Against Confidences by Donald Davie
"Against Confidences" by Donald Davie is a poem that critiques the contemporary tendency to share intimate details in various forms of expression, including confessional writing and personal relationships. Structured in eight quatrains with a precise alternating rhyme scheme, the poem employs a satirical tone to explore the concept of "Candour"—a personified abstraction representing sincerity and truthfulness. Davie contrasts this ideal with the modern phenomenon of indiscriminate disclosure, which he suggests confuses superficial frankness with genuine communication.
The poem emphasizes that true honesty requires restraint and intellectual examination, rather than the compulsive sharing of personal experiences, often contextualized within settings like therapy or intimate relationships. Through its compact language and wordplay, the poem reflects the complexity of human expression and the duality of candor and self-indulgence. By employing neoclassical elements, the poem underscores the importance of precise language and thoughtful reflection in conveying deeper truths. Ultimately, "Against Confidences" serves as a cautionary exploration of the boundaries of openness and the value of retaining some degree of privacy in an age of excessive transparency.
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Against Confidences by Donald Davie
First published: 1958; collected in New and Selected Poems, 1961
Type of poem: Meditation
The Poem
Formally, “Against Confidences” consists of eight quatrains, with very short lines of between three and five syllables and an exact alternating rhyme scheme of abab. The poem argues against the modern popularity of pouring forth intimate details, whether in tell-all books, confessional poetry, psychoanalysis, or personal relationships. In a humorous and satiric tone, the poem explains how “Candour,” one of the poem’s series of personified abstractions reminiscent of the British neoclassical verse that Donald Davie esteemed, has changed in its relationship to “loose lips” (stanza 1) or “mouths that now/ Divulge, divulge” (stanza 8).
In the present time—the present being emphasized by the repetition of the word “now” in the opening and closing stanzas—loose lips or divulging mouths describe Candour, in Davie’s British spelling, as “friend.” This situation suggests that would-be confidants, whether in writing or in personal relationships, confuse the indiscriminate spilling of confidential details with frankness and truth.
Moving from a third-person objective point of view to the first-person plural, the poem’s speaker asserts that the genuine revelation of (or quest for) truth signified by Candour cannot exist in the apparently heedless flow of expression in an environment created or distorted by “our compulsive/ Needs” on “couches” where “we sleep, confess,/ Couple.” The word “couches” may signify the bed as the site of an individual’s dreaming or a couple’s lovemaking as well as the psychiatrist’s couch. All these are spheres in which self-interest undermines the ultimate truthfulness of what appears to be candid outpouring.
Returning to the third-person point of view, the speaker defines the main facets of Candour as “reticence” or restraint, the subjection of all talk and feeling to actual test and intellectual examination, and toleration of a degree of privacy, hazy belief, or half-illuminated conviction but discouragement of self-indulgent and deceptive effusiveness.
Forms and Devices
The poem’s notable compression in its grammar and in its short lines reflects as well as expresses the idea of truth and meaning inherent in “reticence” rather than its opposite. Likewise, multiple meanings are compacted into several puns and wordplays. The confidences of the title may refer to intimate details; to the state of feeling confident, which would be misplaced in dreaming, lovers’ talk, confessional writing, or psychoanalysis; and to the duplicity of a confidence game, since the apparent candor of flowing expression may not be what it seems.
In contrast, reticence is Candour’s “practise”—a word whose primary meaning is habitual operation but whose secondary meaning of intrigue contrasts Candour’s honesty with the deceptiveness of “loose lips.” This deceptiveness is conveyed by the oxymoron of the “pleased distress” (stanza 3) that people experience on their various “couches.” The distress in turn suggests a discrepancy between the surface of the dream, confessional writing or talk, lovers’ intimate conversations, and the true meanings or feelings that underlie them. Thus, in the midst of an anguished confessional poem, a sense may be conveyed of the poet’s pleasure in his or her pain, in the act of complaining about the causes of the pain, or in the accomplishment of a literary work about the subject.
Several features of neoclassical verse also contribute to the poem’s warning against effusiveness. Its precise and straightforward rhymes and rhyme scheme suggest the poem’s emphasis on exactitude and forthrightness. Also, the several balanced antitheses in grammar signaled by the repeated “Not…, But…” constructions convey the speaker’s thoughtful weighing, comparing, and defining of aspects of candor and effusiveness. That is, the poem is patterned to show that Candour does not reside in particular values or activities but does reside in other values and activities. The synecdoches for effusiveness, “loose lips” and “mouths” that “divulge,” help suggest the absence of intellect, as if the anatomy of the effusive person were working by itself, without the brain. In contrast, the synecdoche characterizing Candour’s disapproval of “loose lips” and “mouths” that “divulge,” Candour’s “brow” that is clear (stanza 1) or clouded (stanza 8), conveys not only a facial expression but also the anatomical location of intelligence and thought. Finally, use is made of the proverbial metaphor of the light of reason and truth contrasting with the darkness or shade of irrationality and error. This metaphor is subtly linked to the etymology of the word candor, from the Latin words meaning “white” and “shine.” Like the circular form of the poem, whose first and last stanzas repeat, the recurrent imagery of light and dark suggests the inevitability of the poem’s truths about its subject.
The “shade” of the couches of sleep, confession, and coupling (stanzas 2-3), and of “shy belief/ Too bleakly lit” (stanza 7), in which Candour cannot “live,” is a metaphor not only of the darkness of weakened rationality and truth but also of the comfort provided by avoiding the harsh glare of both Candour and intelligence, particularly the latter. Candour will “respect/ Conviction’s plight” in “Intellect’s/ Hard equal light” (stanzas 5-6). Candour is thus humane and makes some allowances for emotional and spiritual truths, whereas the intellect is harsher. Likewise, in the concluding two stanzas, Candour’s brow is not “clouded” by permitting “To shy belief/ Too bleakly lit,/ The shade’s relief”; rather, what clouds Candour’s brow is “to indulge/ These mouths that now/ Divulge, divulge.”