Making Friends (Some Assembly Required)

Exploring Elizabeth Jennings' "Identity"

Aug 01, 2026

Welcome back, everyone, and thank you so much for your patience as I made my accustomed pilgrimage to the beauties of Europe. On this journey I visited Edinburgh, Glasgow, Paris, Nancy, Brussels, Bruges, Leiden, and the Hague. Paris, Brussels, and Bruges are old favorites of mine, but the rest were new discoveries. Aesthetic highlights of this trip included witnessing the famous sea fog, known as the haar, rolling in over neo-gothic Edinburgh, the virile and fantastically ambitious art deco reliefs of Alfred Janniot at the Palais de Tokyo and the Port Dorée, the haunting collection of Melanesian masks and totems in the shadowy, labyrinthine Musée Branly, and the profusion of gorgeous art nouveau objects in the museums of Nancy. While in the Netherlands, I visited two of the homes of one of my intellectual and spiritual heroes, Baruch Spinoza, and if you’d like to read more about that, as well as several other fascinating things I saw, check out my recent Substack notes.

But what made this trip most special of all– aside from being with my lovely wife–was the rare opportunity to visit friends both old and new, some or all of whom you might know. Firstly, my dear friend Cameron Clark ( Minor Tiresias ), my fellow editor at Literary Matters and co-host of SLEERICKETS, as well as his brilliant companion Solomon, who were kind enough to host me in Edinburgh. Secondly, my lifelong best friend David Klug and his girlfriend Sammy, who live in Colorado but were in the Caledonian neighborhood for a wedding; thirdly, two incredible Scottish poet-editors of incredible magazines, Niall Campbell of Poetry London and Gerry Cambridge of The Dark Horse, both of whom were kind, warm, hospitable, and generous beyond all my expectations; and finally, in Paris, the formidably erudite yet delightfully convivial poet-scholar and Substack superstar Victoria of Horace and Friends. To enjoy such beautiful minds in such beautiful settings was little short of paradise, and I felt the glamour of bohemia upon me. If you’d like further details of my travels, you can always ask me, but for now, let’s tuck into today’s episode:

If it isn’t too much of an oxymoron, happy August, my friends. If you like what you hear or read today, please consider either a paid subscription to this Substack, where you’ll get access to the entire back catalog of Versecraft essays, or a one-time tip at my buymeacoffee page. Financial gratitude for poetic labor is a rare and beautiful thing, and if you can manage it, it makes a world of difference to my life, so thank you so much.

And now, appropriately enough, let’s talk about a poet who, though famous and celebrated in her day, was so frequently destitute and habitually bedraggled that she became known as “the bag lady of sonnets.” That’s right– today we’re turning our attention to the soft-spoken, reclusive, occasionally insane muse of Oxford, Elizabeth Jennings.

Jennings, who lived from 1926 to 2001, moved with her family to Oxford in early childhood, eventually attended St. Anne’s College, and haunted that honey-tinted academopolis until the end of her days. Beginning in her early twenties, she began to publish poems which met with instant recognition, and before long– largely due to being included in the seminal New Lines anthology– she came to be seen as the solitary yet illustrious female member of the movement in British poetry creatively known as “The Movement.”

The Movement described a group of post-war poets who were committed to traditional forms, yet also to faithful descriptions of modern life and sentiment. Emotionally restrained and thoughtfully self-observant, these poets saw themselves as a healthy corrective to the soppy neo-romanticism of older UK poets like Dylan Thomas, and, later, to the self-indulgence of American confessional poets. The Movement included literary celebrities like Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, and Kingsley Amis, but Jennings too was always a critical voice in this circle– less pessimistic and ironic than Larkin, less chaotic and freewheeling than Gunn, she brought a quiet discipline, earnest wonder, and religious spirit to the ecosystem of English letters which enriched it considerably. After her second book, A Way of Looking, won the Somerset Maugham award, the prize money allowed her to study in Rome for several months, a transformative experience which led her to fully embrace the Catholic faith. A good portion of Jennings’ subsequent oeuvre consisted of tender and thoughtful devotional poems, and contemporary poet Dana Gioia, a great advocate for Jennings, has called her “England’s best Catholic poet since Gerard Manley Hopkins.”

Like Hopkins, Jennings led a life of great personal turbulence, despite her relatively static, hermetic habitude. Prone to episodes of mental instability, she was unable to hold a conventional job, and relied largely on her writing to make ends meet. Often, these ends did not quite meet, and as a result, she changed her housing frequently and her clothes infrequently. In 1992, at a royal ceremony honoring her poetry, she presented herself before Queen Elizabeth in a “knitted hat, duffle coat, and canvas shoes,” leading to the “bag-lady” moniker. Jennings often alluded to her mental struggles in her poems, but always consciously strove to do so in a manner more circumspect than her confessional contemporaries. Despite possessing an enthusiastic reading public and great strength of spirit, neither her financial nor mental condition ever improved much, and she died in a care home at the age of 75.

Today, I would like to look at one of the first poems that made Jennings’ name, and which can be found in that founding document of The Movement, the original New Lines anthology. Plainspoken and subtly musical, it nevertheless manages to vividly convey an insightful psycho-philosophical observation, which is often what I gravitate toward when I read poems. Here is:

Identity

When I decide I shall assemble you
Or, more precisely, when I decide which thoughts
Of mine about you fit most easily together,
Then I can learn what I have loved, what lets
Light through the mind. The residue
Of what you may be goes. I gather

Only as lovers or friends gather at all
For making friends means this–
Image and passion combined into a whole
Pattern within the loving mind, not her or his
Concurring there. You can project the full
Picture of lover or friend that is not either.

So then assemble me,
Your exact picture firm and credible,
Though as I think myself I may be free
And accurate enough.
That you love what is truthful to your will
Is all that ever can be answered for
And, what is more,
Is all we make each other when we love.

The form of this poem strikes us both as organic and improvisatory and yet deeply rooted in tradition. Two sestets and an octave, which we might think of as a sonnet-and-half in reverse, are composed mostly in loose iambic pentameter, but only mostly: we have lines of trimeter, tetrameter, and hexameter as well, and the last stanza in particular is characterized by an alternation of long and short lines. Therefore, to say that this poem is in iambic pentameter is not quite accurate. Rather, we might say that, like Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” it is in an inconsistent mixed meter, what is sometimes called vers libéré – not free of meter and rhyme, like vers libre or “free verse,” but free in its line lengths and stanza structure.

We see this tension between freedom and constraint in the rhyme scheme as well. Each line has at least one other line that it rhymes with, but the rhyme schemes of each stanza are different. An analysis gives us the scheme: ABCBAC, DEDEDC, FGFHGIIH. Note that the last line of the first stanza, which might initially seem to be an unrhymed line, has its partner six lines later at the conclusion of the second stanza. As in Arnold’s poem, the rhymes here may be unpredictable, but every line is accounted for in the end. Note too that many of the rhymes are slant rhymes– yet another means of treading a via media between constraint and freedom. Finally, note that the only consecutive rhymes appear in the antepenultimate and penultimate lines of the poem. Jennings does not quite wish to give us the lid-snapping-shut conclusion of an English sonnet, but the singularly rich harmony here, almost at the end of the poem, provides a comparable but slightly lighter effect, a musical signal that we are reaching our quasi-epigrammatic conclusion. Taken together, all of these techniques which embody the spirit of compromise give this poem the effect that it is after: the appearance of being recognizably part of the tradition of English poetry, yet also recognizably new and modern.

Let’s now read through the poem once more:

From the get-go, Jennings introduces the idea that our conception of who people are, even those closest to us, is not the result of naive perception, but careful, perhaps even deliberate, construction. This construction, moreover, is not derived from a desire for accuracy or fealty to the person in themselves so much as a desire to collate those impressions which strike us as being most harmonious with one another. I think here of Aquinas’s claim that a beautiful object is one which possesses wholeness, consonance, and clarity, and there is a sense in which we can interpret Jennings’ claim as being that our conception of someone’s character is based most fundamentally on aesthetic considerations. When we interact with someone, we are never interacting with them as they actually are or on their own terms, but with our own authorial idea of them, the characterological work of art we have conjured to make sense of them. On this view, life and art are neither opposing nor complementary domains– rather, artistic composition is the means by which we experience life, not only on the canvas or the page, but in every moment of our lives.

This view of others as authorially constructed characters has profound, perhaps disturbing implications. When we say that we love someone, what we really mean is that we love the version of them which we have fabricated in our minds. The romantic cliche “I didn’t love you, I loved the idea of you” is inescapable. Like Kant’s being-in-itself, the person-in-themselves is inaccessible to us. This inability to grasp the entirety of another person is not a personal failure on our part– aside from the sheer epistemic impossibility of fully knowing another mind, it is only by selectively winnowing from the raw data that a person’s presence presents to us that we can make them intelligible at all. We keep what “lets light through the mind” and “the residue of what you may be goes.”

Jennings, however, does not despair at these necessary fictions, but rejoices in them. When one “makes friends” one is literally “making friends,” but this act of construction is an act of love, a sort of homage to the limitless, ungraspable other: “image and passion combined into a whole pattern within the loving mind.” It is the fascination for what we perceive, the desire to understand it, which prompts us to gather and filter our perceptions into an intelligible concept or persona. This “gathering” process is reminiscent of the original Old English meaning of the word “thing,” which referred to a meeting or gathering together. This meaning was later picked up by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argued that to truly acknowledge the “thingness” of an object was to recognize how it gathered various qualities together into a single harmonious presence (Heidegger was here perhaps closer to Aquinas, as well as to Scotus’s concept of haecceity, than he would have been willing to admit).

Just as Heidegger invites us to feel the presence of objects more closely, so too does Jennings invite us to feel the presence of those we love more closely. Paradoxically, by recognizing the artificial nature of our loves, we can more fully appreciate the authentic boundlessness of the souls they spring from– the muses which inspire our creations– as well as the personal testaments to these souls which our beloved conceptions embody. Love is not founded upon a scientific or even psychological investigation into the other, but an enraptured, fantastical attentiveness to the other, as well as a willingness to dwell and play within the ultimate mystery of their being.

Jennings then recognizes that the constructive, curative nature of identity also applies to how others view her. She is nothing if not a good sport about this: “that you love what is truthful to your will is all that can ever be answered for.” The common existentialist complaint that people can never really know one another is a non-issue to Jennings. “If,” she seems to say, “we can put aside our self-centeredness and impossible desire to be fully known, as well as our impossible desire to fully know another, we may just learn to appreciate the wonderful fact that different version of ourselves exist in the minds of everyone we know, that these versions are an intimate collaboration between my existence and the mind of another, and that some of these versions are well-loved.”

Indeed, this leads us to the remarkable fact that none of our loved ones love us in quite the same way or for quite the same reasons. There is not one “you” which people either love or do not– there are dozens of yous which are loved, each of which emphasize different facets of your personality and combinations of your traits. Some of these visions of who you are may appear to you more accurate than others, but all are merely approximations, and all are attempts to reckon with the infinite depth that you are– which, given that we are even mysteries to ourselves, we ought to accept with curiosity and gratitude as enlightening information. It is like being given different pieces of a map for a homeland that one is forever exploring, each fragment a product of love– or, at the very least, interest– by a different cartographer, a cartographer who is themselves a fundamentally undiscovered country.

With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend:

Identity

Versecraft

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