Art and Ephemerality: How a Lost Poem Gains Immortality in What We Can Know

Introduction: The Thematic Claim

In Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, art and ephemerality are not opposites—they are locked in a paradoxical embrace. The novel’s central artifact, Francis Blundy’s lost poem “A Corona for Vivien,” becomes more powerful the less it exists as a physical text. The thematic claim is this: an artwork’s absence can generate more cultural meaning than its presence. The poem survives only in memory, rumor, and longing, and it is precisely this ephemerality that elevates it to the status of a secular relic. McEwan uses the poem’s vanishing to question what we value in art—the object itself or the idea of it.

The Creation and the Loss: The Poem’s Birth into Ephemerality

The poem was born with the trappings of permanence. In Chapter 2, Francis Blundy labors over a corona of fifteen Petrarchan sonnets, written in minuscule handwriting on a single sheet of vellum. Vellum, the skin of a calf, has preserved the Magna Carta for nine centuries. Blundy chooses it deliberately: “A dead animal has conferred novel sensuality on my words. Now they are alive.” He intends the vellum scroll to be the unique copy, and he destroys all notes and drafts beforehand. The gift, presented at Vivien’s 54th birthday dinner—the Second Immortal Dinner—is meant to endure.

Yet the poem vanishes. Vivien is the only person to read it. After Francis’s death, the scroll disappears, never to be published or even seen again. The artifact intended for eternity becomes ephemeral in a single stroke. This ironic inversion sets the theme in motion: the most deliberately permanent work of art in the novel is the one that cannot be accessed.

The Cultural Afterlife: The Poem Without a Text

By the time the narrator, Tom Metcalfe, begins his research in 2119, the Corona has been lost for over a century. Yet it has never been more alive. In Chapter 15, the narrator documents how the poem’s reputation blossoms precisely because no one can read it. “The imagined lords it over the actual,” the narrative states, a point reinforced by comparisons to religious believers who refuse depictions of God, or by the way fans embellish their own histories.

The Corona becomes a “repository of dreams” and a “mirror for the ages and all their anxieties.” During the climate crisis of the mid-21st century, the poem is invoked as a hymn to nature’s lost glory. After the Inundation of 2042, the poem’s imagined beauty provides solace. Online communities proclaim themselves “Blundy couples” celebrating lifelong love, ignorant of the actual poem’s content. Poetry competitions to recreate the Corona are held but dismissed; the real poem is too perfect to be written by anyone else. The narrator concludes that if the actual scroll were found, “the excitement would not spread far beyond academia.” The imagined version is superior.

The Quest and the Discovery: The Poem That Wasn’t There

The narrative arc of Tom’s quest reinforces the theme. For much of the novel, he seeks the lost poem, believing it may be hidden in Harry Kitchener’s archive in Scotland, or somewhere on the island where Vivien’s dairy once stood. In Chapter 21, Tom, his wife Rose, and a captain dig at the site indicated by a clue in a notebook. They uncover a steel container.

What they find is not the poem. It is Percy Greene’s violin and a folder of prose—personal papers, not the Corona. The narrator’s understanding of the past is reconfigured. The poem remains lost. This anticlimax is thematically crucial: the search itself, the act of longing, has been the point. The discovery of the violin—a symbol of Percy’s musical art—offers a different kind of permanence, but it is a substitute, not the thing sought. The missing poem continues to hover, potent and untouchable.

The Frame: The Novel as Mediated Document

The novel’s structure compounds the theme. Chapter 23 is a single bibliographic note revealing that the entire narrative is a future scholarly edition of The Confessions of Vivien Blundy, edited by Tom with an introduction by Rose Church and a preface by archivist Donald Drummond. Everything we have read is already a mediated interpretation. The poem’s absence is built into the form of the novel itself.

The Author’s Note that follows adds a final twist: McEwan writes that nothing related to the novel is buried anywhere. This statement denies hidden meanings, yet the novel’s central mystery—the lost poem—remains unsolved. The author asserts transparency while the story insists on the power of the unknown. This contradiction mirrors the theme: the most meaningful thing about art may be what it does not reveal.

Character Connections: Keeper, Poet, Biographer, and Muse

Vivien Blundy is the sole reader of the poem and its guardian. Her decision not to publish or copy it (motivated partly by a desire to control her own story) directly causes the poem’s ephemerality. She becomes the keeper of an absence.

Francis Blundy embodies the artist’s confidence in permanence. He believes his craft will outlast him. Ironically, his very perfectionism—destroying drafts, making one unique copy—guarantees the poem’s disappearance.

Tom Metcalfe is the biographer of a non-text. His professional life is devoted to the reputation of an unread poem. He feels aggrieved that he must write about “the shadow” not the thing itself. Yet his obsession shapes his marriage, his career, and his final understanding that the search matters more than the finding.

Rose Church, Tom’s wife, pushes him toward the quest and represents a more pragmatic relationship with the past. She studies the same period but does not let it sap her joy in the present. Her pregnancy at the novel’s end signals a new kind of hope—not for recovered artifacts but for living continuation.

Percy Greene (Vivien’s first husband) and his violin offer a parallel: music is inherently ephemeral, performed and gone, yet Percy’s instrument survives and is uncovered. The violin is a symbol of art that can be played again, unlike the poem, which can never be read.

Symbol Connections: The Vellum, The Violin, The Lost Poem

The vellum manuscript symbolizes the false promise of permanence. Blundy chooses it for its durability, yet it disappears. The material is permanent; the text is not.

Percy’s violin is a counter-symbol: an instrument recovered from a buried container, still capable of producing sound. Music, which exists only in time, can be recreated each time the violin is played. This offers a model of ephemerality that is also a form of renewal—unlike the poem, which is lost to all performance.

The lost poem itself is the ultimate symbol of ephemeral power. It exists as an idea, a rumor, a talisman. The narrator notes that “a poem has served history well by remaining a blank sheet.” The blank sheet is more potent than any filled page.

Complexity and Contradiction: The Paradox of Absence

McEwan does not present this theme without tension. The narrator explicitly argues that “no paradox or mystery” exists in the imagined outranking the actual. Yet the novel’s entire plot is driven by the desire to find the actual poem. If the imagined were truly sufficient, why would Tom risk his life to dig in Scotland? The contradiction suggests that even those who celebrate the idea of art still crave the physical artifact.

Furthermore, the Author’s Note attempts to close interpretation, but the novel resists closure. The poem remains unfound, and readers are left with only the mediated version of events. McEwan invites us to question whether certain kinds of knowledge—especially about art—are better left incomplete. The thematic claim is not that ephemerality is good, but that it is inescapable and generative.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the lost poem’s absence increase its cultural power?
The poem becomes a blank onto which successive generations project their desires: ecological longing, romantic ideals, political resistance. Because no one can read it, it remains perfect and unassailable, unlike any actual text that could disappoint.

2. What does the contrast between vellum and violin reveal about different kinds of ephemerality?
Vellum is durable but the poem disappears; the violin is recoverable and can be played again. The violin suggests that art which is performed or recreated can survive loss, while a unique written artifact is fragile. The novel prefers the renewable over the fixed.

3. Why does Tom continue to seek the poem even after he argues that the imagined version is superior?
Tom is not fully satisfied with shadows. He wants the physical proof of the poem, both for professional vindication and for personal closure. His quest embodies the human contradiction: we know the idea is enough, but we still want the thing.

4. How does the novel’s frame (the scholarly edition and Author’s Note) affect our understanding of art’s permanence?
The frame reveals that all we read is already an interpretation, not a direct encounter with the poem. The Author’s Note denies hidden puzzles, yet the poem’s location is never revealed. This mirrors the theme: the novel presents itself as transparent while preserving the core mystery, forcing readers to accept that some things cannot be known.

5. In what way does Percy’s violin offer an alternative model of artistic legacy?
Percy’s violin is music, an art form that exists only in performance. Unlike the poem, it can be played anew each time. When Tom finds the violin, he does not try to reconstruct Percy’s lost performances; he simply recovers the instrument. The violin represents an art that does not depend on a fixed text, and therefore cannot be lost in the same way the poem was.