It underscores the nature of Tanguy’s painted worlds, where familiar notions of space and rest are absent.

“The wires are cut that connect us with slumber / And the number of day and the number of night is one!” furthers the theme of disorientation. The severed wires symbolize the inability to reach a state of rest or peace, implying a detachment from the natural cycle of day and night. The equation of day and night as “one” collapses the distinction between opposing states, aligning with the surrealist vision of a unified consciousness where binary distinctions dissolve.

In “Fountains of fire await the painted trigger / And the nails you drove in the earth have sprung up,” Ford introduces elements of violence and creation. The “painted trigger” evokes an artwork that holds explosive potential, waiting to be activated. The nails that spring up, driven into the earth, may represent attempts to anchor or pin down reality, only to find them defiant and transformed. The subsequent line, “Madonnas and torture-machines tell the time,” merges the sacred with the profane, a common motif in Surrealism that highlights the coexistence of sanctity and cruelty.

“Whose bow is the rainbow whose arrow is Egypt / Whose target unknown whose quarry is fear” shifts to an exploration of uncertainty and dread. The bow and arrow metaphor, laden with symbols of natural beauty (the rainbow) and historical mystery (Egypt), points toward an inscrutable pursuit, where fear is both the aim and the elusive prey. This image resonates with Tanguy’s style, where his alien landscapes invoke curiosity and a touch of apprehension.

The final lines, “There’s no place to sleep in this bed, Tanguy / There are too many monuments of broken hearts,” return to the recurring motif of sleeplessness and the impossibility of peace. The “monuments of broken hearts” suggests a landscape marked by suffering, frozen in time as reminders of past sorrows. This reinforces the surrealist theme of unresolved emotions and experiences that linger like relics in the subconscious.

Ford’s “There’s No Place to Sleep in This Bed, Tanguy” is a poetic canvas painted with imagery that reflects the essence of Tanguy’s surrealist art. It is a world where comfort is elusive, emotions are monumented, and the ordinary twists into the strange. The poem invites readers to navigate a space where meaning is not prescribed but felt through a sequence of dreamlike, associative leaps, echoing the surrealists’ pursuit of exploring the mind’s deepest and most unfathomable corners.

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