Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Motion

Motion drops you into a war-lit night where perception keeps swerving: a "gust of light" is first just weather, then instantly retranslated as "flames". That misrecognition is the point. The line stages how the body tries to domesticate catastrophe with familiar categories, even as the mind knows better. "Explains itself" is slyly unstable: light doesn’t explain anything; the speaker is forced to narrate it into coherence, because coherence is what panic threatens to erase.

Then the poem pivots to its most unsettling claim: even "bombs redoubled" can’t "include me in their fear". The syntax makes fear feel like a closed circle others have been admitted to, a social space the speaker can’t enter. It’s not bravery. It’s estrangement. Motion’s speaker is witnessing violence while hovering outside the communal emotional contract that violence usually imposes. That exclusion reads as numbness, survivor’s detachment, or a kind of guilty immunity: if the landscape is being rewritten by fire and ordnance, why am I still myself?

Context matters with Motion: a poet of memory and aftermath, often attentive to how public events (war, national story, private grief) fail to land cleanly on individual feeling. This line catches the psychological lag between impact and comprehension. The bombs are real; the fear is real; the speaker’s inability to be claimed by it is real too. That dissonance is the poem’s moral pressure point: not "what happened", but what it did not manage to make you feel.