Tates Avenue - Analysis

The memory that refuses the picturesque

The poem identifies intimacy not with beautiful or adventurous settings, but with the place where two people endured discomfort long enough to know each other fully. Its opening movements deliberately reject more picturesque memories. The speaker recalls a brown-and-fawn rug beside the sea, then another beside Spain’s Guadalquivir, yet begins both recollections with the corrective Not. These scenes have sensory richness, but neither possesses the emotional authority of the Belfast back yard. The poem’s real subject is the difference between an attractive memory and a decisive one.

Two seductive decoys

The first rug appears almost ceremonial. Its vestal folds suggest purity or virginity, while their being unfolded quietly introduces erotic possibility. The rug seems alive, breathing land-breaths despite lying beside the sea, and its woollen fringe gives it warmth and softness. The second recollection replaces this gentleness with appetite and disorder: crusts, eggshells, olive stones, cheese rinds, drunkenness, and the anticipated bullfight. One scene offers comfort and innocence; the other offers sensual excess and foreign excitement. Yet both are dismissed. Their vividness makes the rejection more striking: the speaker is not choosing Belfast because nothing else happened, but because something more important happened there.

The shut-in world of Sunday Belfast

The turn arrives decisively with Instead, again. In place of sea or Spanish river, the poem gives us locked-park Sunday Belfast, a phrase crowded with closure and restraint. The lovers are in a walled back yard among high, silent dustbins. Nothing in the setting is conventionally romantic. Even the ground resists them: nothing gives beneath the rug. That physical hardness also suggests the emotional conditions of the encounter. Privacy must be made inside a constricted, watchful environment; tenderness occurs not because the world welcomes it, but despite the world’s refusal to soften.

A finger turning from page to hair

Within that severe setting, the poem becomes suddenly quiet and intimate. A page is turned, then a finger twirls warm hair. Reading and touching almost merge, as though the two lovers are learning one another with the same patient attention given to a text. The gesture is erotic but restrained; the poem avoids dramatic declarations and concentrates on small contact. This creates its central tension: the bodies are close, yet the ground remains hard; affection is present, yet everything surrounding it is enclosed and unyielding.

The exact size of knowing

The speaker lies at full length and feels every lump of earth. He is Keen-sensed through discomfort, suggesting that bodily unease sharpens rather than spoils the experience. His refusal to shift from the plaid square matters: remaining there becomes an act of commitment, an acceptance of the encounter exactly as it is. The rug is both a literal boundary and a small territory the lovers temporarily share.

The closing statement, I had your measure, gathers these meanings together. To take someone’s measure is to understand their character, but here the phrase also retains a bodily and spatial force: each person has learned the other through closeness on a limited square of cloth. The tone moves from sensuous recollection, through blunt correction, to grave mutual recognition. What lasts is not luxury, scenery, or excitement, but the hard-grounded moment in which each person became knowable to the other.