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# For a Birthday
- URL: https://poetry101.love/for-a-birthday/
- Published: 2024-09-06T07:21:11.000Z
- Updated: 2024-09-06T07:21:11.000Z
- Description: by Thomas Gunn
- Author: Melissa Anderson
- Tags: Thomas Gunn, #Import 2026-11-04 19:11

I have reached a time when words no longer  
help:  
Instead of guiding me across the moors  
Strong landmarks in the uncertain out-of-doors,  
Or like dependable friars on the Alp  
Saving with wisdom and with brandy kegs,  
They are gravel-stones, or tiny dogs which yelp  
Biting my trousers, running round my legs.  
Description and analysis degrade,  
Limit, delay, slipped land from what has been;  
And when we groan My Darling what we mean  
Looked at more closely would too soon evade  
The intellectual habit of our eyes;  
And either the experience would fade  
Or our approximations would be lies.  
The snarling dogs are weight upon my haste,  
Tons which I am detaching ounce by ounce.  
All my agnostic irony I renounce  
So I may climb to regions where I rest  
In springs of speech, the dark before of truth:  
The sweet moist wafer of your tongue I taste,  
And find right meanings in your silent mouth.

Gunn, Thom. [The Sense of Movement](https://www.google.com/books/edition/The%5FSense%5Fof%5FMovement/vziB3qm02lwC?hl=en&gbpv=0&kptab=getbook&ref=poetry101.love). United Kingdom, Faber & Faber, 2010.