ABSTRACT
He goes on to consider various other gifts-a lamp, flowers, jewels. But the only real gifts he can offer are ‘fleeting’: they are special moments of transcendence which lie beyond all material or physical expression. In the 2002, I published a book of my own poems which I called Gifts.2 There is a poem in it called ‘Adam’s Gift’, addressed to my wife and located in our home in Northumberland. Maybe I was subconsciously influenced by Tagore’s poem, for I discard material gifts in favour of the non-material:
My gift today is the gift of tranquillity Possessed by this house, which like our tongue, Our Englishness, our daughters sprung
From us but with new lives of their own, And our strange, combined selfhood grown From twenty-one years of shared living, Is not just ours for the making or giving.
