spirit without a foyer’, but this, he now understands, is a cause not of mourning but of celebration, for to him ‘local objects become / More precious than the most precious objects of home’. No longer part of any family (his siblings all dead), no longer attached to the past (‘without a remembered past, a present past, / Or present future’), alone in his room, an old man, he can dream of objects not present and grasp that:

Little existed for him but the few things For which a fresh name always occurred, as if He wanted to make them, keep them from perishing. (473–4) Of course, as he says in another late poem:

One would have wanted more – more – more – Some true interior to which to return, A home against one’s self, a darkness, An ease in which to live a moment’s life, The moment of life’s love and fortune, Free from everything else, free above all from thought. But when he contemplates what form this would take he has to fall back on metaphor and analogy:

It would have been like lighting a candle, Like leaning on the table shading one’s eyes, And hearing a tale one wanted intensely to hear. (469) Such a turn,which leaves one wondering which is the metaphor and which the reality, and realising that in a strange way it no longer matters, is to be found in a poem he did put into his Collected Poems, ‘The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’, a title which cunningly elides solitude and company:

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