An Explanation of Doily
(for Adam Zagajewski)
You asked me last summer: ‘What is a doily?’
Sometimes, at lunch, I walk on the beach.
Today I was coatless. A storm cloud threatened,
dark as a spaceship. Should it pour,
a sister ship down in the water
would throw up grappling nets to the surface,
rain rise to soak me. Behind a sandbank,
waves touched the shore, no more than a shimmer.
Less rare than its cousin, the antimacassar,
a doily’s placed between sweet thing and china.
Both survive where vicars arrive
for tea, are given thin cup and saucer
instead of a mug. If your cake’s so rich
that it’s leaking syrup, you’ll need a doily.
Held up, its paper’s the filigree
of snowflake, or fingers looked through in fear.
The shower holds off. My shoe’s a doily.
Without it, where would I be on these shells
that crunch underfoot, like contact lenses,
as I walk, a mermaid, on razor-torn feet
back to my husband in his human dwelling?
Someone is pulling a blue toy trawler
along the horizon to port, so smoothly
it looks realistic. Sea’s partly doily.
Surfers ride its lace to their downfall,
after all, we’re nothing but froth.
Like a carpet salesman, the indolent tide
flops a wave over, showing samples: ‘Madam,
this one is durable, has a fringe.’ Under
its breath the sea sighs, ‘Has it come
to this? Must everything always end in … doily?’
It must. Broad afternoon. The rain-cloud barges
have passed and here’s a cumulonimbus parade
of imperial busts, the Roman rulers
in historical order which, I think, would please you.
Their vapour curls and noble foreheads
are lit up in lilac because they’re invading
the west. Next come the philosophers and, last of all,
the poets. Pulleys draw them delicately on.
Here comes Lucretius, then Ovid, then Horace
in lines, saying relentlessly, ‘Doily’, ‘Doily’,
till stars take over and do the same.
Concluding Gwyneth Lewis’s latest collection, First Rain in Paradise, An Explanation of Doily opens a strange, humorous, mysterious window out of trauma. The combination of the word “doily” and the name of the poem’s dedicatee, the late Polish poet and novelist, Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021), plucks the first enticing chord, with a faint reverberation from Zagajewski’s great poem of exile, To Go to Lvov: “But the cathedral rises, / You remember, so straight, as straight / As Sunday and white napkins and a bucket / Full of raspberries stands on the floor”. The decorative British item, named after a 17th-century London draper, was originally known as a “doily-napkin”.
Zagajewski’s question, presumably asked in a real-life communication, is freighted with further questions for Lewis. She defers her answer in the first stanza, not merely setting the scene, but expanding it. The stanza reflects the picture which was the origin of the collection’s title, the second panel of a manuscript illumination by Rudolf von Ems, God With Adam and Eve; the First Rain in Paradise. For Lewis, as for von Ems, the effect is both desolate and decorative.
An Explanation of Doily seems braced by the experiences of childhood abuse Lewis recounts in her memoir, Nightshade Mother, A Disentangling, and revisits in many of the poems of First Rain in Paradise, and it summons defensive-aesthetic strategies. At first, sea and rain conspire to “soak” the coatless speaker. But, viewed from “behind a sandbank”, the waves move delicately, “no more than a shimmer”. While, in stanza three, the shoe-as-doily evokes the pain-filled Hans Christian Andersen story of The Little Mermaid, it allows the current narrator to protect their feet.
Ambivalence continues in stanza four: the “blue toy trawler” seems harmless, but there’s something grim about the light-heartedness of “lace” and “froth” metaphors that carry the surfers’ “downfall” – the latter word a menacing kind of pun. Menace also haunts the assertions that “Sea’s partly doily”. Once more, the aestheticising perspective seems tyrannical. If the tide resembles “a carpet salesman”, isn’t the sea’s reality being sold short by playful, figurative language? The sea itself is dissatisfied: “Must everything always end in doily?”
Lewis doesn’t resist the word’s straightforward invitation to a few shafts of backward-glancing, class-aspiring mockery. The second stanza refers to the antimacassar as the doily’s “cousin” and associates the doily with the visiting vicar and the best china. It produces the kind of moral warning the vicar himself might have been moved to enunciate: “If your cake’s so rich / that it’s leaking syrup, you’ll need a doily.” And then comes the poet’s sense of the cost demanded by fascination with privilege: “Held up, its paper’s the filigree / of snowflake, or fingers looked through in fear.” Despite the teasing tone, the psychological damage wreaked by the combined “doily” forces of social and religious repression is clearly intimated.
Shaped by the mutability of its narrative weather, the poem nevertheless keeps faith with the ineluctable doily. Clouds returning imperiously as “Roman rulers / in historical order”, with lilac lighting-effects suggesting invasion and a rainy sunset, morph into poets – Lucretius, followed by Ovid and Horace. The epicurean Lucretius sought to lift the oppressive weight of religion (resurrected by the tea-sipping vicar of stanza two, perhaps) and show humanity the “true reality” of things. Is it the ordering intellect which the author of De Rerum Natura has in common with Ovid and Horace? Do the riches of both knowledge and imagination need containment in “lines” to avoid swamping the creators? Unavoidably, Lewis is implicating herself and Zagajewski in the chorus of those saying relentlessly, “‘Doily’, ‘Doily’”: the reticence of artifice appears elevated to an eternal, if eternally inadequate, principle of nature.
• Nightshade Mother, A Disentangling received a Wales book of the year nonfiction award in 2025, and, at the time of writing, is nominated for the Sky Arts award in literature. First Rain in Paradise was published earlier this year by Bloodaxe.
