Towards The Imminent Days - Analysis

A domestic calm that hides an older frontier

Les Murray builds this poem on a deliberate contrast: a room full of inherited gentleness, and a countryside whose order has been burned into animals. The opening settles us into touch and taste—beaded crochet that tickles the ear, boiled things with butter, and pie dissolving in cream and then dissolving in us. The tone is intimate, almost drowsy with comfort: the speaker says they have reached the teapot of calm. Yet that calm is not ignorance; it’s the surface layer over a deeper, harsher literacy—one that knows land by furrows and cattle by brands.

The English table and the slow pressure of years

The poem’s first objects are not simply quaint; they carry history in their grain. The table is made from three immense beech boards out of England, and the speaker imagines the wood’s minute widths of the year refined by daughters’ daughters. Even the aside about the year of Nelson makes time feel archived inside matter, as if climate and empire can be read in timber. Against this, the family’s actual conversation—cattle and cricket—sounds almost too ordinary, as though everyday talk is a way of keeping the weight of history at a safe distance.

The turn: from tea to the Georgic furrow

The poem pivots when the uncle’s morning labor comes into view. The quiet man has been sailing a stump-ridden field of Pleistocene clay never ploughed since the world’s beginning. The diction swells from kitchen smallness to geological time, and Murray names the act with a loaded word: Georgic, the tradition of praising farm work as a moral and civilizing force. But the poem complicates that praise immediately. The furrow lengthens into ever more intimate country—intimate, yet also invaded, cut, made legible by a blade.

Property as a burnt alphabet

In Merchandise Creek, the poem finds its darkest emblem: a post in a ruined blacksmith shop bearing charred-in script—iron characters, hooks, bars, conjoined letters. The speaker calls it a weird bush syllabary, a local writing system made not of ink but heat. This is where the poem’s central tension sharpens: language appears as damage. Brands are property seared into skin, and the line refuses to romanticize the pastoral. Even when the brands become a kind of poetry—black-letter, syllabary—they remain a record of ownership enforced through pain.

When meaning drops below speech into muscle

Murray then makes a startling move: this “language” descends beyond speech into the muscles of cattle, into the world of feed shimmering in cattle minds. The poem suggests that property is not only a human agreement; it becomes bodily habit and animal routine, a system the herd lives inside without knowing it as “law.” That claim both enlarges and indicts the farm world. The uncle can identify the owners with a nod, and the speaker hears that an owner—M-bar—was mourned by thousands of head. The phrase makes devotion sound like conditioning: even grief can be a function of the system.

A knowledge older than Gaelic, and a marriage that might mend

The poem does not end by rejecting the uncle’s world; it ends by trying to find a healing depth inside it. The uncle’s expertise has roots in meadows deeper than Gaelic, which is to say deeper than ancestral language—older than what the speaker can claim as cultural inheritance. And then the aunt’s presence expands: her grave mischievous smile shines out of every object in the loved timber rooms, making the domestic space feel inhabited by a spirit of endurance rather than mere nostalgia. The speaker stands at the threshold of grass, a boundary between inside and outside, comfort and labor, talk and the burnt script.

The poem’s risky faith

The closing sentence is enormous: The depth in this marriage will heal the twentieth century. It’s both earnest and audacious, and it forces us to ask what kind of healing is being imagined. Is the marriage a model of mutual patience—kitchen calm holding the violence of property at bay—or is it a pact that makes the whole system bearable without changing it? The poem’s tenderness toward the aunt and uncle is real, but it sits beside the poem’s knowledge that order here was written with iron.

What does it mean to call this intimate?

The poem repeatedly uses closeness—dissolving in us, intimate country, the smile in every object—to describe a world built on possession. That creates a difficult question the poem refuses to simplify: if love and household peace can coexist with the branding post and the language of property, do they redeem it, or do they help it last? Murray’s power here is that he lets both possibilities remain present, like the taste of cream alongside the knowledge of what, exactly, the iron letters were made to do.