Expression, a poem from Thom Gunn's 1982 collection The Passages of Joy, finds Gunn reading the output of some younger poets. The experience may ‘not always seem first-hand’, but, telling of unsympathetic ‘Mother’, hating ‘Daddy, the noted alcoholic’, and addressing mental breakdown, incarceration and attempted suicide in darkly ironic terms, it is, Gunn concludes, ‘very poetic poetry.’

Where his students are wrought with emotion, Gunn is dry and droll. These junior extremists have the Plathian subjects, tone and vocabulary (mother may be ‘Mother’, but father will, of course, forever be referred to as ‘Daddy’), yet such poetry of authenticity may not, on close examination, be all that authentic. Indeed, being ‘very poetic poetry’, it may be quite the opposite.

In search of an alternative, Gunn goes to the art museum. Here he finds, not further displays of self, but an ‘early Italian altarpiece’ of virgin and child, a child with ‘the knowing face of an adult’. Viewing them is like drinking water: ‘after too much birthday cake’, the solid forms of mother and son ‘stare outward, two pairs of matching eyes/ void of expression.’

‘Too much birthday cake’, implies overindulgence on a day set aside for the singing and celebration of oneself. Reference to birthdays may also call to mind Plath's ‘A Birthday Present’ and ‘Poem for a Birthday’. The criticism of Gunn's juniors is clear enough. Their poems are explicitly about parent and child and the suffering of the latter, but as they seek to describe children overburdened with experience, their poems manage only to read as inauthentically authentic, seeming not to be products of the very first-hand experience of which they brag. For all that its figures are void of expression, the altarpiece is an archetypical figuring of what Gunn's students have been seeking to portray, a child at once innocent and knowing too much. As an altarpiece, it shows the Christ child as sinless while implicitly looking forward to the suffering on the cross; its mother and child may be without expression but that does not mean they do not present the structure of profound and terrible emotion.