Letting us see how love unveils the soul

Lovers come and go but it is the reader who is faithfully present in Edwin Morgan’s profound examinations of the heart, writes Jackie Kay

Edwin Morgan knew all about love: its mysteries, its silences, its absences, its passion. “Love is the most mysterious of the winds that blow.” His love poems, written over a lifetime, both before and after Morgan came out as gay, seem, above all, necessary. Many of the poems refer to silence – “they had decided not to talk . . . and then became fearful,” giving us a revealing glimpse into Morgan’s life and times – and make us realise how much can change during a single lifetime.

There are moments of simple tenderness: the simple act of sharing (perhaps poetry’s most famous) strawberries; a lover’s cigarette like incense on a balcony; a bus journey home. But, although the lovers come and go, are flighty often, it is the reader who is faithfully present throughout, attendant in this most truthful and universal of poets. Indeed, there is an unsettling feeling we sometimes experience reading a Morgan love poem, that the lover is not giving back in the way that he is being given to – that Morgan needs and wants more, that something is always missing or absent, and that only the reader can fill the gap between. The poems build up an uncommon intimacy on the page, as Morgan credits the reader with understanding more than the lover.

I remember once interviewing Edwin for a radio programme about his love poems. He was talking about Clause 28 and how he felt compelled to come out, but how also being out changed the nature of being in love – that when it was only the two of you who knew, and no one else, there was a power to that. That secrecy, although a negative thing in so many ways, also had its own allure.

That conversation struck me with the same force as one that I had years later with Edwin, by then in his old people’s home. He was talking about being in love again, and all the feelings being just as fresh as anything. He talked about how liberating it is to have to choose only 12 of your books out of hundreds, and only a few paintings. “It’s good when you have to pare everything down,” he said, “because when it comes down to it, all that matters is love.” There was something in him that welcomed this simplicity, this return to a certain kind of orderliness, as if his head had more freedom to think interesting thoughts without the clutter.

Morgan’s love poems give you a real sense of this shy, passionate, interesting and interested man, a man who is in awe of the elements and of the natural world, as well as the cultural one, a man who appreciates the intensities of absences, and who knows what a power they have on the imagination. The lovers we glimpse from these poems on the whole feel temporary and uncommitted – until we come to the poems about John. It seems then that the poems turn around, it is Morgan who is now apologising for his lateness. It is John who was there all along, unacknowledged and steady, and it is Morgan who feels as if he has appreciated his full worth too late. It is always the way with love – writers through time, from Sappho to Shakespeare to Neruda and beyond, have known the capricious state of love, its temporaneity, its changing face, the way it must be mirrored by the storms, and downpours, the moody skies, the falling leaves, the ways that writers use the marvels of the universe to make sense of love, the constant search to understand it in all its fickleness and fidelities, its faithfulness and deceits. Love unveils the soul. Edwin Morgan felt himself privileged to know this:

There is so much to say

And who can delay

When some are lost and some are seen, our dearest

heads, and to those and to these we must still

answer and be true.

It seems apt to end with a quote from “The Release” – it speaks to us so powerfully: we must still answer and be true. ■