Most poems about reading make books sound like windows or doors. Marjory Ryan Gunn's «This Far Pasturage» turns language into a landscape instead, a place where the speaker can lie down and stop being herself for a while. The opening wish sets the terms at once: "I would lose my aching identity." The word "aching" matters. Identity here is a sore spot, a weight to be set down, and the poem imagines relief not in action or company but in dissolving into "the cool, forgotten forest of lost words."
That phrase carries a good deal of the poem's meaning. The words are "lost" and the forest "forgotten," which suggests a vocabulary and a tradition that has slipped out of daily use. Nothing in the text tells us exactly what Gunn has in mind, whether old literature, archaic speech, or simply the accumulated language of the past, but the effect is clear. Words become something grown rather than made, a forest with "interchanging boughs." That adjective is a small piece of precision: branches that cross and swap places feel like meanings shifting and overlapping, the way a single word can lean on many others.
The second half of the first stanza shifts the metaphor from forest to grazing land. "Lapping phrases, like seeking herds, / nibble at the greenery of my mind." The image is gently odd, and its oddness repays attention. Phrases are animals, and the mind is the grass they eat. The verbs are tender rather than violent: "lapping" suggests lapping water as much as moving lips, and "nibble" is the opposite of devouring. Being consumed, in this poem, is soothing. The speaker wants her mind grazed upon, thinned and quieted, which fits her wish to lose that aching identity. The word "seeking" adds a faint restlessness to the herds, as if the phrases are looking for meaning as much as the speaker is.
The second stanza slows down, and the sound slows with it. "The soothing, thick antiquity / of ripened and deep-mellowed beauty" is heavy with long vowels and soft consonants, and the adjectives pile up like fruit in a basket. The poem is not strictly rhymed, but it keeps a loose, echoing music: "identity" at the start of the poem finds a partner in "antiquity" at the start of the second stanza, and "pasturage" later gets a faint answer in "fruity" and "beauty." These are near-chimes rather than a tight scheme. The lines vary in length, with no steady metre holding them in place, so the poem reads like thought drifting rather than a rule being obeyed, which suits a speaker trying to loosen her grip on herself.
Then comes the surprise of "fruity." It is an unexpectedly plain, almost comic word in the middle of so much mellow solemnity, and it lands with a small jolt. Autumn is "cherished" and "fruity," and the seasonal turn is telling. This is not spring or summer but the ripe, slightly overripe end of the year, a time of harvest and slowing down. The poem's idea of beauty is a late, mature one, valued because it has had time to deepen.
The ending refuses to rush. "The muttered musings / of long-dismembered afternoons" is the most striking phrase in the poem. "Muttered" gives the musings a half-heard, private quality, like someone talking to herself in another room. "Dismembered" is a surprisingly violent word for such a peaceful scene, and it suggests afternoons broken into pieces, memories that survive only as fragments. The poem finds comfort in that brokenness. The past is not whole, but its scraps are enough to graze on.
What makes the poem worth reading is its quiet insistence that language can be a refuge. It does not argue the point; it builds a place where the idea feels true, in a few lines of soft sound and unexpected images. Its central claim is modest and a little radical: that to read or remember deeply is to give up the burden of being someone, and that this surrender is a kind of rest.