Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database

Abse, Dannie
Carnal Knowledge

In the first part of this four part poem, the medical student climbs “stone-murky steps” to the Dissecting Room, as London is being bombed during World War II. In the second part, the student asks his cadaver, “Who are you?” Probing deeply, cutting the meat, the student concludes that the cadaver was never really a person, the right hand “never held, surely, another hand in greeting / or tenderness . . . . ” In the next part it becomes clear that because of the student’s flip attitude, he hadn’t been invited by the hospital priest to the memorial service for cadavers.

Finally, the speaker (now for many years a physician) reflects again on his old question about the cadaver’s identity. He realizes that the cadaver’s name is the name on every gravestone, that his figure is the figure on every human portrait, “always in disguise.” At the end, the physician goes on with his daily activities, climbing the stairs to his bedroom and winding his clock.

In this presumably autobiographical poem (97 lines), Abse reflects on his life experience with death and the human condition, and places these reflections in the context of a relationship with his gross anatomy cadaver. At first he is unable to give his cadaver an identity or even to attend a memorial service (e.g. to acknowledge that the cadaver was a person like himself). Later in life, he comes to understand that the cadaver is Everyman. The poet’s living hand, with which he winds his clock, will ultimately become like the dead right hand he once thought “never belonged . . . to somebody once shockingly alive.”