In Saint Mark’s Gospel in the Bible, Salome (The historian Josephus tells us her name) was the woman who asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. John the Baptist was the man who baptised Christ in the River Jordan having prophesied the arrival of a Saviour. He also spent a long period of self denial in the desert, eating only locusts and honey. This paralleled Christ’s forty-day fast in the desert.
The poem imagines Salome as a woman who has had more than one man’s head severed on a whim: “I’d done it before” (line 1) It seems that she is a drinker and drug taker who was so immersed in her ways that she couldn’t even remember the name of the man she had asked to be beheaded: “What was his name? Peter? / Simon? Andrew? John?” (lines 14-15). All these names are, of course, those of some of Jesus’s disciples.
Duffy imagines Salome as being the equivalent in our modern terms as a self-obsessed person who lives a life of excess and who later decides to reform. As Salome says “I needed to clean up my act” (line 25). The predatory nature of Salome is encapsulated in the idea that she thinks that John the Baptist had come “like a lamb to the slaughter / to Salome’s bed.” This is the language of sexual conquest but it is actually referring to the fact that John was indeed slaughtered. The Bible account tells us that Salome was given John the Baptist’s head on a platter. This is horrific and is rendered into a modern context by Duffy who clearly has in mind the kind of tribally brutal killings of the Mafia and, most forcibly, the famous scene if the film, The Godfather in which a Mafioso is a sent a warning by a mobster in the form of the severed head of his racehorse in his bed.
Duffy builds up to the description of the well known platter image through words that rhyme or half rhyme with “platter”. For example, “flatter”, “pewter”, “better”, “butter”, “clatter”, “clutter”, “patter”, “latter” and “slaughter”. Salome’s utter callousness is made clear in her appalling “and ain’t life a bitch”. She is so corrupt that she cannot feel anything but indifference to what she has done. The focus of her attention is not the series of murders for which she has been responsible but her own situation, her need to eat more wisely and “get fitter”. Salome is a repugnant person who is clearly ignorant about, or indifferent to, the magnitude of what she has done.
In a general sense this poem is a study of a personality who is utterly amoral with nothing but herself as a focus in life.
The following is the relevant section from St Mark’s Gospel (Chapter VI verses 17-29)
17. For Herod himself had given orders to have John arrested, and he had him bound and put in prison. He did this because of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife, whom he had married.
18. For John had been saying to Herod, "It is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife."
19. So Herodias nursed a grudge against John and wanted to kill him. But she was not able to,
20. because Herod feared John and protected him, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man. When Herod heard John, he was greatly puzzled; yet he liked to listen to him.
21. Finally the opportune time came. On his birthday Herod gave a banquet for his high officials and military commanders and the leading men of Galilee.
22. When the daughter of Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his dinner guests. The king said to the girl, "Ask me for anything you want, and I'll give it to you."
23. And he promised her with an oath, "Whatever you ask I will give you, up to half my kingdom."
24. She went out and said to her mother, "What shall I ask for?" "The head of John the Baptist," she answered.
25. At once the girl hurried in to the king with the request: "I want you to give me right now the head of John the Baptist on a platter."
26. The king was greatly distressed, but because of his oaths and his dinner guests, he did not want to refuse her.
27. So he immediately sent an executioner with orders to bring John's head. The man went, beheaded John in the prison,
28. and brought back his head on a platter. He presented it to the girl, and she gave it to her mother.
29. On hearing of this, John's disciples came and took his body and laid it in a tomb.
Sunday 15 March 2009
Michael Woods writes about Before You Were Mine
In this poem Duffy addresses her mother, framing the time element in a curious way so that she inhabits with her voice the ten-year period before she was born. Speaking in the voice of her pre-existent self, she addresses her mother during the ten-year period preceding her own birth. She is exploring real time but a time that can only be imagined as far as she is concerned. Through specific detail she reconstructs the life her mother led before her daughter’s birth.
The title of the poem is surprising in that it suggests something a mother might say to a child rather than the other way around. The word ‘mine’ suggests closeness in a relationship and a sense of loving ownership.
In stanza 1 Duffy employs the first person in order to address her mother who is carefree and happy. There is an almost ghostly effect created by the child speaking to the parent before it is born. The sentence ‘I’m not here yet’, which opens the second stanza, is characteristic of Duffy’s treatment of time and creates tension between the present and an anticipated future. These ideas are, of course, projected imaginatively into the past of the poet’s mother.
The seemingly arbitrary sequence of events that led to the existence of us all are somehow short-circuited and lent a kind of inevitability by the background presence of the poet. This is clearly perceptible even though the ‘thought’ of a daughter does not enter her head while she dances in ‘the ballroom with the thousand eyes’, a reference to the presence of five hundred potential husbands watching her. The hoped-for future of the mother is framed in terms of ‘fizzy, movie tomorrows / the right walk home could bring’. The word ‘fizzy’ suggests zest for life and excitement (compare this with ‘fizzing hope’ in ‘The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team’) as much as capturing the rather hissy soundtracks and the sometimes less than sharp picture quality of early films. The ‘movie tomorrows’ indicate the way young women hoped that their lives would become real life versions of the films they flocked to see.
The third stanza intensifies the sense of the mother’s freedom as her child to be reminds her that she arrived, like all babies, with a ‘loud, possessive yell’. The easy, conversational tone of the sentence finishing with ‘eh?’ underlines the intimacy of a relationship that has been developing for a long time. Duffy turns her attention to the memory of being a little girl doing such things as putting her hands in her mother’s ‘high-heeled red shoes’. Such an action is fairly typical of what a little girl might do and enables the reader to identify easily with the situation described. The shoes are ‘relics’, a word that emphasises the gulf of time between the event remembered and the occasion of its recall; it also has a religious connotation implying that the shoes are very special because of their association with the poet’s mother. The stanza closes with the poet vividly imagining her youthful mother as she revisits her old Glasgow haunt: ‘and now your ghost clatters toward me over George Square / till I see you, clear as scent’. By employing the technique of synaesthesia, Duffy replicates for the reader the vividness of her seemingly visionary experience of her mother. Scent is unmistakable and almost always associated in our minds with a person and a place. As well as sight, the poet is relying on smell, the most evocative of our senses.
The final stanza continues to catalogue the details of childhood memory, the poet fondly recalling the learning of dance steps ‘on the way home from Mass’. The image of ‘stamping stars from the wrong pavement’ conjures pictures of Hollywood but reminds us that there is no escaping real life. ‘Even then’ suggests that the child yearned for her mother even before she was born. This is a tremendously confirmatory idea and it is clear that ‘love lasts’ for the poet and her mother in the real present as well as the imagined past. The final sentence, peppered with words like ‘glamorous’, ‘sparkle’, ‘waltz’ and ‘laugh’ suggests youth and enjoyment and signals that, unlike many daughters, the poet can imagine a life for her mother without the children she was later to bear. The final phrase of the poem, which contains a repetition of its title, reminds us of its ambiguity. Duffy evokes the Glasgow of the 1950s with its dance halls and fashions influenced by American icons like Marilyn Monroe. The ‘polka-dot dress’ mentioned in the first stanza recalls two famous photographs, one of Monroe strategically stepping over a hot air vent, which caused her dress to fly up, and another called ‘Seaside Chat’ by the photographer Bert Hardy. The women in the latter wear dresses similar to Monroe’s while the photograph is clearly influenced by the image of her. The image Duffy creates of her mother with her friends is an idealised, imaginary one, even the names are invented. This is wholly in keeping with the way children try to reconstruct their parents’ lives through images already available. Such images often do include photographs.
The poet imagines her mother risking ‘a hiding’ from her mother (the poet’s grandmother) for arriving home late from a dance. This indicates clearly that the relationship between parents and children does not differ significantly from one generation to the next.
The title of the poem is surprising in that it suggests something a mother might say to a child rather than the other way around. The word ‘mine’ suggests closeness in a relationship and a sense of loving ownership.
In stanza 1 Duffy employs the first person in order to address her mother who is carefree and happy. There is an almost ghostly effect created by the child speaking to the parent before it is born. The sentence ‘I’m not here yet’, which opens the second stanza, is characteristic of Duffy’s treatment of time and creates tension between the present and an anticipated future. These ideas are, of course, projected imaginatively into the past of the poet’s mother.
The seemingly arbitrary sequence of events that led to the existence of us all are somehow short-circuited and lent a kind of inevitability by the background presence of the poet. This is clearly perceptible even though the ‘thought’ of a daughter does not enter her head while she dances in ‘the ballroom with the thousand eyes’, a reference to the presence of five hundred potential husbands watching her. The hoped-for future of the mother is framed in terms of ‘fizzy, movie tomorrows / the right walk home could bring’. The word ‘fizzy’ suggests zest for life and excitement (compare this with ‘fizzing hope’ in ‘The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team’) as much as capturing the rather hissy soundtracks and the sometimes less than sharp picture quality of early films. The ‘movie tomorrows’ indicate the way young women hoped that their lives would become real life versions of the films they flocked to see.
The third stanza intensifies the sense of the mother’s freedom as her child to be reminds her that she arrived, like all babies, with a ‘loud, possessive yell’. The easy, conversational tone of the sentence finishing with ‘eh?’ underlines the intimacy of a relationship that has been developing for a long time. Duffy turns her attention to the memory of being a little girl doing such things as putting her hands in her mother’s ‘high-heeled red shoes’. Such an action is fairly typical of what a little girl might do and enables the reader to identify easily with the situation described. The shoes are ‘relics’, a word that emphasises the gulf of time between the event remembered and the occasion of its recall; it also has a religious connotation implying that the shoes are very special because of their association with the poet’s mother. The stanza closes with the poet vividly imagining her youthful mother as she revisits her old Glasgow haunt: ‘and now your ghost clatters toward me over George Square / till I see you, clear as scent’. By employing the technique of synaesthesia, Duffy replicates for the reader the vividness of her seemingly visionary experience of her mother. Scent is unmistakable and almost always associated in our minds with a person and a place. As well as sight, the poet is relying on smell, the most evocative of our senses.
The final stanza continues to catalogue the details of childhood memory, the poet fondly recalling the learning of dance steps ‘on the way home from Mass’. The image of ‘stamping stars from the wrong pavement’ conjures pictures of Hollywood but reminds us that there is no escaping real life. ‘Even then’ suggests that the child yearned for her mother even before she was born. This is a tremendously confirmatory idea and it is clear that ‘love lasts’ for the poet and her mother in the real present as well as the imagined past. The final sentence, peppered with words like ‘glamorous’, ‘sparkle’, ‘waltz’ and ‘laugh’ suggests youth and enjoyment and signals that, unlike many daughters, the poet can imagine a life for her mother without the children she was later to bear. The final phrase of the poem, which contains a repetition of its title, reminds us of its ambiguity. Duffy evokes the Glasgow of the 1950s with its dance halls and fashions influenced by American icons like Marilyn Monroe. The ‘polka-dot dress’ mentioned in the first stanza recalls two famous photographs, one of Monroe strategically stepping over a hot air vent, which caused her dress to fly up, and another called ‘Seaside Chat’ by the photographer Bert Hardy. The women in the latter wear dresses similar to Monroe’s while the photograph is clearly influenced by the image of her. The image Duffy creates of her mother with her friends is an idealised, imaginary one, even the names are invented. This is wholly in keeping with the way children try to reconstruct their parents’ lives through images already available. Such images often do include photographs.
The poet imagines her mother risking ‘a hiding’ from her mother (the poet’s grandmother) for arriving home late from a dance. This indicates clearly that the relationship between parents and children does not differ significantly from one generation to the next.
Michael Woods writes about Education for Leisure
A disaffected, unemployed boy searching for ways of filling a day of extreme boredom decides to kill something. Having killed a fly by squashing it against a window, his killing instinct extends to flushing a goldfish down a toilet. He craves more excitement and leaves his house, clutching a bread knife. The poem closes with the terrifying idea that anyone could fall victim to a random attack by such a person.
It would be too easy to read this poem as a criticism of psychopaths as it draws attention to the potential effects of poor employment prospects. The irony of the title illustrates how school does not lead to employment for many young people but to protracted periods of 'leisure'. One might go as far as to say that 'leisure' is simply a euphemism for idleness. There is a simultaneous horror and sympathy communicated in the poem.
The strong narrative impulse in the poem, written in the voice of the boy, is striking. Feeling frustrated and 'ignored', he resorts to physical violence as a means of exerting power over others. He assumes absolute authority by deciding to, 'play God'.
He does not understand Shakespeare but claims to be a genius. This is an allusion to King Lear, perhaps Shakespeare's darkest tragedy. It recalls Gloucester's words, 'As flies to wanton boys, are we to the Gods, / they kill us for their sport' (Act 4, Scene 1). The act of killing the fly cost the boy no thought at all just as he holds the lives of his cat, goldfish and budgie cheap. In playing God, the boy is actually given some of God's words from Genesis to speak: 'I see that it is good' ironically reverses the import of God's reaction to his creation by showing us someone who is bent on destruction. The blackly comic, 'The budgie is panicking', along with 'The cat avoids me' provide temporary relief from the stark reality of what this person is bent on. He seeks attention and is not pleased that the people at the social security office do not acknowledge him in the way he would like. He associates himself with 'talent' and 'genius', telling a radio presenter that he is a superstar.
The final stanza ominously begins with the sentence, 'There is nothing left to kill'. This again reminds us of his anti-type, God who rested after creating everything. Here, the persona in the poem is searching for something or someone to destroy. Having failed to be famous for a while on radio, he decides to kind someone to stab. The penultimate line of the poem conveys the warped associations made in the mind of the homicidal boy: 'He cuts me off' clearly indicates that the boy has been dismissed as being deranged by the radio station receptionist. The word 'cut' clearly links with what he decides to do in taking a knife out onto the street. The arresting visual image of 'The pavements glitter suddenly' suggests both an odd flaring of decision to act in the mind of the potential murderer and, by transference, the flash of the blade as it catches the light. 'I touch your arm' is both sinister in its controlled intimacy and ironically reductive since it is not the hand of a creative God reaching out but that of a killer.
The poem does not defend this sort of person's actions but does raise questions about the potential effects of unemployment and alienation born of an inappropriate school curriculum for those who would do better learning more practical subjects. In this way it is a sobering reminder of what disaffection can lead to.
Duffy captures the 'voice' of the boy in his characteristic vocabulary. After the opening stanza's statements of intent: 'I am going to kill something' and 'I am going to play God', Duffy moves from the future indicative to the simple present: 'I squash', 'I pour', 'I pull', and 'I touch'. The stark, unembellished short sentences indicate a determination to act. His resentment is also suggested through these clipped statements.
It would be too easy to read this poem as a criticism of psychopaths as it draws attention to the potential effects of poor employment prospects. The irony of the title illustrates how school does not lead to employment for many young people but to protracted periods of 'leisure'. One might go as far as to say that 'leisure' is simply a euphemism for idleness. There is a simultaneous horror and sympathy communicated in the poem.
The strong narrative impulse in the poem, written in the voice of the boy, is striking. Feeling frustrated and 'ignored', he resorts to physical violence as a means of exerting power over others. He assumes absolute authority by deciding to, 'play God'.
He does not understand Shakespeare but claims to be a genius. This is an allusion to King Lear, perhaps Shakespeare's darkest tragedy. It recalls Gloucester's words, 'As flies to wanton boys, are we to the Gods, / they kill us for their sport' (Act 4, Scene 1). The act of killing the fly cost the boy no thought at all just as he holds the lives of his cat, goldfish and budgie cheap. In playing God, the boy is actually given some of God's words from Genesis to speak: 'I see that it is good' ironically reverses the import of God's reaction to his creation by showing us someone who is bent on destruction. The blackly comic, 'The budgie is panicking', along with 'The cat avoids me' provide temporary relief from the stark reality of what this person is bent on. He seeks attention and is not pleased that the people at the social security office do not acknowledge him in the way he would like. He associates himself with 'talent' and 'genius', telling a radio presenter that he is a superstar.
The final stanza ominously begins with the sentence, 'There is nothing left to kill'. This again reminds us of his anti-type, God who rested after creating everything. Here, the persona in the poem is searching for something or someone to destroy. Having failed to be famous for a while on radio, he decides to kind someone to stab. The penultimate line of the poem conveys the warped associations made in the mind of the homicidal boy: 'He cuts me off' clearly indicates that the boy has been dismissed as being deranged by the radio station receptionist. The word 'cut' clearly links with what he decides to do in taking a knife out onto the street. The arresting visual image of 'The pavements glitter suddenly' suggests both an odd flaring of decision to act in the mind of the potential murderer and, by transference, the flash of the blade as it catches the light. 'I touch your arm' is both sinister in its controlled intimacy and ironically reductive since it is not the hand of a creative God reaching out but that of a killer.
The poem does not defend this sort of person's actions but does raise questions about the potential effects of unemployment and alienation born of an inappropriate school curriculum for those who would do better learning more practical subjects. In this way it is a sobering reminder of what disaffection can lead to.
Duffy captures the 'voice' of the boy in his characteristic vocabulary. After the opening stanza's statements of intent: 'I am going to kill something' and 'I am going to play God', Duffy moves from the future indicative to the simple present: 'I squash', 'I pour', 'I pull', and 'I touch'. The stark, unembellished short sentences indicate a determination to act. His resentment is also suggested through these clipped statements.
Michael Woods writes about Elvis' Twin Sister
The poem is a humorous dramatic monologue in the voice of an imagined twin sister for Elvis Presley who also happened to be a nun. Elvis had a twin brother who died in childbirth and Duffy imagines the twin surviving but as a girl. She grows up to follow a very different vocation from Elvis. He chose the public life of a rock star whereas she chose the private, contemplative life of a nun. Elvis himself came from the Southern States of America, Memphis, Tennessee with a strong gospel tradition in music.
The opening of the poem is comic in that there is incongruity in the use of language by Elvis’s twin sister: “In the convent y’all (line 1) is folksy and familiar, a bit like Elvis introducing one of his songs. She tells the reader that she prays for “the immortal soul / of rock and roll” (lines 4-5). By this she could be speaking of rock and roll in general or perhaps the soul of her dead brother who epitomised rock and roll because he was the first real star in the genre. The second stanza continues the tone of levity by humorously presenting Elvis’s twin telling the reader that she is called “Sister Presley” and that “The Reverend Mother / digs the way I move my hips/ just like my brother”. (lines 8-10) This libertine image contrasts sharply with the mention of “Gregorian chant” that “drifts out across the herbs”. There are no stacks of amplifiers and electric guitars in this garden of contemplation. Gregorian chant is restful and peaceful and could not be more different from the strident, raucous sound of rock and roll music. The line of Latin from the chant quoted in the poem, “Pascha nostrum immolatus est” (line 13) means ‘Our lamb has been sacrificed”. This is ambiguous in the context of the poem because it refers to the death of Jesus but Elvis’s twin sister could be speaking for the fans of Elvis, too. Unlike her brother, who wore expensive rhinestone and jewel encrusted catsuits, his sister wears a “simple habit” (line 14) and “darkish hues” (line 15), “a rosary” (line 17), “A chain of keys” (line 18)what seems an inevitable pair of “good and sturdy / blue suede shoes”. (lines 19-20). This is clearly in honour of Elvis.
The fact that she thinks of the convent as “Graceland”, the place where Elvis used to live and that she has the same “trademark slow lopsided smile” (line 24) as her brother makes him live on through her. The concluding stanza begins in much the same way as the first with an upbeat exclamation: “Lawdy” is a comical thing for a nun to say but just what Elvis might have said. It also reinforces how alike twins can be. Because it is Elvis’s word more than hers, the next line, “I’m alive and well.” (line 27) hints that he lives on through his music and by being commemorated in poems such as the one Duffy has written. His twin sister tells us that it is a “Long time” since she “walked / down Lonely Street / towards heartbreak Hotel.” (lines 28-30) This suggests that she is happy in life and carefree but it could also be a reminder to herself to go and listen to her brother’s records again, just as Duffy is clearly saying that Elvis’s contribution to popular culture should be recognised and celebrated, as it is in this poem. In some ways it may be read as an upbeat elegy. The original elegy resurrected its subject in a benign landscape and it could be argued that Duffy does just this in a convent herb garden. The rhyme in the poem helps it roll along and the short lines are reminiscent of a song in their stanzaic form.
The opening of the poem is comic in that there is incongruity in the use of language by Elvis’s twin sister: “In the convent y’all (line 1) is folksy and familiar, a bit like Elvis introducing one of his songs. She tells the reader that she prays for “the immortal soul / of rock and roll” (lines 4-5). By this she could be speaking of rock and roll in general or perhaps the soul of her dead brother who epitomised rock and roll because he was the first real star in the genre. The second stanza continues the tone of levity by humorously presenting Elvis’s twin telling the reader that she is called “Sister Presley” and that “The Reverend Mother / digs the way I move my hips/ just like my brother”. (lines 8-10) This libertine image contrasts sharply with the mention of “Gregorian chant” that “drifts out across the herbs”. There are no stacks of amplifiers and electric guitars in this garden of contemplation. Gregorian chant is restful and peaceful and could not be more different from the strident, raucous sound of rock and roll music. The line of Latin from the chant quoted in the poem, “Pascha nostrum immolatus est” (line 13) means ‘Our lamb has been sacrificed”. This is ambiguous in the context of the poem because it refers to the death of Jesus but Elvis’s twin sister could be speaking for the fans of Elvis, too. Unlike her brother, who wore expensive rhinestone and jewel encrusted catsuits, his sister wears a “simple habit” (line 14) and “darkish hues” (line 15), “a rosary” (line 17), “A chain of keys” (line 18)what seems an inevitable pair of “good and sturdy / blue suede shoes”. (lines 19-20). This is clearly in honour of Elvis.
The fact that she thinks of the convent as “Graceland”, the place where Elvis used to live and that she has the same “trademark slow lopsided smile” (line 24) as her brother makes him live on through her. The concluding stanza begins in much the same way as the first with an upbeat exclamation: “Lawdy” is a comical thing for a nun to say but just what Elvis might have said. It also reinforces how alike twins can be. Because it is Elvis’s word more than hers, the next line, “I’m alive and well.” (line 27) hints that he lives on through his music and by being commemorated in poems such as the one Duffy has written. His twin sister tells us that it is a “Long time” since she “walked / down Lonely Street / towards heartbreak Hotel.” (lines 28-30) This suggests that she is happy in life and carefree but it could also be a reminder to herself to go and listen to her brother’s records again, just as Duffy is clearly saying that Elvis’s contribution to popular culture should be recognised and celebrated, as it is in this poem. In some ways it may be read as an upbeat elegy. The original elegy resurrected its subject in a benign landscape and it could be argued that Duffy does just this in a convent herb garden. The rhyme in the poem helps it roll along and the short lines are reminiscent of a song in their stanzaic form.
Michael Woods writes about Anne Hathaway
This poem from The World’s Wife, written in the voice of Shakespeare’s widow, is immediately accessible because of its familiar tone and the manner in which Anne Hathaway enthuses about her dead husband. Despite its apparent simplicity, Duffy uses a rich complexity of ideas relating to language, relationships and Shakespeare’s work. She has chosen to adopt the sonnet form and this is particularly appropriate as Shakespeare himself adapted the form and wrote 154 of his own sonnets.
The poets Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–47) were credited with introducing the sonnet to England. The standard form was known as the Petrarchan, Italian or regular sonnet, with a rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde, but it was modified thus by Shakespeare: ababacdcdefef gg. The volta is delayed in his sonnets until the final rhyming couplet although there is often a discernible change in direction at around line 8, the traditional position of the volta. Duffy’s rhyme scheme is looser than those already mentioned and employs half-rhyme, something in keeping with the ‘softer rhyme’ mentioned at the end of line 5 of this poem. The rhyming couplet conforms to the Shakespearean model but it does not introduce a new rhyme. By recalling ‘bed’ in line 8, the persona’s preoccupation with her physical relationship is brought to the reader’s attention.
It is fitting that Anne Hathaway writes in the form that her husband so famously used. This in itself is an act of homage and, possibly, a means of keeping him alive. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and ending with ‘So long lives this and this gives life to thee’, voices the commonly held view that humans might die but a work of art can last forever, effectively immortalising its subject.
Shakespeare, the arch metaphor-user and coiner of words, is written about in metaphorical terms even in the first line. The idea of a bed being a ‘spinning world’ is striking and starts the poem off at a giddying pace. Duffy neatly presents the bed as a microcosmic centre of an imaginative, expansive universe ‘of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas’ suggesting, at the very least, the plays As You Like It, Macbeth, Hamlet and The Tempest. As You Like It is set in the Forest of Arden, close to Stratford-upon-Avon; Macbeth and Hamlet are partly set in castles. Hamlet contemplates suicide on a clifftop and The Tempest involves a sea voyage. The image of Shakespeare diving in bed suggests oral sex with Anne Hathaway as well as reminding us that he was the man who wrote Ariel’s song in The Tempest.
It is significant that Anne Hathaway describes her husband as a ‘lover’ (line 3), suggesting that their physical relationship was vital and exciting. This is given further emphasis by the words ‘spinning’, ‘shooting’, ‘dancing’ and ‘laughing’. The vitality of their sexual union fits in well with the sort of people we might expect Anne and her husband to be.
Duffy begins with a quotation from Shakespeare’s will as an epigraph to the poem. Some commentators, and not only feminists, have taken the statement to be something of a slight on Anne Hathaway. To be left a ‘second best bed’ is not generally felt to have been complimentary. We might have expected, then, that Anne Hathaway would be given the opportunity to have her revenge. Although other poems in The World’s Wife do present women as being unhappy with their lot, Anne Hathaway’s version of events reveals that she was very much in love with her husband. Theirs was a marriage of equality. He left her his second best bed because it was the one in which they had enacted in a very real sense the drama of their relationship. No children are mentioned by Anne, she concentrates purely on the physical act and not its consequences.
In keeping with the expression of a separate identity, Anne Hathaway is presented as someone who is able to use words in an impressively poetic way. In this sense her personality rhymes with her husband’s. She refers to her body being a ‘softer rhyme’ to Shakespeare. Here, Duffy is subtly relating the poetic techniques of masculine rhyme and feminine rhyme to the actual lives of two people who could hardly be separated from art: ‘kisses’ at the end of line 4 is a feminine ending; ‘touch’ is a masculine one. This explicit use of linguistic and poetic terms draws attention to the self-conscious artifice of the persona’s utterance, as well as the poet’s.
Hathaway states that her lover’s words ‘echo’ as ‘assonance’ in her head. The words ‘on’, ‘body’, ‘softer’, ‘to’, ‘echo’, ‘assonance’, ‘touch’ and ‘noun’ are all linked by assonance; the ‘o’ sound does indeed echo through the lines as a softer rhyme. The description of Shakespeare’s touch as ‘a verb dancing in the centre of a noun’ creates a vital impression of joyous action. It is sexually suggestive in that his hands could be ‘dancing’ in the ‘centre’ of his wife. The line also alerts us to one of Shakespeare’s most famous means of energising language; he would often turn nouns into verbs. For example, in The Winter’s Tale Perdita says, ‘I’ll queen it no inch further.’ In a practically poetic sense, then, Shakespeare was able to find verbs in the centre of nouns. As is sometimes the case in Shakespeare’s sonnets, there is a perceptible progression in this sonnet with ‘Some nights’ (line 8), but the volta actually occurs after line 12 at the rhyming couplet, providing the clinching idea and sense of closure. This rhyme is, incidentally, masculine so we are aware of a female voice giving her husband something of a ghostly, lasting presence in its use. The metaphors in lines 8–9, ‘I dreamed he’d written me, the bed / a page beneath his writer’s hands’, are consistent with Shakespeare’s occupation but they also make a forceful statement about the imaginative power of his wife. She desires him so much that she would like to have been one of his dramatic creations. The bed as site of dramatic action is there as a blank for her husband’s imagination to be unleashed upon. Visually, sheets could easily be thought of as paper in this context. The blurring of the distinction between life and art is again inherent in this section of the poem. The subsequent ‘Romance / and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste’ is heavily erotic, concentrating on sensory exploration and not language itself. Lines 8–10 use theatrical imagery to powerful effect in presenting a scene of lovemaking. The word ‘drama’ makes reference to plays in general as well as to love, while ‘Romance’, one of the categories into which some of Shakespeare’s plays are placed, also reminds us that this relationship is not stale.
Anne relishes remembering that the ‘guests dozed on’ while she and William made love. The derogatory ‘dribbling their prose’ (line 12) is contrasted sharply with ‘My living laughing love’. The lilting alliteration and the cadence of the verse at this point convey extreme happiness and affection. This contrasts with the d, b and p, sounds in ‘dozed’, ‘dribbling’ and ‘prose’. The impression created is that the guests live an inferior life of prose. Shakespeare often gave low status characters prose to speak. The dash preceding the conclusion of the poem acts as something of a dramatic gesture and separates the descriptions of Shakespeare alive with Anne’s acknowledgement that he can only live on in her imagination now that he is dead. The fact that she describes her head as a ‘casket’, a strongbox for keeping jewels and other precious items, indicates the deep love and affection she had for her husband. The consonance on ‘hold’ and ‘held’ recalls that the lovers rhymed with each other when alive, while the tense-change poignantly signals the irrevocable change brought about by her husband’s death. The final, clinching rhyme of ‘head’ and ‘bed’ indicates that Anne Hathaway is able to keep love alive in her memory and imagination. We are left with Anne Hathaway cherishing the memory of being with her husband in ‘that next best bed’. Their true intimacy is made clear here as only she would have been able to interpret correctly Shakespeare’s intention when he wrote the famous bequest in his will. His will, in every sense, is hers.
This sonnet, then, is a poem about a poet by a poet, with the intermediary being the subject’s surviving partner. Carol Ann Duffy is using this thrown voice as a means of celebrating the subject, Shakespeare. Shakespeare delayed the volta in his sonnets until line twelve but there is often a discernible shift of ideas after the second quatrain, the point at which a Petrarchan sonnet displays a more noticeable turn.
The poets Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–47) were credited with introducing the sonnet to England. The standard form was known as the Petrarchan, Italian or regular sonnet, with a rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde, but it was modified thus by Shakespeare: ababacdcdefef gg. The volta is delayed in his sonnets until the final rhyming couplet although there is often a discernible change in direction at around line 8, the traditional position of the volta. Duffy’s rhyme scheme is looser than those already mentioned and employs half-rhyme, something in keeping with the ‘softer rhyme’ mentioned at the end of line 5 of this poem. The rhyming couplet conforms to the Shakespearean model but it does not introduce a new rhyme. By recalling ‘bed’ in line 8, the persona’s preoccupation with her physical relationship is brought to the reader’s attention.
It is fitting that Anne Hathaway writes in the form that her husband so famously used. This in itself is an act of homage and, possibly, a means of keeping him alive. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and ending with ‘So long lives this and this gives life to thee’, voices the commonly held view that humans might die but a work of art can last forever, effectively immortalising its subject.
Shakespeare, the arch metaphor-user and coiner of words, is written about in metaphorical terms even in the first line. The idea of a bed being a ‘spinning world’ is striking and starts the poem off at a giddying pace. Duffy neatly presents the bed as a microcosmic centre of an imaginative, expansive universe ‘of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas’ suggesting, at the very least, the plays As You Like It, Macbeth, Hamlet and The Tempest. As You Like It is set in the Forest of Arden, close to Stratford-upon-Avon; Macbeth and Hamlet are partly set in castles. Hamlet contemplates suicide on a clifftop and The Tempest involves a sea voyage. The image of Shakespeare diving in bed suggests oral sex with Anne Hathaway as well as reminding us that he was the man who wrote Ariel’s song in The Tempest.
It is significant that Anne Hathaway describes her husband as a ‘lover’ (line 3), suggesting that their physical relationship was vital and exciting. This is given further emphasis by the words ‘spinning’, ‘shooting’, ‘dancing’ and ‘laughing’. The vitality of their sexual union fits in well with the sort of people we might expect Anne and her husband to be.
Duffy begins with a quotation from Shakespeare’s will as an epigraph to the poem. Some commentators, and not only feminists, have taken the statement to be something of a slight on Anne Hathaway. To be left a ‘second best bed’ is not generally felt to have been complimentary. We might have expected, then, that Anne Hathaway would be given the opportunity to have her revenge. Although other poems in The World’s Wife do present women as being unhappy with their lot, Anne Hathaway’s version of events reveals that she was very much in love with her husband. Theirs was a marriage of equality. He left her his second best bed because it was the one in which they had enacted in a very real sense the drama of their relationship. No children are mentioned by Anne, she concentrates purely on the physical act and not its consequences.
In keeping with the expression of a separate identity, Anne Hathaway is presented as someone who is able to use words in an impressively poetic way. In this sense her personality rhymes with her husband’s. She refers to her body being a ‘softer rhyme’ to Shakespeare. Here, Duffy is subtly relating the poetic techniques of masculine rhyme and feminine rhyme to the actual lives of two people who could hardly be separated from art: ‘kisses’ at the end of line 4 is a feminine ending; ‘touch’ is a masculine one. This explicit use of linguistic and poetic terms draws attention to the self-conscious artifice of the persona’s utterance, as well as the poet’s.
Hathaway states that her lover’s words ‘echo’ as ‘assonance’ in her head. The words ‘on’, ‘body’, ‘softer’, ‘to’, ‘echo’, ‘assonance’, ‘touch’ and ‘noun’ are all linked by assonance; the ‘o’ sound does indeed echo through the lines as a softer rhyme. The description of Shakespeare’s touch as ‘a verb dancing in the centre of a noun’ creates a vital impression of joyous action. It is sexually suggestive in that his hands could be ‘dancing’ in the ‘centre’ of his wife. The line also alerts us to one of Shakespeare’s most famous means of energising language; he would often turn nouns into verbs. For example, in The Winter’s Tale Perdita says, ‘I’ll queen it no inch further.’ In a practically poetic sense, then, Shakespeare was able to find verbs in the centre of nouns. As is sometimes the case in Shakespeare’s sonnets, there is a perceptible progression in this sonnet with ‘Some nights’ (line 8), but the volta actually occurs after line 12 at the rhyming couplet, providing the clinching idea and sense of closure. This rhyme is, incidentally, masculine so we are aware of a female voice giving her husband something of a ghostly, lasting presence in its use. The metaphors in lines 8–9, ‘I dreamed he’d written me, the bed / a page beneath his writer’s hands’, are consistent with Shakespeare’s occupation but they also make a forceful statement about the imaginative power of his wife. She desires him so much that she would like to have been one of his dramatic creations. The bed as site of dramatic action is there as a blank for her husband’s imagination to be unleashed upon. Visually, sheets could easily be thought of as paper in this context. The blurring of the distinction between life and art is again inherent in this section of the poem. The subsequent ‘Romance / and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste’ is heavily erotic, concentrating on sensory exploration and not language itself. Lines 8–10 use theatrical imagery to powerful effect in presenting a scene of lovemaking. The word ‘drama’ makes reference to plays in general as well as to love, while ‘Romance’, one of the categories into which some of Shakespeare’s plays are placed, also reminds us that this relationship is not stale.
Anne relishes remembering that the ‘guests dozed on’ while she and William made love. The derogatory ‘dribbling their prose’ (line 12) is contrasted sharply with ‘My living laughing love’. The lilting alliteration and the cadence of the verse at this point convey extreme happiness and affection. This contrasts with the d, b and p, sounds in ‘dozed’, ‘dribbling’ and ‘prose’. The impression created is that the guests live an inferior life of prose. Shakespeare often gave low status characters prose to speak. The dash preceding the conclusion of the poem acts as something of a dramatic gesture and separates the descriptions of Shakespeare alive with Anne’s acknowledgement that he can only live on in her imagination now that he is dead. The fact that she describes her head as a ‘casket’, a strongbox for keeping jewels and other precious items, indicates the deep love and affection she had for her husband. The consonance on ‘hold’ and ‘held’ recalls that the lovers rhymed with each other when alive, while the tense-change poignantly signals the irrevocable change brought about by her husband’s death. The final, clinching rhyme of ‘head’ and ‘bed’ indicates that Anne Hathaway is able to keep love alive in her memory and imagination. We are left with Anne Hathaway cherishing the memory of being with her husband in ‘that next best bed’. Their true intimacy is made clear here as only she would have been able to interpret correctly Shakespeare’s intention when he wrote the famous bequest in his will. His will, in every sense, is hers.
This sonnet, then, is a poem about a poet by a poet, with the intermediary being the subject’s surviving partner. Carol Ann Duffy is using this thrown voice as a means of celebrating the subject, Shakespeare. Shakespeare delayed the volta in his sonnets until line twelve but there is often a discernible shift of ideas after the second quatrain, the point at which a Petrarchan sonnet displays a more noticeable turn.
Michael Woods writes about Anne Hathaway
This poem from The World’s Wife, written in the voice of Shakespeare’s widow, is immediately accessible because of its familiar tone and the manner in which Anne Hathaway enthuses about her dead husband. Despite its apparent simplicity, Duffy uses a rich complexity of ideas relating to language, relationships and Shakespeare’s work. She has chosen to adopt the sonnet form and this is particularly appropriate as Shakespeare himself adapted the form and wrote 154 of his own sonnets.
The poets Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–47) were credited with introducing the sonnet to England. The standard form was known as the Petrarchan, Italian or regular sonnet, with a rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde, but it was modified thus by Shakespeare: ababacdcdefef gg. The volta is delayed in his sonnets until the final rhyming couplet although there is often a discernible change in direction at around line 8, the traditional position of the volta. Duffy’s rhyme scheme is looser than those already mentioned and employs half-rhyme, something in keeping with the ‘softer rhyme’ mentioned at the end of line 5 of this poem. The rhyming couplet conforms to the Shakespearean model but it does not introduce a new rhyme. By recalling ‘bed’ in line 8, the persona’s preoccupation with her physical relationship is brought to the reader’s attention.
It is fitting that Anne Hathaway writes in the form that her husband so famously used. This in itself is an act of homage and, possibly, a means of keeping him alive. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and ending with ‘So long lives this and this gives life to thee’, voices the commonly held view that humans might die but a work of art can last forever, effectively immortalising its subject.
Shakespeare, the arch metaphor-user and coiner of words, is written about in metaphorical terms even in the first line. The idea of a bed being a ‘spinning world’ is striking and starts the poem off at a giddying pace. Duffy neatly presents the bed as a microcosmic centre of an imaginative, expansive universe ‘of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas’ suggesting, at the very least, the plays As You Like It, Macbeth, Hamlet and The Tempest. As You Like It is set in the Forest of Arden, close to Stratford-upon-Avon; Macbeth and Hamlet are partly set in castles. Hamlet contemplates suicide on a clifftop and The Tempest involves a sea voyage. The image of Shakespeare diving in bed suggests oral sex with Anne Hathaway as well as reminding us that he was the man who wrote Ariel’s song in The Tempest.
It is significant that Anne Hathaway describes her husband as a ‘lover’ (line 3), suggesting that their physical relationship was vital and exciting. This is given further emphasis by the words ‘spinning’, ‘shooting’, ‘dancing’ and ‘laughing’. The vitality of their sexual union fits in well with the sort of people we might expect Anne and her husband to be.
Duffy begins with a quotation from Shakespeare’s will as an epigraph to the poem. Some commentators, and not only feminists, have taken the statement to be something of a slight on Anne Hathaway. To be left a ‘second best bed’ is not generally felt to have been complimentary. We might have expected, then, that Anne Hathaway would be given the opportunity to have her revenge. Although other poems in The World’s Wife do present women as being unhappy with their lot, Anne Hathaway’s version of events reveals that she was very much in love with her husband. Theirs was a marriage of equality. He left her his second best bed because it was the one in which they had enacted in a very real sense the drama of their relationship. No children are mentioned by Anne, she concentrates purely on the physical act and not its consequences.
In keeping with the expression of a separate identity, Anne Hathaway is presented as someone who is able to use words in an impressively poetic way. In this sense her personality rhymes with her husband’s. She refers to her body being a ‘softer rhyme’ to Shakespeare. Here, Duffy is subtly relating the poetic techniques of masculine rhyme and feminine rhyme to the actual lives of two people who could hardly be separated from art: ‘kisses’ at the end of line 4 is a feminine ending; ‘touch’ is a masculine one. This explicit use of linguistic and poetic terms draws attention to the self-conscious artifice of the persona’s utterance, as well as the poet’s.
Hathaway states that her lover’s words ‘echo’ as ‘assonance’ in her head. The words ‘on’, ‘body’, ‘softer’, ‘to’, ‘echo’, ‘assonance’, ‘touch’ and ‘noun’ are all linked by assonance; the ‘o’ sound does indeed echo through the lines as a softer rhyme. The description of Shakespeare’s touch as ‘a verb dancing in the centre of a noun’ creates a vital impression of joyous action. It is sexually suggestive in that his hands could be ‘dancing’ in the ‘centre’ of his wife. The line also alerts us to one of Shakespeare’s most famous means of energising language; he would often turn nouns into verbs. For example, in The Winter’s Tale Perdita says, ‘I’ll queen it no inch further.’ In a practically poetic sense, then, Shakespeare was able to find verbs in the centre of nouns. As is sometimes the case in Shakespeare’s sonnets, there is a perceptible progression in this sonnet with ‘Some nights’ (line 8), but the volta actually occurs after line 12 at the rhyming couplet, providing the clinching idea and sense of closure. This rhyme is, incidentally, masculine so we are aware of a female voice giving her husband something of a ghostly, lasting presence in its use. The metaphors in lines 8–9, ‘I dreamed he’d written me, the bed / a page beneath his writer’s hands’, are consistent with Shakespeare’s occupation but they also make a forceful statement about the imaginative power of his wife. She desires him so much that she would like to have been one of his dramatic creations. The bed as site of dramatic action is there as a blank for her husband’s imagination to be unleashed upon. Visually, sheets could easily be thought of as paper in this context. The blurring of the distinction between life and art is again inherent in this section of the poem. The subsequent ‘Romance / and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste’ is heavily erotic, concentrating on sensory exploration and not language itself. Lines 8–10 use theatrical imagery to powerful effect in presenting a scene of lovemaking. The word ‘drama’ makes reference to plays in general as well as to love, while ‘Romance’, one of the categories into which some of Shakespeare’s plays are placed, also reminds us that this relationship is not stale.
Anne relishes remembering that the ‘guests dozed on’ while she and William made love. The derogatory ‘dribbling their prose’ (line 12) is contrasted sharply with ‘My living laughing love’. The lilting alliteration and the cadence of the verse at this point convey extreme happiness and affection. This contrasts with the d, b and p, sounds in ‘dozed’, ‘dribbling’ and ‘prose’. The impression created is that the guests live an inferior life of prose. Shakespeare often gave low status characters prose to speak. The dash preceding the conclusion of the poem acts as something of a dramatic gesture and separates the descriptions of Shakespeare alive with Anne’s acknowledgement that he can only live on in her imagination now that he is dead. The fact that she describes her head as a ‘casket’, a strongbox for keeping jewels and other precious items, indicates the deep love and affection she had for her husband. The consonance on ‘hold’ and ‘held’ recalls that the lovers rhymed with each other when alive, while the tense-change poignantly signals the irrevocable change brought about by her husband’s death. The final, clinching rhyme of ‘head’ and ‘bed’ indicates that Anne Hathaway is able to keep love alive in her memory and imagination. We are left with Anne Hathaway cherishing the memory of being with her husband in ‘that next best bed’. Their true intimacy is made clear here as only she would have been able to interpret correctly Shakespeare’s intention when he wrote the famous bequest in his will. His will, in every sense, is hers.
This sonnet, then, is a poem about a poet by a poet, with the intermediary being the subject’s surviving partner. Carol Ann Duffy is using this thrown voice as a means of celebrating the subject, Shakespeare. Shakespeare delayed the volta in his sonnets until line twelve but there is often a discernible shift of ideas after the second quatrain, the point at which a Petrarchan sonnet displays a more noticeable turn.
The poets Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–47) were credited with introducing the sonnet to England. The standard form was known as the Petrarchan, Italian or regular sonnet, with a rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde, but it was modified thus by Shakespeare: ababacdcdefef gg. The volta is delayed in his sonnets until the final rhyming couplet although there is often a discernible change in direction at around line 8, the traditional position of the volta. Duffy’s rhyme scheme is looser than those already mentioned and employs half-rhyme, something in keeping with the ‘softer rhyme’ mentioned at the end of line 5 of this poem. The rhyming couplet conforms to the Shakespearean model but it does not introduce a new rhyme. By recalling ‘bed’ in line 8, the persona’s preoccupation with her physical relationship is brought to the reader’s attention.
It is fitting that Anne Hathaway writes in the form that her husband so famously used. This in itself is an act of homage and, possibly, a means of keeping him alive. Shakespeare’s famous sonnet 18, beginning ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and ending with ‘So long lives this and this gives life to thee’, voices the commonly held view that humans might die but a work of art can last forever, effectively immortalising its subject.
Shakespeare, the arch metaphor-user and coiner of words, is written about in metaphorical terms even in the first line. The idea of a bed being a ‘spinning world’ is striking and starts the poem off at a giddying pace. Duffy neatly presents the bed as a microcosmic centre of an imaginative, expansive universe ‘of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas’ suggesting, at the very least, the plays As You Like It, Macbeth, Hamlet and The Tempest. As You Like It is set in the Forest of Arden, close to Stratford-upon-Avon; Macbeth and Hamlet are partly set in castles. Hamlet contemplates suicide on a clifftop and The Tempest involves a sea voyage. The image of Shakespeare diving in bed suggests oral sex with Anne Hathaway as well as reminding us that he was the man who wrote Ariel’s song in The Tempest.
It is significant that Anne Hathaway describes her husband as a ‘lover’ (line 3), suggesting that their physical relationship was vital and exciting. This is given further emphasis by the words ‘spinning’, ‘shooting’, ‘dancing’ and ‘laughing’. The vitality of their sexual union fits in well with the sort of people we might expect Anne and her husband to be.
Duffy begins with a quotation from Shakespeare’s will as an epigraph to the poem. Some commentators, and not only feminists, have taken the statement to be something of a slight on Anne Hathaway. To be left a ‘second best bed’ is not generally felt to have been complimentary. We might have expected, then, that Anne Hathaway would be given the opportunity to have her revenge. Although other poems in The World’s Wife do present women as being unhappy with their lot, Anne Hathaway’s version of events reveals that she was very much in love with her husband. Theirs was a marriage of equality. He left her his second best bed because it was the one in which they had enacted in a very real sense the drama of their relationship. No children are mentioned by Anne, she concentrates purely on the physical act and not its consequences.
In keeping with the expression of a separate identity, Anne Hathaway is presented as someone who is able to use words in an impressively poetic way. In this sense her personality rhymes with her husband’s. She refers to her body being a ‘softer rhyme’ to Shakespeare. Here, Duffy is subtly relating the poetic techniques of masculine rhyme and feminine rhyme to the actual lives of two people who could hardly be separated from art: ‘kisses’ at the end of line 4 is a feminine ending; ‘touch’ is a masculine one. This explicit use of linguistic and poetic terms draws attention to the self-conscious artifice of the persona’s utterance, as well as the poet’s.
Hathaway states that her lover’s words ‘echo’ as ‘assonance’ in her head. The words ‘on’, ‘body’, ‘softer’, ‘to’, ‘echo’, ‘assonance’, ‘touch’ and ‘noun’ are all linked by assonance; the ‘o’ sound does indeed echo through the lines as a softer rhyme. The description of Shakespeare’s touch as ‘a verb dancing in the centre of a noun’ creates a vital impression of joyous action. It is sexually suggestive in that his hands could be ‘dancing’ in the ‘centre’ of his wife. The line also alerts us to one of Shakespeare’s most famous means of energising language; he would often turn nouns into verbs. For example, in The Winter’s Tale Perdita says, ‘I’ll queen it no inch further.’ In a practically poetic sense, then, Shakespeare was able to find verbs in the centre of nouns. As is sometimes the case in Shakespeare’s sonnets, there is a perceptible progression in this sonnet with ‘Some nights’ (line 8), but the volta actually occurs after line 12 at the rhyming couplet, providing the clinching idea and sense of closure. This rhyme is, incidentally, masculine so we are aware of a female voice giving her husband something of a ghostly, lasting presence in its use. The metaphors in lines 8–9, ‘I dreamed he’d written me, the bed / a page beneath his writer’s hands’, are consistent with Shakespeare’s occupation but they also make a forceful statement about the imaginative power of his wife. She desires him so much that she would like to have been one of his dramatic creations. The bed as site of dramatic action is there as a blank for her husband’s imagination to be unleashed upon. Visually, sheets could easily be thought of as paper in this context. The blurring of the distinction between life and art is again inherent in this section of the poem. The subsequent ‘Romance / and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste’ is heavily erotic, concentrating on sensory exploration and not language itself. Lines 8–10 use theatrical imagery to powerful effect in presenting a scene of lovemaking. The word ‘drama’ makes reference to plays in general as well as to love, while ‘Romance’, one of the categories into which some of Shakespeare’s plays are placed, also reminds us that this relationship is not stale.
Anne relishes remembering that the ‘guests dozed on’ while she and William made love. The derogatory ‘dribbling their prose’ (line 12) is contrasted sharply with ‘My living laughing love’. The lilting alliteration and the cadence of the verse at this point convey extreme happiness and affection. This contrasts with the d, b and p, sounds in ‘dozed’, ‘dribbling’ and ‘prose’. The impression created is that the guests live an inferior life of prose. Shakespeare often gave low status characters prose to speak. The dash preceding the conclusion of the poem acts as something of a dramatic gesture and separates the descriptions of Shakespeare alive with Anne’s acknowledgement that he can only live on in her imagination now that he is dead. The fact that she describes her head as a ‘casket’, a strongbox for keeping jewels and other precious items, indicates the deep love and affection she had for her husband. The consonance on ‘hold’ and ‘held’ recalls that the lovers rhymed with each other when alive, while the tense-change poignantly signals the irrevocable change brought about by her husband’s death. The final, clinching rhyme of ‘head’ and ‘bed’ indicates that Anne Hathaway is able to keep love alive in her memory and imagination. We are left with Anne Hathaway cherishing the memory of being with her husband in ‘that next best bed’. Their true intimacy is made clear here as only she would have been able to interpret correctly Shakespeare’s intention when he wrote the famous bequest in his will. His will, in every sense, is hers.
This sonnet, then, is a poem about a poet by a poet, with the intermediary being the subject’s surviving partner. Carol Ann Duffy is using this thrown voice as a means of celebrating the subject, Shakespeare. Shakespeare delayed the volta in his sonnets until line twelve but there is often a discernible shift of ideas after the second quatrain, the point at which a Petrarchan sonnet displays a more noticeable turn.
Michael Woods writes about Havisham
This poem is a dramatic monologue and gives a powerful insight into the potential thoughts and feelings of the character in Charles Dickens’s novel, Great Expectations (1861). Miss Havisham was jilted at the altar and never recovered from the experience.
A mentally tortured Miss Havisham, riven by the conflict between being in love and hating the man who jilted her is encapsulated in the first two sentences: ‘Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then / I haven’t wished him dead.’ The plosive ‘b’ and dental ‘d’ sounds immediately establish the bitterness and violent aggression in the woman’s voice. The psychological damage done to Miss Havisham is presented in the physical image of eyes that have become ‘dark green pebbles’ and the tendons of her hands are ‘ropes’ she ‘could strangle with’.
The root of her hatred lies in the fact that she is a ‘Spinster’ (line 5). The word, as a sentence in its own right, is isolated like the woman who is defined by society in terms of her unmarried state. She is so obsessed with her predicament that she spends entire days ‘cawing Nooooo at the wall’. The sound suggested is, perhaps, that of a parrot endlessly repeating the same sound. It certainly conveys a visceral, animal-like howling too. Miss Havisham still wears her wedding dress, playing the role of bride, causing her to ‘stink and remember’. The sight of the yellowing dress is seen in a ‘slewed mirror’. What does this suggest? Seeing herself in the mirror rekindles her hatred of the man who deserted her, resulting in the ‘Puce curses’ of line 9.
She has dreams that are sexual fantasies about what she might have experienced with the husband she never had. Her ‘fluent tongue’ explores his body but as she moves near his loins: ‘I suddenly bite awake’. This suggests that in doing so she could emasculate him with her teeth, re-establishing the overriding emotion of anger that she still feels. The enjambment that links stanzas 3 and 4 draws attention to this conflict as it reminds us that such an opposition can co-exist in one person. In terms of the layout of the poem’s lines, the physical distance between the stanzas neatly presents the simultaneous tendency of Miss Havisham to love and hate the man. The mixture of emotions she articulates in line 1 is developed in the oxymoron ‘Love’s / hate behind a white veil’ (lines 12–13). This veil, like Havisham, has decayed; it has yellowed and she is physically and mentally diminished. The power of ‘red balloon / bursting in my face. Bang’. is conveyed again through the use of plosives. Also, through the use if the plosive onomatopoeic ‘Bang’ we see her faced with the truth of her situation erupting through the ‘veil’ of her dream as she becomes fully conscious. There may also be a subconscious reference to the rupturing of the hymen that she has never experienced. She remembers stabbing her wedding cake, which leads to a disturbing aexpression of both homicidal and necrophiliac tendencies.
A mentally tortured Miss Havisham, riven by the conflict between being in love and hating the man who jilted her is encapsulated in the first two sentences: ‘Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then / I haven’t wished him dead.’ The plosive ‘b’ and dental ‘d’ sounds immediately establish the bitterness and violent aggression in the woman’s voice. The psychological damage done to Miss Havisham is presented in the physical image of eyes that have become ‘dark green pebbles’ and the tendons of her hands are ‘ropes’ she ‘could strangle with’.
The root of her hatred lies in the fact that she is a ‘Spinster’ (line 5). The word, as a sentence in its own right, is isolated like the woman who is defined by society in terms of her unmarried state. She is so obsessed with her predicament that she spends entire days ‘cawing Nooooo at the wall’. The sound suggested is, perhaps, that of a parrot endlessly repeating the same sound. It certainly conveys a visceral, animal-like howling too. Miss Havisham still wears her wedding dress, playing the role of bride, causing her to ‘stink and remember’. The sight of the yellowing dress is seen in a ‘slewed mirror’. What does this suggest? Seeing herself in the mirror rekindles her hatred of the man who deserted her, resulting in the ‘Puce curses’ of line 9.
She has dreams that are sexual fantasies about what she might have experienced with the husband she never had. Her ‘fluent tongue’ explores his body but as she moves near his loins: ‘I suddenly bite awake’. This suggests that in doing so she could emasculate him with her teeth, re-establishing the overriding emotion of anger that she still feels. The enjambment that links stanzas 3 and 4 draws attention to this conflict as it reminds us that such an opposition can co-exist in one person. In terms of the layout of the poem’s lines, the physical distance between the stanzas neatly presents the simultaneous tendency of Miss Havisham to love and hate the man. The mixture of emotions she articulates in line 1 is developed in the oxymoron ‘Love’s / hate behind a white veil’ (lines 12–13). This veil, like Havisham, has decayed; it has yellowed and she is physically and mentally diminished. The power of ‘red balloon / bursting in my face. Bang’. is conveyed again through the use of plosives. Also, through the use if the plosive onomatopoeic ‘Bang’ we see her faced with the truth of her situation erupting through the ‘veil’ of her dream as she becomes fully conscious. There may also be a subconscious reference to the rupturing of the hymen that she has never experienced. She remembers stabbing her wedding cake, which leads to a disturbing aexpression of both homicidal and necrophiliac tendencies.
Michael Woods writes about Stealing
In this poem, a burglar and petty thief talks about the items he has stolen, the most unusual of which was a snowman. The poet gives us an insight into what he might be thinking.
Duffy lived for a while by Wimbledon Common in London. Her neighbours once built a traditional snowman for their children, which was stolen. The poet wondered who might have done such a thing. She concluded that it could only have happened under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, a period during which individualism and greed seemed to be regarded as virtues. It is clear, then, that apart from being curious about who might steal a snowman from children, Duffy regarded the actions of an individual as a barometer of the political climate. The opening of stanza 2, ‘Better off dead than giving in, not taking / what you want’ appears to encapsulate this idea.
This dramatic monologue is a good example of how formal organisation into stanzas of regular length can contain the informal register of a persona. Statements such as ‘He weighed a ton’ (line 7), ‘I’m a mucky ghost’ (line 13), ‘I nicked a bust of Shakespeare once’ (line 23) and ‘flogged it’ (line 24) convincingly recreate the argot of the man who is speaking.
He seems to derive pleasure (although this is short-lived) from gratuitous acts of burglary, enjoying the excitement or frisson of the act itself rather than really desiring the objects he steals. He leaves a ‘mess’ (line 13) in other people’s houses. This could refer to the chaos often left behind by burglars who empty drawers and so on, but it could equally suggest defecation, a common feature of burglary. Such an act is calculated to defile victims’ private places. A Freudian psychologist would suggest that its origins are sexual. There is certainly a suggestion of an auto-erotic charge in ‘I watch my gloved hand twisting the doorknob. / A stranger’s bedroom. Mirrors. I sigh like this – Aah’. He also derives pleasure from speculating upon the effect that his acts will have on others: ‘Part of the thrill was knowing / that children would cry in the morning’. (lines 8–9).
The utter futility of what the man does is made clear in such details as, ‘I joy-ride cars / to nowhere’. He steals a guitar but never learns to play it. Perhaps the most striking example of such futility is his attempted reassembling of the stolen snowman. His failure to recreate ‘a mate’ (line 3), with connotations of both friendship and physical intimacy, prompts him to immediate aggression and destruction, leaving him ‘amongst lumps of snow, sick of the world’ (line 19). This fragmentation could symbolically suggest a personality which is itself disintegrated, a Jungian term for describing someone who has not come to terms with his or her ‘shadow’.
Duffy’s use of internal rhyme is appropriate to the interior aspect of a dramatic monologue which seeks to explore the thief’s motives for acting in the way he does. For example ‘the slice of ice / within my own brain’ indicates a self-awareness and concern with interior workings, which the man identifies with coldness and hardness. The second stanza’s ‘chill’ and ‘thrill’ reinforce this identification. The snowman, itself a cherished object, is curiously as unfeeling as he is and conveniently ‘mute’ (stanza 1).
‘Stealing’ is another of Duffy’s explorations of the minds of those who are mentally unstable. Useful comparisons are ‘Psychopath’ (Selling Manhattan), ‘Liar’ (The Other Country) and ‘Havisham’ (Mean Time).
Duffy lived for a while by Wimbledon Common in London. Her neighbours once built a traditional snowman for their children, which was stolen. The poet wondered who might have done such a thing. She concluded that it could only have happened under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, a period during which individualism and greed seemed to be regarded as virtues. It is clear, then, that apart from being curious about who might steal a snowman from children, Duffy regarded the actions of an individual as a barometer of the political climate. The opening of stanza 2, ‘Better off dead than giving in, not taking / what you want’ appears to encapsulate this idea.
This dramatic monologue is a good example of how formal organisation into stanzas of regular length can contain the informal register of a persona. Statements such as ‘He weighed a ton’ (line 7), ‘I’m a mucky ghost’ (line 13), ‘I nicked a bust of Shakespeare once’ (line 23) and ‘flogged it’ (line 24) convincingly recreate the argot of the man who is speaking.
He seems to derive pleasure (although this is short-lived) from gratuitous acts of burglary, enjoying the excitement or frisson of the act itself rather than really desiring the objects he steals. He leaves a ‘mess’ (line 13) in other people’s houses. This could refer to the chaos often left behind by burglars who empty drawers and so on, but it could equally suggest defecation, a common feature of burglary. Such an act is calculated to defile victims’ private places. A Freudian psychologist would suggest that its origins are sexual. There is certainly a suggestion of an auto-erotic charge in ‘I watch my gloved hand twisting the doorknob. / A stranger’s bedroom. Mirrors. I sigh like this – Aah’. He also derives pleasure from speculating upon the effect that his acts will have on others: ‘Part of the thrill was knowing / that children would cry in the morning’. (lines 8–9).
The utter futility of what the man does is made clear in such details as, ‘I joy-ride cars / to nowhere’. He steals a guitar but never learns to play it. Perhaps the most striking example of such futility is his attempted reassembling of the stolen snowman. His failure to recreate ‘a mate’ (line 3), with connotations of both friendship and physical intimacy, prompts him to immediate aggression and destruction, leaving him ‘amongst lumps of snow, sick of the world’ (line 19). This fragmentation could symbolically suggest a personality which is itself disintegrated, a Jungian term for describing someone who has not come to terms with his or her ‘shadow’.
Duffy’s use of internal rhyme is appropriate to the interior aspect of a dramatic monologue which seeks to explore the thief’s motives for acting in the way he does. For example ‘the slice of ice / within my own brain’ indicates a self-awareness and concern with interior workings, which the man identifies with coldness and hardness. The second stanza’s ‘chill’ and ‘thrill’ reinforce this identification. The snowman, itself a cherished object, is curiously as unfeeling as he is and conveniently ‘mute’ (stanza 1).
‘Stealing’ is another of Duffy’s explorations of the minds of those who are mentally unstable. Useful comparisons are ‘Psychopath’ (Selling Manhattan), ‘Liar’ (The Other Country) and ‘Havisham’ (Mean Time).
Michael Woods writes about We Remember Your Childhood Well
This is a complex poem, not because of its diction but because of its ambiguous use of perspective, or point of view. In essence, the poem is about the responsibility we all have to children. Although we could read the poem as being about how adults can damage children, Duffy seems to be presenting the idea that regimes are capable of rewriting history in ways convenient to them. We are familiar, for example, with the way in which Joseph Stalin in Russia edited people from photographs and had official records tampered with. What Duffy is saying is that what is horrific and damaging on an individual level can become exponentially larger if horrible principles are applied on what can sometimes be a national scale. This does not mean that harm done to an individual is less significant if it happens to be an isolated instance or a mass one.
The voiceless child is helpless in the face of the authority figures of parents and any other adults who wield power. The truth is that the child is likely to be the most reliable ‘witness’ to the events in his or her own life. Also, adults cannot calculate the damage they do to children. It is clear that the implied listener or defender is the older self of the child. The point to be drawn out here is that damage is not just something that can be inflicted and forgotten about; it lasts. A scarred child becomes a scarred adult.
The poem opens with a denial, “Nobody hurt you” and this is sustained throughout the poem. The word nobody occurs six times and Duffy clearly wants the denial to ring hollow. The child’s version of the events denied in stanza one would clearly be that she was physically “hurt”, that her parents/ guardian/s “argued…all night” and that she was told that there was “a bad man on the moors”. Finally, she would say that they were locked in to their bedroom.
The language of the second stanza takes on the sinister sound of police in totalitarian or oppressive states using official language with a clipped, formal tone. This is doubly alarming, given that the ostensive subject of the poem is others’ memory of a child’s childhood. Children are naturally inquisitive and ask questions incessantly. The speaker/s (there first person plural lends a collective voice to the poem that potentially implicates all adults) claim that they were patient and answered the child’s questions. The fact that this seems to be challenged by the child (there is an implied rebuttal from the child all the way through the poem) is clear when the emphatic one word sentence “No.” is used by Duffy in line 4. This is a feature of some adults’ treatment of children. They think that their word can obliterate any alternatives. This is also true of certain types of government. Duffy is clearly engaging here with the way in which those in authority can sometimes abuse their positions by wielding power and making statements they know will not be challenged, probably because those listening are colluding with them. “That didn’t occur” (line 4) has the air of an official making a statement in court. The ‘child’ is crushed by being told “you couldn’t sing anyway”. The reference to Film Fun locates the poem in the nineteen forties during the Second World War. The final short sentence in stanza 3, “Anyone’s guess.” ironically draws attention to the fact that what the speaker/s are saying is a pack of lies and that the child (now grown up?) can do nothing to gainsay a majority view.
The next three stanzas present a denial of the effects of separation, presumably evacuation in the war. The opening of stanza three, “Nobody forced you.” (line 7) is sinister with overtones of police brutality. The child allegedly “Begged” to be sent away and there are photographs to prove it if her “smiling and waving” (line 9). It is also claimed that the child “chose the dress” in which she went away. This reads as almost a macabre bridal image of a girl in her ‘going away dress’. In saying to the ‘child’, “The whole thing is inside your head.” (line 9) has two meanings. One the one hand, they mean that it is an invention of the child’s imagination but on the other, Duffy is highlighting the fact that what happened to this child is indeed inside her head and will never be out of her head. Further, it will be her version of events that will remain lodged there.
Stanza four builds on the atmosphere of oppression created by Duffy earlier in the poem. The arrogantly condescending and confident, “What you recall are impressions; we have the facts” (line 10). The speaker/s control is compounded in their saying, “We called the tune” (line 10). This is no longer the case in the context of what the poem sets out do, which is clearly to expose the disreputable nature of what these people did. Indeed, they are so shameless that they tacitly admit their version of events is false. It was their power in being able to call the tune that allowed them to invent somebody’s past. The adults are described by Duffy as “The secret police of your childhood” in the most explicitly chilling image with political overtones in the whole pope. It throws the sentence “Nobody forced you” into sharp relief because it puts the reader in mind of torturing regimes. The bullying dimension of the adults’ behaviour is further emphasised through the admission that they were able to get way with what they did simply by dint of being “older and wiser” but, most worryingly, “bigger”. The recalled “sound of their voices” is a hideous “Boom.Boom.Boom.” This is the sound a small child might experience shouting of adults as, while it also suggests the beating a torture victim might have at the hands of aggressors. It even evokes the explosions of bombs or guns, something that is not out of place in a poem that has clear political as well as social concerns.
The transformation of an evacuation to “an extra holiday” is almost laughable were it not for the fact that the child was clearly scared and sent away with strangers who were, the speaker/s admit “firm”. In the context of the child’s experience as previously suggested in the poem, this is a gross understatement and, in our terms, could be synonymous with ‘sadistic’. The adults’ attempt to exonerate themselves by saying, “There was none to blame but yourself if it all ended in tears.” (line 15) is clearly a lie and turns a cliché into a sinister example of what seems ot amount to perjury in the court of life.
The question that opens the final stanza shows how utterly insensitive the speakers are to the effect they had on this child. The point is that what she experienced then still affects her now. The shocking, scatological image of “nobody left the skidmarks of sin / on your soul” (lines 16-17) suggest that the child (now an adult) feels contaminated and sullied by her early experience at the hands of these adults, just as undergarments can be by faecal remains. She feels, it seems, “wide open for Hell.” (line 17). The speakers’ view of their child’s past is incredible: “You were loved” becomes unbelievable and their claim, “We did what was best” could be transposed to “worst”. The final sentence rings particularly hollow as it repeats the title of the poem in a way that people do if they are not convinced of the truth of that they are saying themselves.
This poem emphasises the need for children to be protected and for societies to maintain a truthful and equitable regime based upon the freedom, not the repression of, the individual.
The voiceless child is helpless in the face of the authority figures of parents and any other adults who wield power. The truth is that the child is likely to be the most reliable ‘witness’ to the events in his or her own life. Also, adults cannot calculate the damage they do to children. It is clear that the implied listener or defender is the older self of the child. The point to be drawn out here is that damage is not just something that can be inflicted and forgotten about; it lasts. A scarred child becomes a scarred adult.
The poem opens with a denial, “Nobody hurt you” and this is sustained throughout the poem. The word nobody occurs six times and Duffy clearly wants the denial to ring hollow. The child’s version of the events denied in stanza one would clearly be that she was physically “hurt”, that her parents/ guardian/s “argued…all night” and that she was told that there was “a bad man on the moors”. Finally, she would say that they were locked in to their bedroom.
The language of the second stanza takes on the sinister sound of police in totalitarian or oppressive states using official language with a clipped, formal tone. This is doubly alarming, given that the ostensive subject of the poem is others’ memory of a child’s childhood. Children are naturally inquisitive and ask questions incessantly. The speaker/s (there first person plural lends a collective voice to the poem that potentially implicates all adults) claim that they were patient and answered the child’s questions. The fact that this seems to be challenged by the child (there is an implied rebuttal from the child all the way through the poem) is clear when the emphatic one word sentence “No.” is used by Duffy in line 4. This is a feature of some adults’ treatment of children. They think that their word can obliterate any alternatives. This is also true of certain types of government. Duffy is clearly engaging here with the way in which those in authority can sometimes abuse their positions by wielding power and making statements they know will not be challenged, probably because those listening are colluding with them. “That didn’t occur” (line 4) has the air of an official making a statement in court. The ‘child’ is crushed by being told “you couldn’t sing anyway”. The reference to Film Fun locates the poem in the nineteen forties during the Second World War. The final short sentence in stanza 3, “Anyone’s guess.” ironically draws attention to the fact that what the speaker/s are saying is a pack of lies and that the child (now grown up?) can do nothing to gainsay a majority view.
The next three stanzas present a denial of the effects of separation, presumably evacuation in the war. The opening of stanza three, “Nobody forced you.” (line 7) is sinister with overtones of police brutality. The child allegedly “Begged” to be sent away and there are photographs to prove it if her “smiling and waving” (line 9). It is also claimed that the child “chose the dress” in which she went away. This reads as almost a macabre bridal image of a girl in her ‘going away dress’. In saying to the ‘child’, “The whole thing is inside your head.” (line 9) has two meanings. One the one hand, they mean that it is an invention of the child’s imagination but on the other, Duffy is highlighting the fact that what happened to this child is indeed inside her head and will never be out of her head. Further, it will be her version of events that will remain lodged there.
Stanza four builds on the atmosphere of oppression created by Duffy earlier in the poem. The arrogantly condescending and confident, “What you recall are impressions; we have the facts” (line 10). The speaker/s control is compounded in their saying, “We called the tune” (line 10). This is no longer the case in the context of what the poem sets out do, which is clearly to expose the disreputable nature of what these people did. Indeed, they are so shameless that they tacitly admit their version of events is false. It was their power in being able to call the tune that allowed them to invent somebody’s past. The adults are described by Duffy as “The secret police of your childhood” in the most explicitly chilling image with political overtones in the whole pope. It throws the sentence “Nobody forced you” into sharp relief because it puts the reader in mind of torturing regimes. The bullying dimension of the adults’ behaviour is further emphasised through the admission that they were able to get way with what they did simply by dint of being “older and wiser” but, most worryingly, “bigger”. The recalled “sound of their voices” is a hideous “Boom.Boom.Boom.” This is the sound a small child might experience shouting of adults as, while it also suggests the beating a torture victim might have at the hands of aggressors. It even evokes the explosions of bombs or guns, something that is not out of place in a poem that has clear political as well as social concerns.
The transformation of an evacuation to “an extra holiday” is almost laughable were it not for the fact that the child was clearly scared and sent away with strangers who were, the speaker/s admit “firm”. In the context of the child’s experience as previously suggested in the poem, this is a gross understatement and, in our terms, could be synonymous with ‘sadistic’. The adults’ attempt to exonerate themselves by saying, “There was none to blame but yourself if it all ended in tears.” (line 15) is clearly a lie and turns a cliché into a sinister example of what seems ot amount to perjury in the court of life.
The question that opens the final stanza shows how utterly insensitive the speakers are to the effect they had on this child. The point is that what she experienced then still affects her now. The shocking, scatological image of “nobody left the skidmarks of sin / on your soul” (lines 16-17) suggest that the child (now an adult) feels contaminated and sullied by her early experience at the hands of these adults, just as undergarments can be by faecal remains. She feels, it seems, “wide open for Hell.” (line 17). The speakers’ view of their child’s past is incredible: “You were loved” becomes unbelievable and their claim, “We did what was best” could be transposed to “worst”. The final sentence rings particularly hollow as it repeats the title of the poem in a way that people do if they are not convinced of the truth of that they are saying themselves.
This poem emphasises the need for children to be protected and for societies to maintain a truthful and equitable regime based upon the freedom, not the repression of, the individual.
Michael Woods writes about We Remember Your Childhood Well
This is a complex poem, not because of its diction but because of its ambiguous use of perspective, or point of view. In essence, the poem is about the responsibility we all have to children. Although we could read the poem as being about how adults can damage children, Duffy seems to be presenting the idea that regimes are capable of rewriting history in ways convenient to them. We are familiar, for example, with the way in which Joseph Stalin in Russia edited people from photographs and had official records tampered with. What Duffy is saying is that what is horrific and damaging on an individual level can become exponentially larger if horrible principles are applied on what can sometimes be a national scale. This does not mean that harm done to an individual is less significant if it happens to be an isolated instance or a mass one.
The voiceless child is helpless in the face of the authority figures of parents and any other adults who wield power. The truth is that the child is likely to be the most reliable ‘witness’ to the events in his or her own life. Also, adults cannot calculate the damage they do to children. It is clear that the implied listener or defender is the older self of the child. The point to be drawn out here is that damage is not just something that can be inflicted and forgotten about; it lasts. A scarred child becomes a scarred adult.
The poem opens with a denial, “Nobody hurt you” and this is sustained throughout the poem. The word nobody occurs six times and Duffy clearly wants the denial to ring hollow. The child’s version of the events denied in stanza one would clearly be that she was physically “hurt”, that her parents/ guardian/s “argued…all night” and that she was told that there was “a bad man on the moors”. Finally, she would say that they were locked in to their bedroom.
The language of the second stanza takes on the sinister sound of police in totalitarian or oppressive states using official language with a clipped, formal tone. This is doubly alarming, given that the ostensive subject of the poem is others’ memory of a child’s childhood. Children are naturally inquisitive and ask questions incessantly. The speaker/s (there first person plural lends a collective voice to the poem that potentially implicates all adults) claim that they were patient and answered the child’s questions. The fact that this seems to be challenged by the child (there is an implied rebuttal from the child all the way through the poem) is clear when the emphatic one word sentence “No.” is used by Duffy in line 4. This is a feature of some adults’ treatment of children. They think that their word can obliterate any alternatives. This is also true of certain types of government. Duffy is clearly engaging here with the way in which those in authority can sometimes abuse their positions by wielding power and making statements they know will not be challenged, probably because those listening are colluding with them. “That didn’t occur” (line 4) has the air of an official making a statement in court. The ‘child’ is crushed by being told “you couldn’t sing anyway”. The reference to Film Fun locates the poem in the nineteen forties during the Second World War. The final short sentence in stanza 3, “Anyone’s guess.” ironically draws attention to the fact that what the speaker/s are saying is a pack of lies and that the child (now grown up?) can do nothing to gainsay a majority view.
The next three stanzas present a denial of the effects of separation, presumably evacuation in the war. The opening of stanza three, “Nobody forced you.” (line 7) is sinister with overtones of police brutality. The child allegedly “Begged” to be sent away and there are photographs to prove it if her “smiling and waving” (line 9). It is also claimed that the child “chose the dress” in which she went away. This reads as almost a macabre bridal image of a girl in her ‘going away dress’. In saying to the ‘child’, “The whole thing is inside your head.” (line 9) has two meanings. One the one hand, they mean that it is an invention of the child’s imagination but on the other, Duffy is highlighting the fact that what happened to this child is indeed inside her head and will never be out of her head. Further, it will be her version of events that will remain lodged there.
Stanza four builds on the atmosphere of oppression created by Duffy earlier in the poem. The arrogantly condescending and confident, “What you recall are impressions; we have the facts” (line 10). The speaker/s control is compounded in their saying, “We called the tune” (line 10). This is no longer the case in the context of what the poem sets out do, which is clearly to expose the disreputable nature of what these people did. Indeed, they are so shameless that they tacitly admit their version of events is false. It was their power in being able to call the tune that allowed them to invent somebody’s past. The adults are described by Duffy as “The secret police of your childhood” in the most explicitly chilling image with political overtones in the whole pope. It throws the sentence “Nobody forced you” into sharp relief because it puts the reader in mind of torturing regimes. The bullying dimension of the adults’ behaviour is further emphasised through the admission that they were able to get way with what they did simply by dint of being “older and wiser” but, most worryingly, “bigger”. The recalled “sound of their voices” is a hideous “Boom.Boom.Boom.” This is the sound a small child might experience shouting of adults as, while it also suggests the beating a torture victim might have at the hands of aggressors. It even evokes the explosions of bombs or guns, something that is not out of place in a poem that has clear political as well as social concerns.
The transformation of an evacuation to “an extra holiday” is almost laughable were it not for the fact that the child was clearly scared and sent away with strangers who were, the speaker/s admit “firm”. In the context of the child’s experience as previously suggested in the poem, this is a gross understatement and, in our terms, could be synonymous with ‘sadistic’. The adults’ attempt to exonerate themselves by saying, “There was none to blame but yourself if it all ended in tears.” (line 15) is clearly a lie and turns a cliché into a sinister example of what seems ot amount to perjury in the court of life.
The question that opens the final stanza shows how utterly insensitive the speakers are to the effect they had on this child. The point is that what she experienced then still affects her now. The shocking, scatological image of “nobody left the skidmarks of sin / on your soul” (lines 16-17) suggest that the child (now an adult) feels contaminated and sullied by her early experience at the hands of these adults, just as undergarments can be by faecal remains. She feels, it seems, “wide open for Hell.” (line 17). The speakers’ view of their child’s past is incredible: “You were loved” becomes unbelievable and their claim, “We did what was best” could be transposed to “worst”. The final sentence rings particularly hollow as it repeats the title of the poem in a way that people do if they are not convinced of the truth of that they are saying themselves.
This poem emphasises the need for children to be protected and for societies to maintain a truthful and equitable regime based upon the freedom, not the repression of, the individual.
The voiceless child is helpless in the face of the authority figures of parents and any other adults who wield power. The truth is that the child is likely to be the most reliable ‘witness’ to the events in his or her own life. Also, adults cannot calculate the damage they do to children. It is clear that the implied listener or defender is the older self of the child. The point to be drawn out here is that damage is not just something that can be inflicted and forgotten about; it lasts. A scarred child becomes a scarred adult.
The poem opens with a denial, “Nobody hurt you” and this is sustained throughout the poem. The word nobody occurs six times and Duffy clearly wants the denial to ring hollow. The child’s version of the events denied in stanza one would clearly be that she was physically “hurt”, that her parents/ guardian/s “argued…all night” and that she was told that there was “a bad man on the moors”. Finally, she would say that they were locked in to their bedroom.
The language of the second stanza takes on the sinister sound of police in totalitarian or oppressive states using official language with a clipped, formal tone. This is doubly alarming, given that the ostensive subject of the poem is others’ memory of a child’s childhood. Children are naturally inquisitive and ask questions incessantly. The speaker/s (there first person plural lends a collective voice to the poem that potentially implicates all adults) claim that they were patient and answered the child’s questions. The fact that this seems to be challenged by the child (there is an implied rebuttal from the child all the way through the poem) is clear when the emphatic one word sentence “No.” is used by Duffy in line 4. This is a feature of some adults’ treatment of children. They think that their word can obliterate any alternatives. This is also true of certain types of government. Duffy is clearly engaging here with the way in which those in authority can sometimes abuse their positions by wielding power and making statements they know will not be challenged, probably because those listening are colluding with them. “That didn’t occur” (line 4) has the air of an official making a statement in court. The ‘child’ is crushed by being told “you couldn’t sing anyway”. The reference to Film Fun locates the poem in the nineteen forties during the Second World War. The final short sentence in stanza 3, “Anyone’s guess.” ironically draws attention to the fact that what the speaker/s are saying is a pack of lies and that the child (now grown up?) can do nothing to gainsay a majority view.
The next three stanzas present a denial of the effects of separation, presumably evacuation in the war. The opening of stanza three, “Nobody forced you.” (line 7) is sinister with overtones of police brutality. The child allegedly “Begged” to be sent away and there are photographs to prove it if her “smiling and waving” (line 9). It is also claimed that the child “chose the dress” in which she went away. This reads as almost a macabre bridal image of a girl in her ‘going away dress’. In saying to the ‘child’, “The whole thing is inside your head.” (line 9) has two meanings. One the one hand, they mean that it is an invention of the child’s imagination but on the other, Duffy is highlighting the fact that what happened to this child is indeed inside her head and will never be out of her head. Further, it will be her version of events that will remain lodged there.
Stanza four builds on the atmosphere of oppression created by Duffy earlier in the poem. The arrogantly condescending and confident, “What you recall are impressions; we have the facts” (line 10). The speaker/s control is compounded in their saying, “We called the tune” (line 10). This is no longer the case in the context of what the poem sets out do, which is clearly to expose the disreputable nature of what these people did. Indeed, they are so shameless that they tacitly admit their version of events is false. It was their power in being able to call the tune that allowed them to invent somebody’s past. The adults are described by Duffy as “The secret police of your childhood” in the most explicitly chilling image with political overtones in the whole pope. It throws the sentence “Nobody forced you” into sharp relief because it puts the reader in mind of torturing regimes. The bullying dimension of the adults’ behaviour is further emphasised through the admission that they were able to get way with what they did simply by dint of being “older and wiser” but, most worryingly, “bigger”. The recalled “sound of their voices” is a hideous “Boom.Boom.Boom.” This is the sound a small child might experience shouting of adults as, while it also suggests the beating a torture victim might have at the hands of aggressors. It even evokes the explosions of bombs or guns, something that is not out of place in a poem that has clear political as well as social concerns.
The transformation of an evacuation to “an extra holiday” is almost laughable were it not for the fact that the child was clearly scared and sent away with strangers who were, the speaker/s admit “firm”. In the context of the child’s experience as previously suggested in the poem, this is a gross understatement and, in our terms, could be synonymous with ‘sadistic’. The adults’ attempt to exonerate themselves by saying, “There was none to blame but yourself if it all ended in tears.” (line 15) is clearly a lie and turns a cliché into a sinister example of what seems ot amount to perjury in the court of life.
The question that opens the final stanza shows how utterly insensitive the speakers are to the effect they had on this child. The point is that what she experienced then still affects her now. The shocking, scatological image of “nobody left the skidmarks of sin / on your soul” (lines 16-17) suggest that the child (now an adult) feels contaminated and sullied by her early experience at the hands of these adults, just as undergarments can be by faecal remains. She feels, it seems, “wide open for Hell.” (line 17). The speakers’ view of their child’s past is incredible: “You were loved” becomes unbelievable and their claim, “We did what was best” could be transposed to “worst”. The final sentence rings particularly hollow as it repeats the title of the poem in a way that people do if they are not convinced of the truth of that they are saying themselves.
This poem emphasises the need for children to be protected and for societies to maintain a truthful and equitable regime based upon the freedom, not the repression of, the individual.
Michael Woods writes about all of Gillian Clarke's AQA poems
CATRIN
This intensely personal poem is a mother’s reflection upon the changing relationship with her daughter. It does not shy away from talking about the tensions that can arise from time to time but at the same time affirms the permanence of unconditional maternal love. This is also a poem that simultaneously celebrates the individuality of mother and daughter and their shared characteristics.
The bipartite structure of this poem deftly signals the separation that occurs after the severing of the umbilical chord “the tight / Red rope of love” (lines 7-8). The structure of the poem also shares one of the features of the Petrarchan sonnet, although it is not a sonnet in form. This feature is a clear break between the two sections. The first verse paragraph is largely descriptive, whilst the second (not lacking descriptive detail in itself) has a more reflective tone and explores the implications of what has been established earlier in the poem.
The recurrent “I” and “you” throughout the poem help to frame the poem very clearly in terms of a relationship that changes and yet does not change.
The poem opens with a mild-toned reminiscence that seems quite ordinary. Clarke presents the reader with the sorts of detail that could easily attach to any number of ordinary experiences: “The people and cars taking / Turn at the traffic lights.” (lines 4-6). The very ordinariness of the scene is, however, that which provides a perfect introduction to the extraordinary nature of what erupts into the “hot, white / Room” (lines 2-3) of the hospital. The birth of the child is presented in very strong terms. Sound and sense fuse to emphasise the physical strain of childbirth and the idea of two strong personalities at loggerheads:
I can remember you, our first
Fierce confrontation, the tight
Red rope of love which we both
Fought over.
(lines 6-9)
The alliterated f’s and t’s create both tension and a sense of clinical precision. The umbilicus is the locus of both attachment and challenge. Clarke’s choice of the word “rope” suggests both a tug-of-war but also the tug of love. The choice of the adjective “red” is not only visually accurate in its context but reinforces the biological blood link between mother and child. The individual voices of mother and child are brilliantly presented by Clarke in her image of the mother’s words colouring the white tiles of the hospital room, almost as a child might colour squares in a book, but with the clear sense that the language of the mother may well be colourful because of the pain she is experiencing. The words “wild” and ”tender” (line 14) emphasise the mixture of experiences as a mother gives birth. There is an extraordinary self-awareness on the part of the mother but this is at least matched by the awareness of the child’s otherness and individuality. This idea is reinforced through Clarke’s choice of language in lines 15-17. The “I” and “you” that characterises the presentation of the relationship up to this point modulates into “our”, “we” and “ourselves”. However, mother and child are united in their “struggle to become / Separate.” The word “separate” that begins line 16 is followed by a full stop, leaving the next sentence as a concerted statement of individuality. The neat choice of the plural reflexive pronoun that concludes the first part of the poem paves the way for Clarke to explore the paradoxical nature of the mother-daughter relationship that is characterised by mixture of affinity and conflict.
The beauty of this second section lies, though, in the reality that her daughter’s defiance is for the poet an affirmative manifestation of her very being and a reminder that as a baby she seemed to hold on defiantly to life. The mother never forgets her attachment to the child: “that old rope” is actually ageless; it is both real and metaphorical. All the nuances of feeling a mother has for her child are wonderfully clinched in the conclusion of this beautiful poem. The metaphor of “the heart’s pool” and the idea of the umbilicus being that which signals attachment, inescapable responsibility, and the reality that the story of a mother and daughter’s life is patterned by “love and conflict”. Part of what makes this poem so successful is the direct simplicity of its language that is rooted in everyday language, something that is admirably suited to the task of charting the extraordinary miracle of birth and the growth of families that occurs as routinely as the procession of traffic but is also cosmic in its significance as that very procession continues, oblivious to the event.
BABY-SITTING
This poem, in contrast with ‘Catrin’, focuses upon the poet’s distance from another mother’s child rather than on the close bond that exists between her and her own daughter.
Clarke again uses a bipartite structure. The two ten line sections may just be called stanzas. The first focuses upon the persona’s response to the baby and her fears relating to her possible waking. Words like “wrong”, “don’t”, “afraid”, “hate”, “shout” and “rage” build up a strong picture of negativity and rejection. There is no maternal bond and the baby will only be repugnant to her; she would not fail, of course, to “enchant” her natural mother with “the perfume / Of her breath” (lines 9-10)
The second stanza concentrates more upon the child’s potential reaction to her babysitter. The atmosphere created in the first stanza of the poem is one of trepidation, familiar to anyone who is looking after someone else’s baby. The fact that it is a baby makes any dialogue impossible should she awaken. Emotion and instinct are lacking in the
The concluding line of the poem is both tender and resigned. The repeated “it will not come” refers on one level simply to the fact that the child has no biological connected to her and will therefore not be consoled by her smell. On another level, the child’s distress is emphasised by the words of a mother who is alarmed at having no milk to feed her child. If milk “does not come” then the child goes hungry. Although the child depicted clearly has a lactating mother, the experience of deprivation is acute.
The child’s natural mother would be able to deal with the baby’s heavy cold, ignoring the streaming snot, bubbling as the child struggles to breathe because she loves her. The poet clearly delineates here the boundaries that love does not but exist for anyone who is not the parent.
Although the speaker does not “love /this baby” (lines 2-3), she is not indifferent to her distress. She may not react emotionally to her but is able to empathise in realising that she represents for the child “absolute / Abandonment” (lines 11-12) The transferred epithets of the metaphor “cold lonely sheets” uses a metaphor to explore the baby’s sense of desertion, this is couched in very adult terms too, though as the poet commandeers grown-up equivalents for the situation. The child’s distress will be “worse / Than for a lover cold in lonely / Sheets” (lines 11-13)
MALI
This poem is written from the perspective of grandmother’s experience, as opposed to that of a mother. Just as the precise details of the birth of her daughter are recalled in ‘Catrin’, the poet recalls those surrounding the birth of Mali:
Three years ago to the hour, the day she was born,
that unmistakable brim and tug of the tide
I’d thought was over.
The precise placing in time is only part of the memory, of course. Clarke’s employment of sea imagery clearly draws attention to the relationship between the moon and the sea. We only intermittently remember the fact that the tide is controlled by a great force beyond the earth just as even mothers can think that their experience of giving birth has disappeared. Here, the experience of a daughter brings back the experience of the mother who is now a grandmother.
Just as the birth of Catrin is depicted as a team effort, the same may be said of Mali’s. Catrin’s mother drives her to the hospital. The sense of urgency is highlighted through the contrasting details of a world that is not in a hurry and oblivious to the emergency:
I drove
the twenty miles of summer lanes,
my daughter cursing Sunday cars,
and the lazy swish of a dairy herd
rocking so slowly home.
(lines 3-7)
The sentence that extends over more than four enjambed lines emphasises the lack of urgency in weekend country life. The rhythm of the lines acts as a counterpoint to the frustrated need for speed.
The second stanza focuses upon the fecundity and largesse of “late summer” that will soon be “overspilling into harvest” The “apples reddening on heavy trees” suggest the roundness and heaviness of pregnancy. The family has been picking blackberries and the pleasant imagery of “lanes sweet with brambles” (line 11) leads on the an associative blood image in “our fingers purple” (line 12). This is immediately followed with: “then the child coming easy, / to soon, in the wrong place” (lines13-14). There is a natural rightness about the birth even though the baby was born as the family was on holiday. The third stanza flows continuously from the second, linking the generations and seasons in a neatly seamless way. The image of a harvest moon suggests fullness and the control of the tides. The image of being “towed home” is redolent of both a car pulled by a rope and the umbilicus linking mother and child. The female principle in nature is strongly felt at this point in the poem and Clarke goes on to reflect upon the unbreakable bond between mother and child. She feels “hooked again, life-sentenced” capturing both the sense of absolute enchantment coupled with a sense of the weight of responsibility every parent feels. Although as a grandmother she may feel less responsible for her granddaughter, she has a renovated view of her own role as mother, too. The most powerful natural force on Earth, the sea is used by Clarke to highlight the strength of her feeling for her new granddaughter. There is, of course, the idea that a
The final stanza is a joyous account of Mali’s third birthday party. The metaphorical “blossom” on the trees are “balloons and streamers”. The child’s birthday is toasted in seawater “a cup / of cold blue ocean” and “three drops of, / probably, last blood”. This is redolent of pagan ritual. Water and blood are both potent symbols of life. Last blood is, though, the end of menstruation for a woman. The word “probably” signals that Clarke has recognition that there are definite demarcations between the fertile periods between generations. Her daughter’s fertility makes the passing of her own part of the natural procession of generations and there is the implication that, one day, Mali will be a mother, too.
Beyond the atmospheric “candles and twilight” that help to create a mystical atmosphere at the end of the poem, there is the sense that the “cup of ocean” links to amniotic fluid (the water in which a baby exists before birth) and the moon, controller of tides and, of course intimately linked with the female menstrual cycle. The waxing and waning of the moon happens on a monthly cycle, just like a woman’s menstrual cycle (the word ‘menstrual’ is an adjective derived from the Latin word for ‘month’).
This touching poem is a celebration of fertility, birth, and womanhood; it is also contemplation upon the permanence of maternal love.
A DIFFICULT BIRTH
In contrast to the “child coming easy” in ‘Mali’, the difficult birth described in this poem is one of a lamb in Eater 1998. Gillian Clarke keeps sheep so she is intimately acquainted with the process she describes.
The first stanza presents us with “An old ewe” who was thought “barren” but who surprises by giving birth. This surprise links with the welcome surprise and delight felt by so many when the opposing factions in Northern Ireland began to negotiate peacefully. The ewe is described as “restless, hoofing the straw” and we cannot help but see a parallel between her anxiety and those who waited anxiously for news of a new peace deal in Northern Ireland. The poet and (presumably) her husband “put off the quiet supper and bottle of wine…to celebrate only if the news is good” (lines 5-6). Again, we understand that the ewe’s struggle to give birth and that of the Peace Deal’s progress are intermingled in her mind.
Stanza two concentrates on difficulty. As the ewe goes into labour “they slog it out in Belfast” (line 9) in a physical image that is redolent of two boxers at loggerheads. The “eight decades / since Easter 1916” are recalled by Clarke who again muses upon the link between the ewe’s experience and those in Northern Ireland who, like the ewe, have been “tamed by pin”. Belfast has been the location of terrible atrocities since the modern “troubles” began in the 1960s. The ewe “lies down again”, leaving the poet to linger in her anxiety.
Stanza three catalogues the process of helping the ewe. “But the lamb won’t come” (line 13) lends the events described real immediacy. Clarke maintains this immediacy by addressing her husband as if in ‘real time’: “You phone for help…” (line13). Her husband waits expectantly for the lights of the vet’s car. The poet intervenes and decides to be the midwife for the lamb.
The team effort required to deliver the lamb is made clear at the start of the final stanza: “We strain together, harder than we dared” (line 19) emphasises that desperate circumstances sometimes demand desperate measures. The “creak” that gives way to a “syrupy flood” signals that the point of crisis has passed. The poet’s husband returns to see a wonderful scene of new life and peace, “ a cradling that might have been a death” (line 22). This sense of life coming out of near death is clinched in the conclusion of the poem as the expulsion of the lamb from its mother’s body “her opened door” is aligned with the resurrection of Christ whose tomb was found empty by Roman centurions who were astonished to discover that the stone sealing his tomb had been rolled away.
This image of resurrection signals a new sort of “Rising “ in Ireland as the peace treaty was ratified during that period. The images of cooperation between woman and ewe show that working together can have memorable and sometimes beautiful results, not born out of “terrible” things, as was the case in 1916.
In order to grasp the full implications of the poem, it is necessary to appreciate the ambiguity of the title that results form the fact that at the time of the poem’s composition, a peace treaty in Northern Ireland was being negotiated. The “difficult birth” is, therefore, a metaphor for the political process that led to the Good Friday agreement. As we know, the so-called “Peace Process” took a great deal of time to reach the point where full disarmament by the IRA was effected in September 2005, seven years after the initial ceasefires. There are two more vital things to keep in mind as we read this poem. Easter is the Christian festival that commemorates the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ who died on Good Friday, the very day that, in 1998, gave birth to the Good Friday agreement. The festival also has a special place in the Republic of Ireland’s history because in 1916 the Easter Rising took place. This involved a group of Republicans occupying the General Post Office in Dublin’s O’Connell Street as a protest to British occupation. The ensuing stand-off resulted in the execution of the participants. The Anglo-Irish poet W.B Yeats commemorated their act of defiance in his famous poem ‘Easter 1916’. In this poem he deals with the uncomfortable idea that the rebels’ aims were honourable and that the violence they used was understandable, if not excusavble. The lines “All’s changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born” are part of Ireland’s poetic “lingo” now.
THE FIELD MOUSE
Just as A Difficult Birth, Easter 1918 has political events as a backdrop so too does this poem. In this case Clarke is preoccupied with the events in Europe and, more specifically, those in the former Yugoslavia in which the Serbs and Croats fought bitterly in the Bosnian civil war.
The vulnerability of a tiny creature is employed by Clarke to draw attention to the vulnerability of people in the face of enormous war machines. A mouse can be easily killed by the indifferent blades of a mechanical plough just as people may be slaughtered by bombs or guns. The title of the poem recalls Robert Burns’ poem about a mouse in which he refers the animal as “tim’rous wee beastie”. Clarke draws attention in her poem to the timorous animals and people whose lives can be arbitrarily cut down without notice.
The poem opens in the season of summer and the sound of crickets or grasshoppers in “the long grass” that is brilliantly described as “a snare drum”. This captures the high frequency continuous noise with which we are all familiar in a hot summer. The second line “The air hums with jets” is almost appealing and certainly does not convey a sense of threat but we will soon connect their presence with the war referred to later in the poem. Clarke shifts attention to the meadow that is “far from the radio’s terrible news” (line 4) and the activity of her neighbour, clearly a farmer, who is spreading lime. This lime is described as “drifting our land / with a chance gift of sweetness”. This is quite surprising as lime is generally thought of as something that burns.
Stanza two presents a scenario of death from a single child’s perspective as he tries to save a mouse that is beyond help and that of children in Bosnia facing the devastation of civil war. Clarke makes us aware of the single child’s innocent belief that the mouse can be saved as he “comes running through the killed flowers” (line 10). This makes the theme of death explicit and prepares for the death of the “quivering mouse” (line 11) that “curls in agony big as itself” (line 12). Its eyes are described as “two sparks” that make one think of the spark o life and the cosmic image in “and the star goes out in its eye” (line 15) emphasises that even the smallest creature is part of a huge universe. Clarke continues her exploration of a wider perspective by considering the conflict in Bosnia. The personification of the earth in “the field’s hurt” reminds us that it is a whole nation that suffers when riven by war. Just as the mouse was mown down in “long grass”, so the children “kneel in long grass” (line 17) as if brought low by what adults have done. They are presented as being numbed “staring” at “what we have crushed” (line 18). The use of the word “we” implicates all adults in that they have a responsibility to children.
The third and final stanza again personifies land, this time the field that was introduced in stanza one. The description evokes a scene of carnage in a war, a killing field. The poet’s garden, it seems, is teeming with what amount to refugee survivors as it is “inhabited by the saved, / voles, frogs and a nest of mice.” (lines 20-21). The atrocity of war is unbearable and this is made clear in the fact that “we can’t face the newspapers” (line 23). This is something with which we can all identify.
The poem concludes with a dream influenced by the experiences of the day. The poet is haunted by the image of vulnerable children who are imaginatively connected with the mouse encountered earlier in the day. Clarke imagines their “bones brittle as mouse-ribs” (line 25). The alliterated b’s emphasise the fragility of young life. The personification of the air “stammering with gunfire” captures both the sound made by machine guns and the terror caused by their use, rendering people inarticulate with fear. The final thought we are left with is a horrific vision of the poet’s neighbour turning against her “wounding my land with stones”, as she puts it. This leads us to ask why civil wars begin and to acknowledge that such conflict could begin anywhere.
October
This moving poem commemorates a dead friend’s funeral and the effect it has on the poet who resolves to “write like the wind” while she is still alive and well enough to do so.
The month of October is one of transition, the dying time of year in nature when the leaves, as W B Yeats said, “are in their autumn beauty” but will shed their leaves. Clarke engages with the dual facets of beauty and death in the opening of the poem.. It is clear that something is out of kilter, as the poet opens with the image of a “broken branch, a dead arm in the bright trees” ” (lines 2-3) This metaphor personifies one of the trees and prepares us for the revelation that a funeral is the occasion being recalled and which is the occasion of the poem.
Poplars are beautiful trees that shimmer if the wind shakes their leaves. Their beauty is even more striking as the “tremble / gradually to gold” (line 3). The word “tremble” is normally associated with human fear so we are alerted to a sense of trepidation. The alliteration of ‘g’ sounds adds emphasis while the polysyllabic “gradually” is perfectly chosen by Clarke to convey both the time taken for leaves to change colour and the gradations of shades as they change colour. The double ‘l’ in the adverb that alliterates internally with the ‘l’ in “gold” also helps to create a legato effect. The verse slows down, too, in what a musician would describe as rallentando until the full stop puts the brakes on, separating the trees from “The stone face / of the lion” (lines 3-4). The statue is self-evidently stone but Clarke is using the adjective in a very subtle way, as it is indifferent to the emotional charge of the occasion. The fact that its face “darkens” is foreboding and this is caused by sudden rain that is a “sharp shower”. The terseness of the words builds upon the indifference of the stone lion. The image of “dreadlocks of lobelia” would be attractive were it not for the fact that they are decaying in autumn to become “more brown that blue-eyed” (line 6).
The second stanza is uncompromising in its direct confrontation of what the situation is. The reader has been prepared for the stark reality of the occasion through the build up of atmospheric detail and Clarke’s careful crafting and poetic diction. The harsh alliteration of ‘d’ and ‘g’ sounds reinforces the finality of the funeral: “My friend dead and the graveyard at Orcop” (line 7) communicating to the reader both the personal loss being experienced and a precise geographical location (Orcop is in Herefordshire). The natural surroundings are given further emphasis and the dead friend is clearly being buried in a rural place: “her short ride to the hawthorn hedge” (line 7) will place the grave on the perimeter of the cemetery. The diminution of the friend through age or illness is captured in another natural image as Clarke describes the load the pallbearers have to carry as “lighter than hare-bones”. A hare’s skeleton is indeed extremely light in order that it may run swiftly. Here, we have a sense of a person who has wasted away, through cancer, perhaps. The mourners are linked with the “stone face” of the lion in stanza one through Clarke’s use of the phrase, “our faces / stony” (lines 9-10). In this case, the mourners are far from unfeeling; they are stunned and morose, whereas the lion, being an object and not a creature is presented as indifferent to the death. The emotional impact of the friend’s death on the mourners is delicately understated through the ambiguity of the remainder of the long first sentence of stanza two that takes up almost four of its seven lines: “rain, weeping in the air” (line 10) suggests that the sky itself is crying as well as hinting that the mourners are crying. It could be, though, that they maintain “stony” faces” and that the sky is doing the “weeping for them”. The poetic technique used by Clarke in suggesting that human feeling is reflected in nature is known as pathetic fallacy. It was coined by the nineteenth century critic, John Ruskin. It derives from two Greek words that literally mean ‘false feeling’. We know that the sky cannot literally be moved to tears but we understand the intensity of people’s emotions all the more powerfully though the suggestion of the metaphor. The stanza concludes with a description of interment “The grave / deep as a well takes the earth’s thud, the slow/ fall of flowers (lines 11-12). Clarke’s choice of simile very effectively draws a picture of a grave seeming to be bottomless but there is a subtle link with the rain falling earlier in the stanza. A well is a source of water and is symbolic of life. There is a complexity of association created as a result. We tend to be galvanised into concentrating upon the reality of life as well as the finality of death when attending funerals. This finality is not dodged by the poet who lets us hear “earths thud” as the coffin touches the bottom of the grave. The final image of “the slow / fall of flowers” captures, through the use of alliterated l’s and f’s the seeming suspension of time as we watch bouquets dropping onto a coffin. Flowers are also symbolic of life and add poignancy to the situation of all funerals by dint of their fragile beauty.
The final stanza of the poem opens subtly because it sutures the last line of the previous stanza to its first line. The effect of this is to link the life and death of the friend to the continuing life of the persona in the poem. The use of enjambment (run on line) conveys a sense of tumbling urgency to create: “over the page the pen / runs faster than the wind’s white steps over grass.” This superb image, showing Clarke’s acute observation of the natural world expresses the urgency of writing. When the wind whips across a field of tall grass it has the effect of exposing the undersides of all the blades of grass, making the grass seem white in what seem to be “steps”. The difficulty of surviving a friend and the grief that goes with this is captured marvellously in “For a while health feels like pain.” (line 14). The remainder of poem sees the person resolving to be creatively productive in the face of mortality. After the period of grieving, something that often renders people inert or unproductive, there is “panic” to get on with finishing all the things in life that we all tend to leave undone. Clarke maintains the coherence of her natural imagery by describing this panic as “running”, “racing” and “holding”. The artist’s desire to capture and create is very strong, wanting to garner all the sense impressions possible but principally, in this case, through the sense of sight: “holding that robin’s eye / in the laurel” suggests both capturing it but also staring it out or making a very strong connection with it. We are reminded that the month is October through the detail of “racing leaves” (line 15) and “hydrangeas’ faded green” (line 17).
The closing couplet is a statement of intent: “I must write like the wind, year after year” (line 18) takes the familiar ‘ride like the wind’ and changes it to “write”. This simply emphasises the urgency of the situation but also coheres with the images of the wind employed earlier in the poem. The final image is one of a writer’s defiant will to write which somehow short-circuits death because the creative act is life affirming. In saying “passing my death-day” we are reminded of birthdays and how we need to celebrate life and live it fully because one day it will be October for us all.
ON THE TRAIN
This poem centres on the Ladbroke Grove train crash that happened near Paddington on 5 October 1999.
Clarke begins, in the title of the poem, with one of the most irritating statements of the modern age, the person on a train telling someone on the other end of the phone that this is the case. In the early days of the mobile telephone this was an ostentatious way of letting others know that the user was in possession of said telephone. Clarke is well aware of this but alerts us to the fact that we need to modify our intolerance in the light of such, disasters as the Paddington rail crash.
The opening of the poem initially presents the persona travelling “through England” (line 1) in terms that make her appear like a baby being carefully looked after by a vigilant parent. The speaker is “Cradled” (line 1) and this is the first word of the poem. The train is then described as “rocking, rocking the rails” in a rhythm redolent of a lullaby. The speaker is lulled by the motion with which anyone who has travelled by train will be familiar. She is also lost in her own world by listening to a personal stereo, “my head-phones on” (line 2). That safety is precarious and not to be taken for granted is subtly suggested in the change of tone effected through Clarke’s description in line 3: “the black box of my Walkman” makes the scene authentic and immediately recognisable through a well known brand name but it also suggests a coffin and, perhaps, the black box recorder that survives disasters, even if people do not. The mood of anxiety is reinforced as “Hot tea trembles in its plastic cup” (line 4). We are familiar with seeing the effect Clarke describes here but she injects life into the image by carefully choosing the word “tremble” in this context. The verb personifies the drink as a fearful individual. The use of the present tense makes the situation immediate and personal, particularly as the speaker addresses her partner at the close of the first stanza: “I’m thinking of you waking in our bed / thinking of me on the train. Too soon to phone.” (lines5-6) The presentation of intimate thoughts shared between people is a prelude to a contemplation upon the universal significance of all human relationships and the fact that they can be destroyed by disasters such as the Ladbroke Grove crash.
The second stanza takes the reader through “suburbs” and “commuter towns” (line 7) and the everyday sights of the leave takings involved in “cars unloading children at school gates” (line 8) as she listens to the radio. We are told, though that it is “silenced in dark parkways down the line” (line 8). A foreboding atmosphere is sustained through such apparently innocuous details as “locks click” (line 10) and:
…trains slide out of stations in the dawn
dreaming their way towards the blazing done-ship
(lines 11-12)
There is a sense of the irrevocable about what is happening and the fact that the trains are described as if dreaming of a Viking funeral ship is a sinister personification and a terribly prescient vision in the context of what is to become a gruesome immolation of many people. The Viking funeral was a heroic celebration, often of those who had died in battle, but the train crash will be a modern day reduction of that to accidental, pointless death.
Clarke continues in stanza three with the everyday detail with which all mobile telephone users are familiar:
The Vodaphone you are calling
may have been switched off.
Please call later.
(lines 13-15)
However, she quickly modulates to contemplation upon the desperation of those who will try again and again to contact those lost in the “rubble” of the crash. The repetition of “calling later” in lines 15 and 16 clearly presents the way people will keep ringing while they have any hope at all. The destruction of hope is brilliantly handled by Clarke through the repeated image of rubble. First the phones of the dead “ring in the rubble” (line 17) and then in “the rubble of suburban kitchens”. Homes have been metaphorically reduced to rubble as telephone calls from the authorities come in to tell them that someone has died in the accident.
The final stanza returns to the relationship between the speaker and her partner. She cannot get through on the phone. Despite knowing that she will “be home safe” (line 21) she feels an urgent need to speak to the person she loves, “talk to me, please” The simple act of telling someone that one is safe by saying, “Darling, I’m on the train” is not something about which to be intolerant. We all need to know that we are loved and that we love. This oft-used line is surely a code for that. Clarke’s sentiment, “Today I’m tolerant / of mobiles (lines 22-3) is surely one that will chime with every reader when they recall, as Clarke does so well in this poem, the horror of disasters such as the one forming the subject of her poem.
COLD KNAP LAKE
The theme of death that informs ‘A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998’, ‘The Field-Mouse’, ‘October’ and ‘On the Train’ is dealt with in this poem but in it we see the thwarting of it and the reassertion of life. A young girl, thought to be drowned, is revived by the poet’s mother who gives her what we often call ‘the kiss of life’.
The opening of the poem presents the facts as they were. Any accident happening to a person is often attended by many. Any arrival of ambulance to someone in a crowded high street is enough to convince us of the accuracy of Clarke’s description. The reader is led to believe that the child is dead as she is describe in line two as “drowned”. This has the simultaneous effect of conveying to the reader the crowd’s belief that the child was dead. The fact that she was “Blue-lipped” and wearing weeds which are described as “water’s long green silk” presents her Ophelia-like. The final line in the stanza hints, though, that there might be hope we are told that “she lay for dead” (line 4).
The “heroine” described in the second stanza is “kneeling on the earth” which suggests a reverence for life. The poet’s mother’s head is “bowed” as she gives “a stranger’s child her breath” (line 8). She gives the gift of life to the child anew, almost a second mother – as the child’s mother first gave birth to the imperilled child. The crowd introduced in the first stanza is referred to again “silent” as they waited with their own bated breath and “drawn by the dread of it”. The word drawn means ‘attracted’ in the instinctive sense that we are all drawn to watch a dramatic happening of this nature but it also has the connotation of being emotionally drained. Certainly, the event is a taxing one for all concerned but mostly for the child and the poet’s mother.
The innocence and fragility of the child is conveyed in the word “bleating” to describe her cries after she has “breathed”. Her returned colour, “rosy” (line 12) contrasts to the deathly blue of stanza one.
The wonderful act of the poet’s mother is clearly a source of great joy but this is tempered by her father’s experience of the little girl’s parents’ (or the people who are supposed to look after her) reaction. She is “thrashed for almost drowning” (line 14). This seems an extraordinary reaction even if one can understand the parents’ shock and desire to impress upon the child that she should not have fallen into the lake. The reader wonders why the child was not being looked after by her parents in the first place. The fact that the child was taken “home to a poor house” suggests straitened circumstances. The last thing the poor girl needed was a “thrashing”. She needed love and attention but parents can sometimes react like this even if they are very relieved.
The short question opening stanza four, “Was I there?” presents the poet almost doubting memory or at least the memory of the real becomes fused with details of the imagined. To a child even a small lake can seem to have enormous depth and mystery. The “satiny mud” in line 18 recalls the “long green silk” of line 3 and the poet as child wondered if the swans had dragged anything into the lake. The “troubled surface” of the lake could well stand as a metaphor for the disturbed state of the child’s mind who witnessed the event and saw the whole scene as somehow enchanted or nightmarish like a Grimm’s fairy tale. Swans are serene creatures but can be very violent, easily stirring up “mud blooms” and capable of breaking a man’s arm with their wings. The closing couplet that aligns, through rhyme, “water” and “daughter” unified the real and the imagined. To the child, all dark, sinister and “lost things” are lurking beneath the surface. This rather dark conclusion is in keeping with the remainder of the poem, notwithstanding the joyous revival of the child who was thought to be drowned. We all have a subconscious “lake” beneath the surface of which our worst fears lurk. This is a convincing insight into the ways in which a child’s imagination can work, as well as being a memorable chronicling of a traumatic event
This intensely personal poem is a mother’s reflection upon the changing relationship with her daughter. It does not shy away from talking about the tensions that can arise from time to time but at the same time affirms the permanence of unconditional maternal love. This is also a poem that simultaneously celebrates the individuality of mother and daughter and their shared characteristics.
The bipartite structure of this poem deftly signals the separation that occurs after the severing of the umbilical chord “the tight / Red rope of love” (lines 7-8). The structure of the poem also shares one of the features of the Petrarchan sonnet, although it is not a sonnet in form. This feature is a clear break between the two sections. The first verse paragraph is largely descriptive, whilst the second (not lacking descriptive detail in itself) has a more reflective tone and explores the implications of what has been established earlier in the poem.
The recurrent “I” and “you” throughout the poem help to frame the poem very clearly in terms of a relationship that changes and yet does not change.
The poem opens with a mild-toned reminiscence that seems quite ordinary. Clarke presents the reader with the sorts of detail that could easily attach to any number of ordinary experiences: “The people and cars taking / Turn at the traffic lights.” (lines 4-6). The very ordinariness of the scene is, however, that which provides a perfect introduction to the extraordinary nature of what erupts into the “hot, white / Room” (lines 2-3) of the hospital. The birth of the child is presented in very strong terms. Sound and sense fuse to emphasise the physical strain of childbirth and the idea of two strong personalities at loggerheads:
I can remember you, our first
Fierce confrontation, the tight
Red rope of love which we both
Fought over.
(lines 6-9)
The alliterated f’s and t’s create both tension and a sense of clinical precision. The umbilicus is the locus of both attachment and challenge. Clarke’s choice of the word “rope” suggests both a tug-of-war but also the tug of love. The choice of the adjective “red” is not only visually accurate in its context but reinforces the biological blood link between mother and child. The individual voices of mother and child are brilliantly presented by Clarke in her image of the mother’s words colouring the white tiles of the hospital room, almost as a child might colour squares in a book, but with the clear sense that the language of the mother may well be colourful because of the pain she is experiencing. The words “wild” and ”tender” (line 14) emphasise the mixture of experiences as a mother gives birth. There is an extraordinary self-awareness on the part of the mother but this is at least matched by the awareness of the child’s otherness and individuality. This idea is reinforced through Clarke’s choice of language in lines 15-17. The “I” and “you” that characterises the presentation of the relationship up to this point modulates into “our”, “we” and “ourselves”. However, mother and child are united in their “struggle to become / Separate.” The word “separate” that begins line 16 is followed by a full stop, leaving the next sentence as a concerted statement of individuality. The neat choice of the plural reflexive pronoun that concludes the first part of the poem paves the way for Clarke to explore the paradoxical nature of the mother-daughter relationship that is characterised by mixture of affinity and conflict.
The beauty of this second section lies, though, in the reality that her daughter’s defiance is for the poet an affirmative manifestation of her very being and a reminder that as a baby she seemed to hold on defiantly to life. The mother never forgets her attachment to the child: “that old rope” is actually ageless; it is both real and metaphorical. All the nuances of feeling a mother has for her child are wonderfully clinched in the conclusion of this beautiful poem. The metaphor of “the heart’s pool” and the idea of the umbilicus being that which signals attachment, inescapable responsibility, and the reality that the story of a mother and daughter’s life is patterned by “love and conflict”. Part of what makes this poem so successful is the direct simplicity of its language that is rooted in everyday language, something that is admirably suited to the task of charting the extraordinary miracle of birth and the growth of families that occurs as routinely as the procession of traffic but is also cosmic in its significance as that very procession continues, oblivious to the event.
BABY-SITTING
This poem, in contrast with ‘Catrin’, focuses upon the poet’s distance from another mother’s child rather than on the close bond that exists between her and her own daughter.
Clarke again uses a bipartite structure. The two ten line sections may just be called stanzas. The first focuses upon the persona’s response to the baby and her fears relating to her possible waking. Words like “wrong”, “don’t”, “afraid”, “hate”, “shout” and “rage” build up a strong picture of negativity and rejection. There is no maternal bond and the baby will only be repugnant to her; she would not fail, of course, to “enchant” her natural mother with “the perfume / Of her breath” (lines 9-10)
The second stanza concentrates more upon the child’s potential reaction to her babysitter. The atmosphere created in the first stanza of the poem is one of trepidation, familiar to anyone who is looking after someone else’s baby. The fact that it is a baby makes any dialogue impossible should she awaken. Emotion and instinct are lacking in the
The concluding line of the poem is both tender and resigned. The repeated “it will not come” refers on one level simply to the fact that the child has no biological connected to her and will therefore not be consoled by her smell. On another level, the child’s distress is emphasised by the words of a mother who is alarmed at having no milk to feed her child. If milk “does not come” then the child goes hungry. Although the child depicted clearly has a lactating mother, the experience of deprivation is acute.
The child’s natural mother would be able to deal with the baby’s heavy cold, ignoring the streaming snot, bubbling as the child struggles to breathe because she loves her. The poet clearly delineates here the boundaries that love does not but exist for anyone who is not the parent.
Although the speaker does not “love /this baby” (lines 2-3), she is not indifferent to her distress. She may not react emotionally to her but is able to empathise in realising that she represents for the child “absolute / Abandonment” (lines 11-12) The transferred epithets of the metaphor “cold lonely sheets” uses a metaphor to explore the baby’s sense of desertion, this is couched in very adult terms too, though as the poet commandeers grown-up equivalents for the situation. The child’s distress will be “worse / Than for a lover cold in lonely / Sheets” (lines 11-13)
MALI
This poem is written from the perspective of grandmother’s experience, as opposed to that of a mother. Just as the precise details of the birth of her daughter are recalled in ‘Catrin’, the poet recalls those surrounding the birth of Mali:
Three years ago to the hour, the day she was born,
that unmistakable brim and tug of the tide
I’d thought was over.
The precise placing in time is only part of the memory, of course. Clarke’s employment of sea imagery clearly draws attention to the relationship between the moon and the sea. We only intermittently remember the fact that the tide is controlled by a great force beyond the earth just as even mothers can think that their experience of giving birth has disappeared. Here, the experience of a daughter brings back the experience of the mother who is now a grandmother.
Just as the birth of Catrin is depicted as a team effort, the same may be said of Mali’s. Catrin’s mother drives her to the hospital. The sense of urgency is highlighted through the contrasting details of a world that is not in a hurry and oblivious to the emergency:
I drove
the twenty miles of summer lanes,
my daughter cursing Sunday cars,
and the lazy swish of a dairy herd
rocking so slowly home.
(lines 3-7)
The sentence that extends over more than four enjambed lines emphasises the lack of urgency in weekend country life. The rhythm of the lines acts as a counterpoint to the frustrated need for speed.
The second stanza focuses upon the fecundity and largesse of “late summer” that will soon be “overspilling into harvest” The “apples reddening on heavy trees” suggest the roundness and heaviness of pregnancy. The family has been picking blackberries and the pleasant imagery of “lanes sweet with brambles” (line 11) leads on the an associative blood image in “our fingers purple” (line 12). This is immediately followed with: “then the child coming easy, / to soon, in the wrong place” (lines13-14). There is a natural rightness about the birth even though the baby was born as the family was on holiday. The third stanza flows continuously from the second, linking the generations and seasons in a neatly seamless way. The image of a harvest moon suggests fullness and the control of the tides. The image of being “towed home” is redolent of both a car pulled by a rope and the umbilicus linking mother and child. The female principle in nature is strongly felt at this point in the poem and Clarke goes on to reflect upon the unbreakable bond between mother and child. She feels “hooked again, life-sentenced” capturing both the sense of absolute enchantment coupled with a sense of the weight of responsibility every parent feels. Although as a grandmother she may feel less responsible for her granddaughter, she has a renovated view of her own role as mother, too. The most powerful natural force on Earth, the sea is used by Clarke to highlight the strength of her feeling for her new granddaughter. There is, of course, the idea that a
The final stanza is a joyous account of Mali’s third birthday party. The metaphorical “blossom” on the trees are “balloons and streamers”. The child’s birthday is toasted in seawater “a cup / of cold blue ocean” and “three drops of, / probably, last blood”. This is redolent of pagan ritual. Water and blood are both potent symbols of life. Last blood is, though, the end of menstruation for a woman. The word “probably” signals that Clarke has recognition that there are definite demarcations between the fertile periods between generations. Her daughter’s fertility makes the passing of her own part of the natural procession of generations and there is the implication that, one day, Mali will be a mother, too.
Beyond the atmospheric “candles and twilight” that help to create a mystical atmosphere at the end of the poem, there is the sense that the “cup of ocean” links to amniotic fluid (the water in which a baby exists before birth) and the moon, controller of tides and, of course intimately linked with the female menstrual cycle. The waxing and waning of the moon happens on a monthly cycle, just like a woman’s menstrual cycle (the word ‘menstrual’ is an adjective derived from the Latin word for ‘month’).
This touching poem is a celebration of fertility, birth, and womanhood; it is also contemplation upon the permanence of maternal love.
A DIFFICULT BIRTH
In contrast to the “child coming easy” in ‘Mali’, the difficult birth described in this poem is one of a lamb in Eater 1998. Gillian Clarke keeps sheep so she is intimately acquainted with the process she describes.
The first stanza presents us with “An old ewe” who was thought “barren” but who surprises by giving birth. This surprise links with the welcome surprise and delight felt by so many when the opposing factions in Northern Ireland began to negotiate peacefully. The ewe is described as “restless, hoofing the straw” and we cannot help but see a parallel between her anxiety and those who waited anxiously for news of a new peace deal in Northern Ireland. The poet and (presumably) her husband “put off the quiet supper and bottle of wine…to celebrate only if the news is good” (lines 5-6). Again, we understand that the ewe’s struggle to give birth and that of the Peace Deal’s progress are intermingled in her mind.
Stanza two concentrates on difficulty. As the ewe goes into labour “they slog it out in Belfast” (line 9) in a physical image that is redolent of two boxers at loggerheads. The “eight decades / since Easter 1916” are recalled by Clarke who again muses upon the link between the ewe’s experience and those in Northern Ireland who, like the ewe, have been “tamed by pin”. Belfast has been the location of terrible atrocities since the modern “troubles” began in the 1960s. The ewe “lies down again”, leaving the poet to linger in her anxiety.
Stanza three catalogues the process of helping the ewe. “But the lamb won’t come” (line 13) lends the events described real immediacy. Clarke maintains this immediacy by addressing her husband as if in ‘real time’: “You phone for help…” (line13). Her husband waits expectantly for the lights of the vet’s car. The poet intervenes and decides to be the midwife for the lamb.
The team effort required to deliver the lamb is made clear at the start of the final stanza: “We strain together, harder than we dared” (line 19) emphasises that desperate circumstances sometimes demand desperate measures. The “creak” that gives way to a “syrupy flood” signals that the point of crisis has passed. The poet’s husband returns to see a wonderful scene of new life and peace, “ a cradling that might have been a death” (line 22). This sense of life coming out of near death is clinched in the conclusion of the poem as the expulsion of the lamb from its mother’s body “her opened door” is aligned with the resurrection of Christ whose tomb was found empty by Roman centurions who were astonished to discover that the stone sealing his tomb had been rolled away.
This image of resurrection signals a new sort of “Rising “ in Ireland as the peace treaty was ratified during that period. The images of cooperation between woman and ewe show that working together can have memorable and sometimes beautiful results, not born out of “terrible” things, as was the case in 1916.
In order to grasp the full implications of the poem, it is necessary to appreciate the ambiguity of the title that results form the fact that at the time of the poem’s composition, a peace treaty in Northern Ireland was being negotiated. The “difficult birth” is, therefore, a metaphor for the political process that led to the Good Friday agreement. As we know, the so-called “Peace Process” took a great deal of time to reach the point where full disarmament by the IRA was effected in September 2005, seven years after the initial ceasefires. There are two more vital things to keep in mind as we read this poem. Easter is the Christian festival that commemorates the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ who died on Good Friday, the very day that, in 1998, gave birth to the Good Friday agreement. The festival also has a special place in the Republic of Ireland’s history because in 1916 the Easter Rising took place. This involved a group of Republicans occupying the General Post Office in Dublin’s O’Connell Street as a protest to British occupation. The ensuing stand-off resulted in the execution of the participants. The Anglo-Irish poet W.B Yeats commemorated their act of defiance in his famous poem ‘Easter 1916’. In this poem he deals with the uncomfortable idea that the rebels’ aims were honourable and that the violence they used was understandable, if not excusavble. The lines “All’s changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born” are part of Ireland’s poetic “lingo” now.
THE FIELD MOUSE
Just as A Difficult Birth, Easter 1918 has political events as a backdrop so too does this poem. In this case Clarke is preoccupied with the events in Europe and, more specifically, those in the former Yugoslavia in which the Serbs and Croats fought bitterly in the Bosnian civil war.
The vulnerability of a tiny creature is employed by Clarke to draw attention to the vulnerability of people in the face of enormous war machines. A mouse can be easily killed by the indifferent blades of a mechanical plough just as people may be slaughtered by bombs or guns. The title of the poem recalls Robert Burns’ poem about a mouse in which he refers the animal as “tim’rous wee beastie”. Clarke draws attention in her poem to the timorous animals and people whose lives can be arbitrarily cut down without notice.
The poem opens in the season of summer and the sound of crickets or grasshoppers in “the long grass” that is brilliantly described as “a snare drum”. This captures the high frequency continuous noise with which we are all familiar in a hot summer. The second line “The air hums with jets” is almost appealing and certainly does not convey a sense of threat but we will soon connect their presence with the war referred to later in the poem. Clarke shifts attention to the meadow that is “far from the radio’s terrible news” (line 4) and the activity of her neighbour, clearly a farmer, who is spreading lime. This lime is described as “drifting our land / with a chance gift of sweetness”. This is quite surprising as lime is generally thought of as something that burns.
Stanza two presents a scenario of death from a single child’s perspective as he tries to save a mouse that is beyond help and that of children in Bosnia facing the devastation of civil war. Clarke makes us aware of the single child’s innocent belief that the mouse can be saved as he “comes running through the killed flowers” (line 10). This makes the theme of death explicit and prepares for the death of the “quivering mouse” (line 11) that “curls in agony big as itself” (line 12). Its eyes are described as “two sparks” that make one think of the spark o life and the cosmic image in “and the star goes out in its eye” (line 15) emphasises that even the smallest creature is part of a huge universe. Clarke continues her exploration of a wider perspective by considering the conflict in Bosnia. The personification of the earth in “the field’s hurt” reminds us that it is a whole nation that suffers when riven by war. Just as the mouse was mown down in “long grass”, so the children “kneel in long grass” (line 17) as if brought low by what adults have done. They are presented as being numbed “staring” at “what we have crushed” (line 18). The use of the word “we” implicates all adults in that they have a responsibility to children.
The third and final stanza again personifies land, this time the field that was introduced in stanza one. The description evokes a scene of carnage in a war, a killing field. The poet’s garden, it seems, is teeming with what amount to refugee survivors as it is “inhabited by the saved, / voles, frogs and a nest of mice.” (lines 20-21). The atrocity of war is unbearable and this is made clear in the fact that “we can’t face the newspapers” (line 23). This is something with which we can all identify.
The poem concludes with a dream influenced by the experiences of the day. The poet is haunted by the image of vulnerable children who are imaginatively connected with the mouse encountered earlier in the day. Clarke imagines their “bones brittle as mouse-ribs” (line 25). The alliterated b’s emphasise the fragility of young life. The personification of the air “stammering with gunfire” captures both the sound made by machine guns and the terror caused by their use, rendering people inarticulate with fear. The final thought we are left with is a horrific vision of the poet’s neighbour turning against her “wounding my land with stones”, as she puts it. This leads us to ask why civil wars begin and to acknowledge that such conflict could begin anywhere.
October
This moving poem commemorates a dead friend’s funeral and the effect it has on the poet who resolves to “write like the wind” while she is still alive and well enough to do so.
The month of October is one of transition, the dying time of year in nature when the leaves, as W B Yeats said, “are in their autumn beauty” but will shed their leaves. Clarke engages with the dual facets of beauty and death in the opening of the poem.. It is clear that something is out of kilter, as the poet opens with the image of a “broken branch, a dead arm in the bright trees” ” (lines 2-3) This metaphor personifies one of the trees and prepares us for the revelation that a funeral is the occasion being recalled and which is the occasion of the poem.
Poplars are beautiful trees that shimmer if the wind shakes their leaves. Their beauty is even more striking as the “tremble / gradually to gold” (line 3). The word “tremble” is normally associated with human fear so we are alerted to a sense of trepidation. The alliteration of ‘g’ sounds adds emphasis while the polysyllabic “gradually” is perfectly chosen by Clarke to convey both the time taken for leaves to change colour and the gradations of shades as they change colour. The double ‘l’ in the adverb that alliterates internally with the ‘l’ in “gold” also helps to create a legato effect. The verse slows down, too, in what a musician would describe as rallentando until the full stop puts the brakes on, separating the trees from “The stone face / of the lion” (lines 3-4). The statue is self-evidently stone but Clarke is using the adjective in a very subtle way, as it is indifferent to the emotional charge of the occasion. The fact that its face “darkens” is foreboding and this is caused by sudden rain that is a “sharp shower”. The terseness of the words builds upon the indifference of the stone lion. The image of “dreadlocks of lobelia” would be attractive were it not for the fact that they are decaying in autumn to become “more brown that blue-eyed” (line 6).
The second stanza is uncompromising in its direct confrontation of what the situation is. The reader has been prepared for the stark reality of the occasion through the build up of atmospheric detail and Clarke’s careful crafting and poetic diction. The harsh alliteration of ‘d’ and ‘g’ sounds reinforces the finality of the funeral: “My friend dead and the graveyard at Orcop” (line 7) communicating to the reader both the personal loss being experienced and a precise geographical location (Orcop is in Herefordshire). The natural surroundings are given further emphasis and the dead friend is clearly being buried in a rural place: “her short ride to the hawthorn hedge” (line 7) will place the grave on the perimeter of the cemetery. The diminution of the friend through age or illness is captured in another natural image as Clarke describes the load the pallbearers have to carry as “lighter than hare-bones”. A hare’s skeleton is indeed extremely light in order that it may run swiftly. Here, we have a sense of a person who has wasted away, through cancer, perhaps. The mourners are linked with the “stone face” of the lion in stanza one through Clarke’s use of the phrase, “our faces / stony” (lines 9-10). In this case, the mourners are far from unfeeling; they are stunned and morose, whereas the lion, being an object and not a creature is presented as indifferent to the death. The emotional impact of the friend’s death on the mourners is delicately understated through the ambiguity of the remainder of the long first sentence of stanza two that takes up almost four of its seven lines: “rain, weeping in the air” (line 10) suggests that the sky itself is crying as well as hinting that the mourners are crying. It could be, though, that they maintain “stony” faces” and that the sky is doing the “weeping for them”. The poetic technique used by Clarke in suggesting that human feeling is reflected in nature is known as pathetic fallacy. It was coined by the nineteenth century critic, John Ruskin. It derives from two Greek words that literally mean ‘false feeling’. We know that the sky cannot literally be moved to tears but we understand the intensity of people’s emotions all the more powerfully though the suggestion of the metaphor. The stanza concludes with a description of interment “The grave / deep as a well takes the earth’s thud, the slow/ fall of flowers (lines 11-12). Clarke’s choice of simile very effectively draws a picture of a grave seeming to be bottomless but there is a subtle link with the rain falling earlier in the stanza. A well is a source of water and is symbolic of life. There is a complexity of association created as a result. We tend to be galvanised into concentrating upon the reality of life as well as the finality of death when attending funerals. This finality is not dodged by the poet who lets us hear “earths thud” as the coffin touches the bottom of the grave. The final image of “the slow / fall of flowers” captures, through the use of alliterated l’s and f’s the seeming suspension of time as we watch bouquets dropping onto a coffin. Flowers are also symbolic of life and add poignancy to the situation of all funerals by dint of their fragile beauty.
The final stanza of the poem opens subtly because it sutures the last line of the previous stanza to its first line. The effect of this is to link the life and death of the friend to the continuing life of the persona in the poem. The use of enjambment (run on line) conveys a sense of tumbling urgency to create: “over the page the pen / runs faster than the wind’s white steps over grass.” This superb image, showing Clarke’s acute observation of the natural world expresses the urgency of writing. When the wind whips across a field of tall grass it has the effect of exposing the undersides of all the blades of grass, making the grass seem white in what seem to be “steps”. The difficulty of surviving a friend and the grief that goes with this is captured marvellously in “For a while health feels like pain.” (line 14). The remainder of poem sees the person resolving to be creatively productive in the face of mortality. After the period of grieving, something that often renders people inert or unproductive, there is “panic” to get on with finishing all the things in life that we all tend to leave undone. Clarke maintains the coherence of her natural imagery by describing this panic as “running”, “racing” and “holding”. The artist’s desire to capture and create is very strong, wanting to garner all the sense impressions possible but principally, in this case, through the sense of sight: “holding that robin’s eye / in the laurel” suggests both capturing it but also staring it out or making a very strong connection with it. We are reminded that the month is October through the detail of “racing leaves” (line 15) and “hydrangeas’ faded green” (line 17).
The closing couplet is a statement of intent: “I must write like the wind, year after year” (line 18) takes the familiar ‘ride like the wind’ and changes it to “write”. This simply emphasises the urgency of the situation but also coheres with the images of the wind employed earlier in the poem. The final image is one of a writer’s defiant will to write which somehow short-circuits death because the creative act is life affirming. In saying “passing my death-day” we are reminded of birthdays and how we need to celebrate life and live it fully because one day it will be October for us all.
ON THE TRAIN
This poem centres on the Ladbroke Grove train crash that happened near Paddington on 5 October 1999.
Clarke begins, in the title of the poem, with one of the most irritating statements of the modern age, the person on a train telling someone on the other end of the phone that this is the case. In the early days of the mobile telephone this was an ostentatious way of letting others know that the user was in possession of said telephone. Clarke is well aware of this but alerts us to the fact that we need to modify our intolerance in the light of such, disasters as the Paddington rail crash.
The opening of the poem initially presents the persona travelling “through England” (line 1) in terms that make her appear like a baby being carefully looked after by a vigilant parent. The speaker is “Cradled” (line 1) and this is the first word of the poem. The train is then described as “rocking, rocking the rails” in a rhythm redolent of a lullaby. The speaker is lulled by the motion with which anyone who has travelled by train will be familiar. She is also lost in her own world by listening to a personal stereo, “my head-phones on” (line 2). That safety is precarious and not to be taken for granted is subtly suggested in the change of tone effected through Clarke’s description in line 3: “the black box of my Walkman” makes the scene authentic and immediately recognisable through a well known brand name but it also suggests a coffin and, perhaps, the black box recorder that survives disasters, even if people do not. The mood of anxiety is reinforced as “Hot tea trembles in its plastic cup” (line 4). We are familiar with seeing the effect Clarke describes here but she injects life into the image by carefully choosing the word “tremble” in this context. The verb personifies the drink as a fearful individual. The use of the present tense makes the situation immediate and personal, particularly as the speaker addresses her partner at the close of the first stanza: “I’m thinking of you waking in our bed / thinking of me on the train. Too soon to phone.” (lines5-6) The presentation of intimate thoughts shared between people is a prelude to a contemplation upon the universal significance of all human relationships and the fact that they can be destroyed by disasters such as the Ladbroke Grove crash.
The second stanza takes the reader through “suburbs” and “commuter towns” (line 7) and the everyday sights of the leave takings involved in “cars unloading children at school gates” (line 8) as she listens to the radio. We are told, though that it is “silenced in dark parkways down the line” (line 8). A foreboding atmosphere is sustained through such apparently innocuous details as “locks click” (line 10) and:
…trains slide out of stations in the dawn
dreaming their way towards the blazing done-ship
(lines 11-12)
There is a sense of the irrevocable about what is happening and the fact that the trains are described as if dreaming of a Viking funeral ship is a sinister personification and a terribly prescient vision in the context of what is to become a gruesome immolation of many people. The Viking funeral was a heroic celebration, often of those who had died in battle, but the train crash will be a modern day reduction of that to accidental, pointless death.
Clarke continues in stanza three with the everyday detail with which all mobile telephone users are familiar:
The Vodaphone you are calling
may have been switched off.
Please call later.
(lines 13-15)
However, she quickly modulates to contemplation upon the desperation of those who will try again and again to contact those lost in the “rubble” of the crash. The repetition of “calling later” in lines 15 and 16 clearly presents the way people will keep ringing while they have any hope at all. The destruction of hope is brilliantly handled by Clarke through the repeated image of rubble. First the phones of the dead “ring in the rubble” (line 17) and then in “the rubble of suburban kitchens”. Homes have been metaphorically reduced to rubble as telephone calls from the authorities come in to tell them that someone has died in the accident.
The final stanza returns to the relationship between the speaker and her partner. She cannot get through on the phone. Despite knowing that she will “be home safe” (line 21) she feels an urgent need to speak to the person she loves, “talk to me, please” The simple act of telling someone that one is safe by saying, “Darling, I’m on the train” is not something about which to be intolerant. We all need to know that we are loved and that we love. This oft-used line is surely a code for that. Clarke’s sentiment, “Today I’m tolerant / of mobiles (lines 22-3) is surely one that will chime with every reader when they recall, as Clarke does so well in this poem, the horror of disasters such as the one forming the subject of her poem.
COLD KNAP LAKE
The theme of death that informs ‘A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998’, ‘The Field-Mouse’, ‘October’ and ‘On the Train’ is dealt with in this poem but in it we see the thwarting of it and the reassertion of life. A young girl, thought to be drowned, is revived by the poet’s mother who gives her what we often call ‘the kiss of life’.
The opening of the poem presents the facts as they were. Any accident happening to a person is often attended by many. Any arrival of ambulance to someone in a crowded high street is enough to convince us of the accuracy of Clarke’s description. The reader is led to believe that the child is dead as she is describe in line two as “drowned”. This has the simultaneous effect of conveying to the reader the crowd’s belief that the child was dead. The fact that she was “Blue-lipped” and wearing weeds which are described as “water’s long green silk” presents her Ophelia-like. The final line in the stanza hints, though, that there might be hope we are told that “she lay for dead” (line 4).
The “heroine” described in the second stanza is “kneeling on the earth” which suggests a reverence for life. The poet’s mother’s head is “bowed” as she gives “a stranger’s child her breath” (line 8). She gives the gift of life to the child anew, almost a second mother – as the child’s mother first gave birth to the imperilled child. The crowd introduced in the first stanza is referred to again “silent” as they waited with their own bated breath and “drawn by the dread of it”. The word drawn means ‘attracted’ in the instinctive sense that we are all drawn to watch a dramatic happening of this nature but it also has the connotation of being emotionally drained. Certainly, the event is a taxing one for all concerned but mostly for the child and the poet’s mother.
The innocence and fragility of the child is conveyed in the word “bleating” to describe her cries after she has “breathed”. Her returned colour, “rosy” (line 12) contrasts to the deathly blue of stanza one.
The wonderful act of the poet’s mother is clearly a source of great joy but this is tempered by her father’s experience of the little girl’s parents’ (or the people who are supposed to look after her) reaction. She is “thrashed for almost drowning” (line 14). This seems an extraordinary reaction even if one can understand the parents’ shock and desire to impress upon the child that she should not have fallen into the lake. The reader wonders why the child was not being looked after by her parents in the first place. The fact that the child was taken “home to a poor house” suggests straitened circumstances. The last thing the poor girl needed was a “thrashing”. She needed love and attention but parents can sometimes react like this even if they are very relieved.
The short question opening stanza four, “Was I there?” presents the poet almost doubting memory or at least the memory of the real becomes fused with details of the imagined. To a child even a small lake can seem to have enormous depth and mystery. The “satiny mud” in line 18 recalls the “long green silk” of line 3 and the poet as child wondered if the swans had dragged anything into the lake. The “troubled surface” of the lake could well stand as a metaphor for the disturbed state of the child’s mind who witnessed the event and saw the whole scene as somehow enchanted or nightmarish like a Grimm’s fairy tale. Swans are serene creatures but can be very violent, easily stirring up “mud blooms” and capable of breaking a man’s arm with their wings. The closing couplet that aligns, through rhyme, “water” and “daughter” unified the real and the imagined. To the child, all dark, sinister and “lost things” are lurking beneath the surface. This rather dark conclusion is in keeping with the remainder of the poem, notwithstanding the joyous revival of the child who was thought to be drowned. We all have a subconscious “lake” beneath the surface of which our worst fears lurk. This is a convincing insight into the ways in which a child’s imagination can work, as well as being a memorable chronicling of a traumatic event
Gillian Clarke writes about ALL her exam poems
HOW TO READ A POEM: TIP FOR GCSE STUDENTS
Do think of a poem as a little story. Read it out loud in your head. Work it out for yourself. Every word counts. The whole meaning lies in the words. Sometimes layers of meaning come through slowly. No one, not even the poet, sees every possible meaning in a word or phrase all at once. Bring your own experience and response to understanding a poem.
Don’t invent what you can’t prove by quoting the poem. Don’t jump to conclusions before you’ve read every word and worked it out. Don’t assume the poem is the poet’s own life story. Poems are made from experience, imagination, a love of language, and a lot of creative energy.
A Difficult Birth Easter 1998
Q What’s the poem about?
A There are 3 stories tangled up here, and you need to know them:
1) 2000 years ago, the story goes, on the Friday before the day now known as Easter Sunday, Jesus was crucified, and his body placed in a tomb with a stone blocking the entrance. The story tells that later, when people went to look, the stone had been rolled away, and the body was gone. Christians believe he had risen from the dead.
2) The second story happened on Good Friday 1998. After 30 years of violence involving the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland, with the British Army as ‘piggy in the middle’, something called ‘the peace process’ was about to be agreed in Belfast. All sides had to sign it. And they did.
3) Story number three stars a five year old ewe (female sheep) who’d never had a lamb. She was due to lamb at any moment. She was 5, which is old for a first time lambing, so we were warned she might have trouble, and we might have to call the vet. The lambs were born safely, without the vet.
So what’s the poem about? Difficulties overcome.
Q Why is she ‘hoofing the straw’?
A She is making a nest. You can tell the ewe is in labour when she scrapes the ground with her hoof and turns round and round to make herself a bed.
Q Who are the whitecoats?
A Doctors, or those doctors who think they know more about birth than mothers do, and the ‘whitecoats’ symbolise know-alls who think they know better than nature does. The statement is slightly ironic, a note of caution rather than a serious condemnation of surgical intervention in birth. It is a gentle rebuke, not a condemnation of doctors, vets, or science.
Q What do you mean by her ‘opened door’?
A The ‘opened door’ is the exit from the womb after the first lamb was born. The second twin just slipped into the straw without a hitch.
Q What does ‘the stone rolled away’ mean?
A In a way there’s a word missing in the last line of the poem. I could have written, ‘the stone having rolled away’. Sometimes I read it like that, to make the meaning quite clear, but I don’t like the sound of it, and it’s not strictly needed. You should read the line slowly, with the last 3 words stressed: ‘the stone rolled away’. The image connects the empty tomb on Good Friday 2000 years ago, the womb of the ewe once the first lamb is born, and the prospect of peace at last in Northern Ireland. In all three cases, life wins.
Baby-Sitting
Q My teacher and some of my class think the poem is about post-natal depression. I think it's about baby-sitting. Who is right?
A You are right. You've listened carefully to the language of the poem, and trusted the poet. The evidence is on your side. Start with the title: 'Baby-Sitting'. This is a deliberate choice, and intended to guide the reader. In line 1 and line 2 there are two important words: 'strange' to describe the room, and 'wrong' to describe the baby. I, the baby-sitter, am telling you, the reader, that I am sitting in an unfamiliar room, not in my own house. Then I tell you that I am listening for 'the wrong baby', that is, not my baby. Later, I emphasise this: 'I don't love this baby.' Look at the last two lines of the first verse: that this baby's breath 'fails to enchant me' implies that I understand the experience of being enchanted by a baby's breath. I use the word 'perfume' - something joyfully experienced as a mother.
The second verse is all about the baby's feeling in the company of a stranger. It describes the baby's fear and loneliness. Further proof that the baby-sitter is not sorry for herself, but sorry for the baby.
Readers who think about post natal depression must say that it is THEIR thought, and must first take note of the clear intention of the poet before they add their own thoughts
Q What is 'the monstrous land'?
A The baby's bad dream. Maybe what woke the baby was a dream about monsters.
Q Why have you used the words 'snuffly, roseate, bubbling sleep.'?
A The words describe a baby sleeping, snuffly, with rosy cheeks and a bubbly nose.
Q Why have you used capital letters at the start of each line even when it's not a new sentence?
A I wrote the poem a long time ago. Poems used to be printed with capital letters at the start of the line. I don't do it now. I think it looks old fashioned.
Q What do you mean by ‘the wrong baby’?
A From its birth a baby knows its own mother, and a mother knows her baby. There is, usually, a powerful bond from the start. There has to be for us human beings to survive. If you watch a flock of sheep you’ll see how the lambs, which all look the same to us, run crying to find their mothers. The ‘wrong baby’ is the wrong lamb. There is no bond between the baby sitter and the baby, so they are wrong for each other.
Q Why are you afraid of the baby?
A The baby sitter is scared that the baby will wake, and she won’t be able to comfort her.
Q What is ‘the bleached bone in the terminal ward’?
A I imagine a man dying in a hospital ward, the curtains drawn about his bed, his wife watching. His body is a bony shape under the white sheet, like, I thought, a ‘bleached bone’ on a beach. Surely a baby crying for its mother feels as abandoned as that woman seeing her husband die. I am still surprised that such a bleak image came to me as I wrote about such an ordinary activity as baby sitting. I was trying to look at loss from a baby’s point of view.
Blodeuwedd
(‘blodau’: flowers: Welsh)
Blodeuwedd is a character from the British (Welsh) mythology called The Mabinogion. Lleu needed a wife, and Blodeuwedd was created for him out of flowers by a wizard called Gwydion. According to the myth the flowers were yellow broom, meadow sweet and oak blossom. After a period of contentment Blodeuwedd fell in love with another man. They plotted to kill Lleu. Gwydion punished her by turning her into an owl, condemned to the night without human company or the company of birds.
Hendre is a farmhouse in mountains close to the sea in Gwynedd, North Wales, where I was staying with two woman friends. A colony of barn owls lived in an old building close to the farm. We couldn’t help thinking about Blodeuwedd as we heard the owls calling.
Buzzard
This poem considers, observes and describes with great care a simple and beautiful thing - the skull of a buzzard. In the last three verses the bird is imagined alive and hunting, falling from the sky in one swift stoop on a mouse moving in a barley field.
Cardiff Elms
Since the arrival of Dutch Elm Disease in Britain in the 1970s, almost all the elm trees in our landscape have disappeared. Cardiff City Centre had a magnificent avenue of elm trees, flanking a wide, rose-red road, running between fine, white stone buildings. I loved them since my university days, when every day I walked in their shade on my way to lectures. This poem is about their loss.
Catrin
Q What's the poem about?
A Why did my beautiful baby have to become a teenager! At least, I think that's what it's about.
Q What is 'the tight red rope of love'?
A The umbilical cord.
Q So what's 'that old rope'
A The invisible umbilical cord that ties parents and children even when children grow up. I was also thinking of the image of a boat tied to a harbour wall. The rope is hidden. The boat looks as if it's free, but it isn't.
Q Couldn't it be the tug of war between teenager and parent?
A Brilliant! I hadn't thought of that. It proves that if you bring your personal experience to a poem you find ever deeper layers of meaning in the words.
Q Or about letting your child go?
A Even more brilliant.
Q In the last lines is an image of the daughter asking to 'skate in the dark for one more hour'. Isn't that the baby in the womb wanting to 'skate in the dark' one more hour before being born?
A A beautiful, amazing question! You've seen something I didn't see when I wrote the poem. It proves that poems are not carved in stone. Interpretations change as the world changes. When Catrin was born they didn't scan babies in the womb. Now we all know what a baby in the womb looks like, so your question gives the words new meaning. Nobody can stop you reading a poem in your own way, thank goodness.
Q So what did you mean by skating in the dark?
A Just that! Children asking if they could stay out in the street skating as darkness fell. I chose the request as an example of the sort of thing children want to do that mothers refuse. I chose it because it was a romantic, poetic request, and I wanted something that showed it is beautiful and dangerous to be young.
Q Doesn't 'in the dark' mean the mother and daughter have yet to explore their relationship?
A Another one I hadn't thought of. Of course you're right. The language proves it - 'in the dark' means not knowing something.
Q What is 'the glass tank'?
A The hospital.
Q Do the changing traffic lights symbolise the progress of labour and changing relationships?
A Another clever idea I hadn't thought of. I thought I was describing ordinary life going on in the city while inside the hospital momentous events were happening in people's lives.
Q What do you think about students analysing your poems and finding meanings you didn't intend?
A I'm grateful to you for reading them and for revealing to me what you find. Poets write instinctively, and don't always see every possible meaning in the words they choose. If you find something, and prove it with quotations, then it's there, and you're right, and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
Q Could 'that old rope' suggest the chains of DNA handed down from mother to daughter?
A It certainly could. When the poem was written the genetic map had not yet been written, nor had the method of identifying people from their DNA been used. This proves that poetry and language move on, and new meanings can be found.
Cold Knap Lake
Q Is it a real lake? If so, where is it?
A Yes, it is real. It is a large artificial lake in a park in Barry in South Wales. The name is haunting, because of the word ‘cold’. That’s one reason I remember the lake. I have written several poems about it.
Q Is it a true story?
A Yes, as true as I and my memory can make it. It happened when I was a young child, about 6.
Q Does it rhyme? Or is it just at the end?
A I use half rhyme, except for the last two lines which use full rhyme. Examples of half rhymes are ‘crowd’ and ‘dead’, ‘lake’ and silk’, where just the last letters rhyme. You will find rhyme in every verse, if you look and listen for it.
Q Why do you describe your mother’s dress as ‘her wartime cotton frock’?
A During the second World War, when I was a baby, and for several years afterwards, you couldn’t buy nice clothes. My mother, who was very young and pretty at the time, made all her own clothes, and mine and my sister’s too. The fashions were dull, and cut from the least possible cloth. Old photographs will show you what I mean. I deliberately use the old word ‘frock’, to conjure the period of the War.
Q What’s the ‘water’s long green silk’?
A Water weed, and streams of water falling from the child’s clothes.
Q Why did the family beat the child?
A I suppose because they were so upset that they’d nearly lost her.
Q What was the ‘poor house’?
A Just a shabby place. They were a poor family.
Q What does the 4th verse mean?
A When you recapture a memory from early childhood, you’re sometimes not sure if you were really there, if someone told you about it, or if you read it in a story. The lake was not deep, but deep enough to drown in. I’d read fairy stories and legends about people drowning in mysterious lakes. I’d seen a famous painting of a drowned girl floating in a brook. Lake stories often have swans in them. Swans can be fierce, and pretty scary to a child who thinks they are beautiful beings out of legend. The little girl nearly drowned. Did the swans try to take her to their kingdom under the water? That’s the kind of story that haunted me when I was a child. The rhyme at the end connects the real event with a fairy story, I think.
Death of a Cat
When he was a child, my son Dylan had a bad dream. He woke up to hear cats wailing outside. One of our cats had been run over by a car the day before, and we’d buried it in the garden. Dylan went to the window to see what was going on. It was dawn. He saw our other two cats sitting on the compost heap close to the grave, howling. It seemed as if they were grieving, holding a wake for their lost one.
East Moors
East Moors steelworks in Cardiff was closed about 30 years ago, leaving many people out of work. It was shut on the first of May, a cold wet May Day. Penylan is a comfortable suburb of Cardiff, Roath and Rumney are less affluent suburbs closer to the steelworks. The ‘two blue islands’ are Flatholm and Steepholm, landmarks in the Bristol Channel, visible from the hills on which Cardiff is built. I was born and brought up in Cardiff, and lived in an old family house. The poem tells a true story, the details accurately noted.
Friesian Bull
The Friesian bull, like the male of most breeds of dairy cattle, is a dangerous animal, and must be kept confined in a strong pen. The bull was on my uncle’s farm on the banks of the River Dee in North Wales. The bull could always be heard crashing about in his stall, knocking the steel bars, kicking and bellowing. The heifer (young female) could only be brought to him for fertilisation by confining her in a narrow passage, too narrow for the bull, and then raising the iron gate between the bull and the heifer. It seemed to me a sad and savage procedure. Yet he had been a calf once, in a field under the sky. His ancestors roamed freely in herds. Do the scents on the wind remind him of these things?
Heron at Port Talbot
Port Talbot, in South Wales, has a famous steel works which dominates the town, but which has been declining for many years. The town, flanked by the motorway (M4), lies between the sea and the mountains, and would be beautiful were it not for the industrial sprawl of the works. In the incident I describe, I was driving in a snow storm, when a heron flew off the waters of a lake on the sea side of the M4, heading inland for the mountains. It flew right across my windscreen, close enough to see his eye. It was a moment of danger, but also of intimacy with the creature. Both of us were scared. Both ‘braked’. Both, I guess, continued our journey with faster beating hearts.
Jac Codi Baw
‘Jac Codi Baw’ is the Welsh child’s name for a J.C.B digger machine, and it translates literally as Jack Dig Dirt. The poem tells what happened. In the two hours it took to do some shopping, a fine old warehouse was reduced to a pile of rubble. The street looked completely unfamiliar. Everything was covered with dust. The familiar city skyline was suddenly strange.
Kingfishers at Condat
This is one of three poems from a journal written on a holiday in France. It’s an account of an incident on a hot September afternoon at Condat, a small town in the Dordogne. The rivers Coly and Vezere meet in a confluence near Condat, where we swam and watched kingfishers flashing over the water. Later, into the peaceful scene where we sit thinking about our happy day, a gang of bikers roar in to the square, as bright as kingfishers, but loud, intrusive. The kingfishers’ electric blue flashed secretly, silently, like private joy.
Lament
‘Lament’ is an elegy, an expression of grief. It can be a sad, military tune played on a bugle. The poem uses the title as the start of a list of lamented people, events, creatures and other things hurt in the war, so after the word ‘lament’, every verse, and 11 lines, begin with ‘for’.
The poem is about the Gulf War, which happened in 1991 when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the United States, with Britain’s help, bombed Iraq. This war has never really stopped. As we begin a new school year, it still threatens the world.
War can’t be waged without grave damage to every aspect of life. All the details in the poem came from reports in the media. There were newspaper photographs of cormorants covered with oil - ‘in his funeral silk’. ‘The veil of iridescence on the sand’ and ‘the shadow on the sea’ show the spreading stain of oil from bombed oil wells. The burning oil seemed to put the sun out, and poisoned the land and the sea. The ‘boy fusilier who joined for the company,’ and ‘the farmer’s sons, in it for the music’, came from hearing radio interviews with their mothers. The creatures were listed by Friends of the Earth as being at risk of destruction by oil pollution, and ‘the soldier in his uniform of fire’ was a horrific photograph of a soldier burnt when his tank was bombed. The ashes of language are the death of truth during war
Last Rites
Q Is the story true?
A Yes. If a poem uses the poet’s own voice, and tells a story from his or her own viewpoint, it is true. The point of view, the personal voice, the place names, the reference to an inquest, the precise description, all tell you it is fact. Sometimes a poet takes the viewpoint of a character, not his or her self. Then the poet uses imagination.
Q What happened?
A It’s all in the poem. On a beautiful morning in the longest, hottest summer I ever remember, a 20 year old motor cyclist was killed in a collision with a milk tanker. His fiancee was saved. It happened 50 metres from my house, in the quiet countryside.
Q What does ‘stigmata’ mean?
A It’s the wound made by nails in the hands and feet of Jesus when he was crucified.
Q Why do you say the road ‘has kept its stigmata of dust and barley seed’?
A It was the ‘summer of the long drought, 1976 - there was no significant rain for about 9 months, from January to September - so there was not a stream, pond or puddle for the policeman to get water to wash the blood and oil from the road. He gathered handfuls of barley and earth from the field, and threw it onto the mess on the road. There was no rain for several more months, so the stain remained on the road, like the scar of the stigmata that won’t heal.
Q Does ‘a mains hum only, no message coning through’ refer to an emergency phone call?
A If you put the three lines together, you will notice that the image connects the pulse with the radio message. ‘His pulse dangerous in my hands/ A mains hum only, no message/ Coming through’. I was thinking of the mains hum on a radio after the station has closed down. His pulse is beating still, but his brain is dead. However, I can see it might also make you think of a phone call, so that’s a good idea too.
Q Why do you call it ‘Last Rites’?
A The image is a priest giving the last rites of the church to a dying person. All I could do was cover him with a blanket, and wait by his side until the emergency services arrived.
Q Who is ‘his cariad’?
A His fiancee. It’s a Welsh word for a person you love.
Q Does ‘his blood on my hands’ mean you felt guilty?
A Yes. His real blood was on my hands, but we all feel guilty at being alive when someone else dies in tragic circumstances.
Les Grottes
This two-part poem (one of three in the collection) from the French journal refers to two of the famous caves (les grottes: the caves) of the Dordogne. They are magnificent, cathedral-like places, their walls painted and carved with images of animals by the people who lived in them and used them thousands of years ago. They were originally hollowed from the limestone millions of years ago by the force of rivers.
1. Rouffinac
The contrast between the summer heat above ground and the icy cold of the underground caves is striking. In the first poem, the mammoth look as innocent as a ‘nursery frieze’, the parade of animals on a child’s bedroom wall, or in a circus. But the place is haunted with thoughts of the tribes who carved these images, the savage lives they lived, and, even longer ago, before mankind lived on earth, the long millennia when the rivers were cutting the caves out of ancient rock:
‘The Vezere is a ghost,/ its footprints everywhere./ Even the kitchen taps// run cloudy into the palms/ of our hands, fill our mouths/ with chalk.’
You can see and taste the chalk in water that flows out of limestone.
2. Font de Gaume
In this poem I am struck by human creativity, the one characteristic which distinguishes human from other animals. I am inspired to write a poem. 14,000 years ago early human beings were inspired to carve images. Imagination cries for symbols, for the means to create, for tools, a pen, a chisel, to rejoice, celebrate, lament, praise, remember, or to please the gods. Suddenly that artist from so long ago seems to be, not a savage, but my brother or my sister.
Letters from Bosnia
In the closing decade of the 20th century, all the small countries that formed the former Yugoslavia declared their wish to be free. Croatia, Serbia, and other smaller countries, had been rolled into one, big country, Yugoslavia, which had been ruled for most of the 20th century as a single, atheist, communist state, although many of its people were Muslim and many were Christian. When the Bosnian people wanted their freedom, the Serbian army used brutal force in an effort to suppress them. It was a terrible war. Many innocent people died. People were murdered for their religion or their ethnic identity. Christians and Muslims who had been good neighbours became suspicious of each other. Peaceful communities were destroyed. Friends became enemies.
As in many towns in Britain, the people in the small mid-Wales town of Llanidloes collected money, food, clothes and blankets and sent them to Bosnia. The children in the primary school sent letters to children in Vites, and pen friendships were formed. One April day just before Easter I was writing poetry with the children when the post arrived from Bosnia. One letter was from Misha to Ben. There were Easter cards made by the Bosnian children, and a photograph of the class in Vites. They looked exactly like Welsh children, smiling in the sunshine in their tee shirts and trainers, some signalling, thumbs up, for the camera. Behind them was a shabby wall, marked by what looked like bullet holes.
All this is in the poem. Read it, and find the facts, all set out in as few words as possible. In a poem every word counts. One word often serves two purposes. The children in Llanidloes are also the children in Vites. The European spring is happening is in Wales and Bosnia. We share Easter. We are all Europeans. ‘April is all indecision’, just as Europe is. The cherry blossom is beautiful, but it is torn by sharp April rain, just as the beautiful children are torn by sudden war. The ‘bullet holes’ in the final line is intended to be shocking, and a warning. What if it happened here?
Llŷr
Llŷr, a British King whose story is told in the Mabinogion (British/Welsh mythology), is the source of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The poem was commissioned by the late Sam Wanamaker for an anthology called ‘Poems for Shakespeare’.
The idea for my poem arose while I was staying in a house in the Llyn peninsula in North Wales, close to the then home of the great Welsh poet R.S.Thomas, who was often to be seen striding the cliffs of Llyn. (He appears in the poem in verse 2, line 9). The two settings of the poem are the mountain-seascape where it was written, and the remembered experience of seeing my first Shakespeare play, ‘King Lear’, at Stratford on Avon when I was 10 years old. ‘River’ in Welsh is ‘afon’, the ‘f’ pronounced ‘v’. It’s the origin of the name of the River Avon.
The poem was at first written as three sonnets, but I abandoned the formal rhyme scheme in favour of a more natural use of echoes and half-rhymes while using iambic pentameter, until the final rhyming verse, and the closing couplet. There are several references and quotations from King Lear in the poem. ‘Nothing’, for example, is all Cordelia had to say when her father, Lear, demanded a public declaration of love from her.
Login
Login is a small village in Carmarthenshire. The title and first three lines of description set the scene for the story of how a return visit to the village results in a surprising and romantic discovery. The words portray a pretty village deep in a valley at the foot of a steep, wooded hill. The day is hot. It is summer. All this is sketched in the first 3 lines.
The story is told from the point of view of the poet, the ‘I’ in lines 4 and 5. Then verse 2, line 2, introduces a second person, a woman who opens her cottage door to the poet’s knock. They don’t know each other, but the poet hopes that the woman will remember her father. The place is connected with her father’s youth. The poem suggests that her father is dead.
Although the poem does not say so, you can infer from verses 2 and 3 that the woman who opens the door and lets the strangers in does indeed remember him. His name is enough for the poet and her young son to ‘gain entry’. The welcome is warm. The woman brings tea, spreads a lace cloth - a special cloth for important visitors - on the table. She ‘ruffles my son’s brown hair’, an intimate action which suggests that she sees in the boy someone she once loved. The fact that past love is hinted at but not spoken of lies in the atmosphere, the language chosen, the mood of the poem. There are hints in those ‘glances converging’ that ‘could not span such giddy water’. Love lies in language like ‘headlong fall’, ‘fast water’, ‘the bridge burns’, ‘brilliance’. The landscape is described in a passionate language.
In the final verse the boy runs down the lane to the bridge while the two women linger, saying goodbye. The poet imagines her son, many years later, looking back on this day and remembering how he saw his mother and the woman standing in the sun. He might think of it like an old photograph, just as his mother thinks of the past love between her father and this elderly woman as being like a faded sepia photograph from another age.
I am fascinated by the way the past, present and future can converge in one place. This poem has something in common with ‘Siege’, where I make connections between the past and the present as well between the ‘here’ of the poem and something happening at that moment far away.
Mali
Q Why did you write the poem?
A ‘Mali’ celebrates the birth of a first granddaughter. The first 3 verses recall a beautiful September day when a young woman went into labour 3 weeks early at her mother’s house by the sea. They drove to the nearest hospital where the baby was born quickly and easily. Next day the family took the new baby to the beach. Verse four, exactly three years later, describes the child’s third birthday celebration at the same house by the sea.
Q What are the ‘three drops of last blood?
A The birth of a baby involves great commitment. It’s a ‘life sentence’. The ‘blood’ in the poem is the blood of belonging, tribal, genetic, as well as the blood of fertility, birth, menstruation. Last blood is the very last drop of menstrual blood in a woman’s life. No woman ever knows at the time when last blood has been shed. One generation’s fertility ends in blood, and the next generation arrives in blood.
Q What’s the poem about?
A The poem is about babies, generations, and time. The body has an internal clock. Planet Earth too has a clock that makes night and day, and the seasons of the year. Shakespeare said: “Ripeness is all.” There are words and phrases in the poem connecting the ripeness of the body with the ripeness of the season. The tides of the sea are pulled by the moon’s gravitational force. The moon has the same 28 day rhythm as an average woman has. There’s a symbolic connection between the moon and the sea, and the moon and women. In the last verse it is September again, three years later, time for a party, a cake, balloons, candles. So, as well as being a poem about babies, I suppose it’s about Life, the Universe, and Everything.
PS: Teachers may like to know that ‘Mali’ is fifth in a sequence of 7 poems under the general title, ‘Blood’. The sequence is published in my collection, The King of Britain’s Daughter. (Carcanet Press). There are clues in other poems in the sequence that cast light on ‘Mali’, phrases such as ‘brim of blood’, ‘dish of seed’, ‘the silted well’, ‘a taste of salt’, ‘month of the high tides’, and words like newborn, afterbirth, quicken, sea and moon.
Marged
Marged - Welsh for Margaret - killed herself in 1930, in the house where I now live. She died as a result of poverty. In ‘Letter from a Far Country' I imagine that tragic day,
'Middle-aged, poor, isolated,
she could not recover
from mourning an old parent's death.
Influenza brought an hour
too black, too narrow to escape.'
In the same long poem I describe the little house as I found it, and bought it, 40 years after her death, a neglected ruin.
'In that innocent smallholding
where the swallows live and field mice
winter and the sheep barge in
under the browbone, the windows
are blind, are doors for owls,
bolt—holes for dreams. The thoughts have flown.
The last death was a suicide.'
'Marged' is a sonnet. It has 14 lines, each with 5 strong beats, and a rhyme scheme that goes like this:
a,b,a,b/c,d,d,c/e,f,e,f/ g,g.
The form came naturally, following the tune of the first two lines. I used the pattern of the sonnet to tell a simple story, enjoying the contrast between form and content. The rhyme too seemed to fall into place.
'Parlwr' is Welsh - Marged's language - the word for one of two main rooms in her simple, traditional longhouse. A longhouse is a two roomed croft, with sleeping space in the roof, a barn, cowshed and dairy all under one roof.
In 1984, I moved from Cardiff to the countryside, to live alone, by choice, for one winter in Blaen Cwrt. The cottage was romantically primitive, with oil lamps, a wood-burning stove and spring water. It was far from romantic for Marged half a century earlier. The poem is prompted by my guilt about Marged's life and death, my gratitude for our life today in her house, my sympathy for her, as a woman, the things we had in common, the differences between us, between women's lives then and now. These differences lie in the poem's language: contrast the pleasures of
'Lighting the lamps, November afternoons,
a reading book, whisky gold in my glass.'
with Marged's isolation and poverty,
'the old dark parlwr where she died
alone in winter, ill and penniless'
Miracle on St David’s Day
Q Why did you write the poem?
A Because it happened. It’s a true story. I was invited to read poetry to patients in the Occupational Therapy Department of a mental hospital in South Wales. The reading was organised to celebrate St Davids Day - March 1st.
Q What are the links between your poem and Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’?
A The man who could not speak suddenly stood up and recited Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’, word for word, just as he had learned it when he was a child at school. I suppose the sight of the daffodils never left the mind of Wordsworth, and came to him whenever he was in a ‘pensive mood’, and the poem never left the mind of the man in the hospital. In both cases the sight of ten thousand daffodils set memory going, and fired the mind.
Q Why couldn’t he speak?
A He was what is called an elected mute. That is, he was dumb because of his mental illness, not from any physical cause. He was suffering from long-term depression.
Q What made him recite the poem?
A I think two things set the poem going in his mind. One was the daffodils in the room and in the grass outside. The other was that I was reading poetry. The rhythm of the poems and the sight of the daffodils reminded him that he had loved poetry once, and the moment set him free from dumbness.
Q What do you mean by the image of the woman ‘in a cage of first March sun’?
A The sun casts the shadows of window bars into the room. A woman sits in the sunlight and the shadows as if she is in a cage. She is also in the cage of her depression.
Q In verse 6, using words like ‘frozen’ and ‘still as wax’, you suggest an unlit candle. In the last line of the poem you light the candle. Is this a symbol of hope?
A A wonderful question. I hadn’t noticed the connection between ‘wax’ and the ‘flame’ at the end. But you are right. The words prove it. The way it works is that one image suggests another in the poet’s mind.
Q Why does the thrush sing?
A Because it did. We listened to the man reciting the poem, and when we fell silent for a moment before applauding him, a thrush began to sing just outside the window. It is surprising how often I have read this poem on the 1st March, and heard either a blackbird or a thrush sing outside an open window.
My Box
Q Why did you write the poem?
A I asked primary school children to write a poem called ‘My Box’. They had to think of a container - the sea, an acorn, anything that contained something - and write 3 verses, the first beginning, ‘My box is made of...’, verse 2 beginning, ‘In my box...’. The final verse must describe what you do with your box. We all wrote together in the classroom.
Q What inspired you?
A An oak box my husband made for my birthday. I keep my journals in it. I’ve kept a diary since I was 14. In the box are my journals. In the journals is my life.
Q Why do you say you found heartsease? Were you thinking of love?
A Because we found that flower, though I’m aware of the resonance in the name.
Q The poem doesn’t rhyme.
A Yes it does! The poem rhymes all the way through. The rhyme was made like music, by listening, not by following rules. The rhyme is clearly heard, less easily seen. It does not always occur at line endings. Sometimes it is half rhyme. Sometimes it is internal rhyme. The snag about conventional rhyme is that it can be predictable, and create a dum-de-dum poetry. I’m trying for something more subtle. I use repetition, chiming, half rhyme, and a few end rhymes.
Verse 1: ‘oak’ half rhymes with ‘lock’, ‘me’ with ‘key’, linking with ‘he’ on the next line. ‘Nights’ chimes with ‘bright’ (line 4), and if you read the last 2 lines without stopping till you get to the comma, you hear ‘brass’ repeated, and pick up the main rhyming ‘e’ sound in the words ‘a golden tree.’ The rhymes slow the poem, the details set the scene.
Verse 2: This verse breaks away from traditional rhyme and it’s all one sentence. But in line 1, ‘box’ rhymes with ‘books’. Lines 2 and 3 are linked by ‘down’ and ‘how’, lines 3 and 4 by ‘planed’ with ‘planted’, and so on to the refrain, ‘and planted a golden tree’.
Verse 3: This verse end-rhymes throughout, using just 3 rhyme sounds: ‘box’, ‘lock’, and ‘box’ again; ‘read’, ‘dead’, and ‘made’; ‘me’ and ‘tree’. The whole poem is held together by the repeating final line.
Q What rhythm did you choose?
A Verse 1 goes 4,3,4,3,4,3,4,3. Verse 2 is again the odd one out, to be read like a headlong list, and it goes 4,3,4,4,4,4,4,3. Verse 3 is back to the pattern of 4,3,4,3,4,3,4,3.
Q Did you use the building of a wall to symbolise building a marriage, and digging a well to symbolise making a relationship deeper?
A No, but that doesn’t mean you’re wrong. A poet selects details and facts to tell the story. I made it sound like a nursery rhyme with phrases like the golden oak, the bright key, the 12 black books, etc. But these are all real, and the wall and the well are real. We restored a derelict, 200 year old longhouse, made a garden, and drilled a 54 foot deep well, or borehole, to find a water supply. However, there are layers of meaning in language, so the symbolism is for you to find.
The trick is to write about it knowing the fact and symbolism. Accept the facts the poet presents you with - a box, a partner, books, a tree, birds, flowers, walls, a garden, and a well. These things set the scene and tell the story. Then you add your own interpretation, proving your point by quoting from the poem.
October
Q Who’s the poem about?
A A friend who was a poet and an actress. Her name was Frances Horovitz. When someone the same age as you dies, it is shocking. She was too young to die.
Q Why did you call it October?
A She died in October. It can be a sad month. Summer is over, as her life was. The weather was wet and stormy, reflecting our emotions.
Q Where are you in the first verse? Is it a different place from where the funeral took place?
A Yes, two different places. The first verse describes the scene in the garden on the October day when the poem was written. Summer’s finished, the flowers are dead. Wind has broken a branch in one of five poplar trees. The tree itself, and the other trees, are healthy and sound, their leaves turning gold - just as I and most of my friends and family were alive and well. There is a parallel between the trees and the friends, the living and the dead. I wrote the poem while remembering the funeral, a few days earlier, where rain and tears mixed on people’s faces.
Q Did you write the poem as therapy? If not, why did you write it?
A I make poems about everything because I am a poet, never for therapy, though poetry does help you to think about difficult things, like death.
Q What are the wind’s white steps? Why does the pen run?
A When wind blows over long grass, green turns silver. The death of a friend makes you determined to waste no time and to make the most of your life. So ‘I must write like the wind’. The wind over the grass turns into an image for the feeling of panic to see, experience, record everything.
Q Why does health feel like pain?
A When someone your age dies you feel guilty about being alive and well.
Q What is the death-day?
A We are all born. We all die. We know our birthday, but not our death day. I was suddenly aware that I pass that date every year without knowing it, ‘winning ground’.
On the Train
Q Which train crash was it?
A The Paddington train crash of October 1999
Q Did you write it at the time of the crash?
A My poems try to be truthful as well as accurately factual. I find the best way to make the poem live is to begin with the here and now. The poem was written, as you see from the details, on a train at about 8 in the morning as the crash was being reported on Radio 4’s Today programme. I was travelling from Manchester to Wales, not, as I often do, from Paddington.
Q What is ‘the blazing bone-ship’?
A The coach which was on fire, containing an unknown number of passengers.
Q Was it an image for a place of death? The station, maybe? A charnel house?
A I wasn’t thinking of a charnel house, though I agree the words suggest it as a possible image. I was thinking of the burning funeral ships the Celts used to push out to sea, containing the bodies of their heroes. I wanted to suggest something noble, tragic, heroic, because real people would be grieving, and deserved no less than the dignity of the noblest image I could conjure.
Q Why do you mention mobile phones? They’re not very poetic.
A I hope I’ve made them poetic. It’s a poet’s job to use real things and make it into poetry. The mobile phone is the modern messenger of love and tragedy as well as chat. They featured too in the tragic events in New York on September 11th. At the time of the train crash the mobile phone’s favourite cliché, ‘I’m on the train’, was suddenly the most important message in the world.
Peregrine Falcon
Q Who is the person speaking in the poem?
A 'I' in verse two, and 'we' in verse 5, tell you that the viewpoint is the poet's, that the poet is not alone to witness the peregrine killing and butchering the pigeon.
Q What is the scullery?
A It’s a special room next to a kitchen in an old house, and it’s where the washing up was done. I chose it for its old associations, and its sound. I like the way the word echoes ‘skull’, a place of skulls, the peregrine’s kitchen and killing place. Note the word ‘table’ in verse 3.
Q Why is her house air?
A Because birds live in the air. The air is their staircase.
Q What do you mean by : ‘I touch the raw wire/ of vertigo/ feet from the edge'?
A Vertigo is a fear of heights. It's like an electric shock, like touching a raw wire.
Q What is ‘the edge’?
A Since vertigo is fear of heights, 'the edge' must be the edge of a cliff or quarry. Peregrine falcons nest on cliffs. The peregrine in the poem killed her prey on the cliff before taking it back to her nest half way down the cliff face. The meaning is in the language. The language suggests height, flight, descent, falling, the sky, the earth.
Q What does 'The pigeon bursts like a city' mean?.
A This is my personal favourite image. Have you seen news footage of aerial bombing? I imply the bursting of intricate, perfect complexity, heart, arteries, lungs, feathers, bones, like streets, centres of government, galleries, cathedrals, etc.
Plums
This is a love poem, but it is also about a year when our plum trees produced a particularly abundant crop of fruit, as happens every few years. The poem celebrates the moment lived fully, and the final line recognises that the joy and the beautiful summer won’t last forever.
Ram
The skeleton of the ram lay on a mountain called the Fan, (pronounced Van) in the Brecon Beacons in South Wales. It is a meditation on the life, death and disintegration of the ram, while taking a close look at the skull, a beautiful object picked clean, washed and bleached by sun and rain. The poem links the skull of the ram with the mountain landscape where it lies. It ends with images of life and fruitfulness, and suggests, and rejects, a new use for the skull.
Scything
I am often asked if a poem is personal. I reply, not personal, but true. All writers use personal experience, even those who seem to be making things up. All poets , all fiction writers, use a mixture of experience and imaginative invention.
‘Scything’ is about a mother and her 11 year old son clearing long grass and brambles from a country garden. They are using a scythe. They are sad about something, working quietly. Silence is mentioned twice in the poem. They accidentally destroy a willow warbler’s nest. This event is the catalyst that breaks the silence. They are so upset that for a moment they blame each other, the way people do in any family at a high emotional moment. Restraint is gone. They first shout, then weep, then feel guilty and sad. All of a beautiful May day the little bird reminds them of their hurt, their regret, their guilt, as she searches for her lost nest of eggs. The song of the willow warbler is one the loveliest songs of the spring garden. The mother bird searched in silence, and the potential birdsong of a nest of fledglings was lost too.
A mother always feels guilty when she shouts at her child. I have not revealed in the poem what the cause of their sorrow was. In a way it is not important to know the cause. However, in the context of the collection in Six Women Poets students might like to know that the poem was written at the same time as ‘White Roses’, and that the death of the young boy in that poem is what weighs on the minds of mother and son in ‘Scything’. The boys were best friends. For some reason grief is always associated with guilt. When we grieve for someone we also feel glad and guilty to be alive and healthy. We wish we had done more for the dying, or dead person.
The scythe is a real tool, and we were using it to cut the grass. I never tell lies in a poem. If I say I am using a scythe, it is true. But the scythe is also often seen as a symbol of death, and death often portrayed as a reaper carrying a scythe. Thus Death is the harvester, taking life when its time has come. In Welsh we talk of ‘killing’ the corn. Yet how can we say that a twelve year old boy’s time has come? It was no more time for a 12 year old to die than for the hatching eggs of a willow warbler to be destroyed. The scythe was a ‘scalpel’, the shell the bones of babies.
In the last line I recall the heat of birth, of the sudden breaking of birth waters, the waters of life. I intend the poem to end with life, not death, and of course the mother and son are soon sorry for shouting, talking about their grief at last, and able to comfort each other.
Seamstress at St Leon
This is the second of three poems here included taken from a journal from France. It’s an attempt to capture the atmosphere of an afternoon using the details of what we saw, heard and sensed. We stopped to look at the river, and noticed a house where a seamstress lived. She was absent, but the signs of her recent presence and of her needlework were everywhere: her tea, her cloth, silks, sewing machines. Even her garden looked as though she had embroidered it. Flowers and greenery covered her little house. The Singers are her old, treadle sewing machines.
Shadows in Llanbadarn
This is a poem of observation. It’s about watching, from an upstairs window, a kitten playing on a ladder leaning on a wall, and ‘you’ (my husband) working in the garden, while the sun slowly sank in the sky leaving the garden in shadow. It’s autumn. The days are shortening. Then ‘you’ disappear into the house. ‘Your shadow turns.’ I see only his shadow, then hear him climbing the stairs.
I’m enjoying the game of rhyme, the parallel themes of a scene and a day and a season ending. Even such a simple scene is to be relished while it lasts.
Sheila na Gig at Kilpeck
The ‘Sheila na Gig’ is a Celtic fertility figure carved, in this case, as a corbel stone which is part of a frieze of beautiful carved figures running round the eaves of Kilpeck Church, on the Welsh Borders of Herefordshire. I take a personal, female view of the figure, and consider the bodily upheavals of the birthing mother. In her case, of course, she is a fertility goddess and therefore responsible for all fruitfulness. Inside every woman there is a ‘clock’ regulating menstruation, pregnancy, menopause. I imagine it as a little golden clock, a miraculous mechanism made of perfectly turning gold cogs. There are many symbols of sexuality and birth in the poem.
Siege
We live in a world where what is happening on the other side of the world often seems as close as what is happening in our own homes. This affects us, and makes us conscious of things never known to poets who wrote before radio, television, e-mail, the internet, the mobile phone. A poet writing now cannot leave out of her work what she knows is happening in the wider world.
The siege happened at the Iranian embassy in London, in the 1980s. Nine people, (I think) were shot dead when the police stormed the building, and it happened live on radio and television. It was one of the first occasions that people died as we watched or listened to a live broadcast, and it was very shocking - as shocking then as the twin towers was in 2001.
There are shifts both of place and of time in the poem - I am interested in these shifts, and have tried to write about them more than once. The scene shifts between the garden outside the kitchen window of the family house where I was born and lived until 1984, and the Iranian embassy in London. Time shifts between the summer day in the ‘80s when the siege happened, the photographs were sorted, and the poem was written, to the past when I was a baby, or even before I was born. The scenes of the past are conjured by the pile of old photographs on the kitchen table. The events of the poem’s present are shown in ordinary type. The events in the photographs are shown in italicised, indented verses.
What am I trying to do in this poem? To make the writer’s mind the stage on which all the drama happens. To show that, in one garden, on one summer day, an embassy is stormed, 9 people die while a yellow butterfly is crossing a lawn, blossoms open while blood flows, I write a poem, and sort photographs. Outside the window in the garden my father holds me in his arms 40 years earlier; my mother, even earlier, poses for a picture holding the bridle of a horse. In verse 3, lines 7-10, is a memory of riding over the field and down the lane on the top of a load of hay, when I was a child on my grandmother’s farm.
In the last verse, the wren sings - our smallest bird produces more young than any other - thus ‘that song of lust and burgeoning’. My parents’ images from the photographs stand in the garden, ‘never clearer’, the butterfly has almost reached the other side of the garden, and 9 people are dead in London. These things crossed the barriers of space and time. They happened in the poem’s now, in the poet’s consciousness, and it was all over in a few minutes.
Suicide on Pentwyn Bridge
This story is true, half heard from people talking about it, half learned from the local newspaper. Pentwyn Bridge carries a road over a dual carriageway in Cardiff. A man told his terrified wife he was going out to kill himself. He jumped from the bridge and was severely injured. He died many months later, never having left hospital.
Sunday
This poem is a detailed description of the pleasures of getting up early on a spring Sunday morning in Cyncoed, a leafy suburb of Cardiff, of enjoying the sunshine and silence before the family wake up. Then I turn to the newspapers, and the world’s news of war, famine, cruelty, terrorism, bring the shadow of a warning to spoil the morning’s simple joy.
Swimming with Seals
Q Did you really swim with seals?
A Yes. It’s quite common in west Wales to find seals or dolphins swimming in the sea quite close to people.
Q Why are there two horizons?
A One is the real one, where the sea meets the sky. The other is the one you see when you’re swimming, where the surface of the sea meets the submarine world. If you duck your head you see that other world.
Q What are the stars and shoals?
A Starfish, little shoals of fish and seaweed, like a garden.
Q Why do you say the elderly bask at the edge of what they’ve lost?
A People who never get out of their cars, but just look at the sea through the car windscreen, or binoculars, have forgotten what they’re missing.
Q When you say ‘she’s gone’, who are you talking about?
A The seal.
Q Why do you say ‘all earth’s weight’ is beneath the old?
A Gravity, the pull of the earth. Children seem light footed, denying gravity, but old people seem to be pulled down towards the earth.
Q What do you mean by ‘rolling in amnion’?
A Amnion is the amniotic fluid, or waters of the womb. The seals is pregnant. Her calf, or pup, will be born in autumn. We are swimming, diving under the water to look at the submarine world. We are swimming underwater like the seal pup in the womb.
Taid’s Funeral
Taid is a Welsh word for Grandfather. My Taid died when I was about 2 years old. One day when I was about 18, searching for something in a drawer, I found a scrap of the dress I had worn as a two-year old child on that long ago day. Suddenly, in a flash, I remembered the funeral. In the poem I struggle to remember more details from that day and to understand what I remembered. Yet the images remain a puzzle, and the child’s eye view of them renders them merely mysterious to the adult mind.
The Field Mouse
Q Why is the long grass a ‘snare drum’?
A The insects in the grass make the field sound like a snare drum.
Q What does ‘the air hums with jets’ mean?
A The jets are military aircraft, practising low flying over hill country. When war threatens somewhere in the world, and Britain is involved, the activity increases. The noise is sometimes a terrifyingly sudden scream, and sometimes a continuous roar, like deep humming.
Q What is the ‘terrible news’ on the radio?
A It was the war in Bosnia, in the former Yugoslavia.
Q What is lime?
A This lime comes from limestone, and is naturally present in alkaline soil. In acid soil lime is deficient, and farmers add it to help the crops to grow. It sweetens the soil, so I describe the cloud drifting onto our land as ‘a chance gift of sweetness’.
Q Why do you talk about Summer in Europe’?
A British people and Bosnian people are both Europeans. We are alike. Summer, whether in the countryside in Wales (where I am) or in Bosnia, is hay making time. Farmers cut long grass, dry it, and store it to feed their animals in the winter. They wait for a good weather forecast before cutting the hay, as it needs to dry in the sun for a few days before it is baled and stored. All children love playing in the hay. It is a sunny, happy, busy time.
Q So why do ‘the fields hurt’?
A Small animals get killed in the long grass during hay making. Think also of the word ‘battlefield’. Here, little creatures were killed. In Bosnia men, women and children were killed. We call hay making cutting the hay, but the Welsh equivalent translates as ‘killing the hay’.
Q Who are the children and what are they staring at?
A There are two countries, Wales and Bosnia, and two groups of children, here, and there. The children here are sad to see small animals injured. In Bosnia the children see people die. I’m also thinking of the children of the world watching adults wreck our planet. They stare at what we, the adults, have crushed.
Q What do you mean by ‘the wrong that woke from a rumour of pain’?
A The rumour of pain, the world’s pain, comes from the media, wars and rumours of wars. I am reminded of the world’s troubles by the sight of the injured field mouse brought to me by a four year old boy. We try to save the mouse. It is tiny, but its agony is as big as if it were a man. It has been hurt by accident, but it reminds me of the war I’ve been trying to forget about all day, I’ve been trying to enjoy a happy day in the sunshine, picnicking with the children in the hayfield. The death of one small mouse brings the pain close.
Q What do the last lines of the poem mean?
A It’s a nightmare, a bad dream about the children being as frail and vulnerable as field mice, and there’s gunfire in the air. The poem asks what if this were Bosnia, and my neighbour hated me just because we had different religions and different ethnic backgrounds? What if instead of a cloud of lime he threw stones at me?
The Sundial
The poem is about a child who makes a sundial out of 12 stones and a broken bean stick. It is also about time, about light and shade, about a child’s nightmare, stone circles, lions in the night and the lion-sun burning down on a garden next day.
Owain is a six year old boy who wakes at night from a bad dream, shouting to his mother that there is a lion in his bedroom. The poem is written next day, a hot summer day which mother and child spend in the garden. After a sleepless night the child is quiet, ‘dry and pale’, ‘intelligently adult’. The fever has made him still, able to concentrate on his task. The mother is tired, sleepily watching as the child works out where to place the stones. He checks the time on his watch, and places a stone where the shadow cast by the stick falls on the circle of paper. This is ‘the mathematics of sunshine’. Primitive people used the ‘mathematics of sunshine’ when they raised stone circles such as Stonehenge, calculating from sunlight and shadows the hours of the day and the seasons of the year.
The sun is the lion of the child’s frightening dream. In children’s books, illustrations of a lion’s face or the face of the sun look similar. Time is a circle. The clock face is a circle. At the end of the poem the lion-sun becomes the lion trainer, takes up the whip and points it at mother and child. We are ‘caged’. We can’t escape time.
Why does the mother think about time as she watches her child, recovering from a fever? Does the language and imagery of the poem suggest anxiety? If, in the early hours of the morning, a child wakes screaming, hot and frightened, would any parent fear the worst?
The Vet
Q Is it a true story?
A As true as I can remember it.
Q Who’s speaking in the first two lines?
A The vet. It was my grandmother’s farm. The cow was about to calve. I’d never seen a calf born and I wanted to be there. I wanted to be a vet when I grew up. The cow was in trouble and the vet thought I was too young to watch, in case it turned out badly.
Q How old were you?
A I don’t know. 8. 10. Something like that.
Q Why did you say you were stuck with it?
A When you’ve whinged and wined for something, it’s hard to admit you’ve changed your mind. I was a bit scared by what the vet said, but I stayed anyway, ‘brazening out the cowshed and the chance of horror’.
Q Why do you use a word like brazening and what does it mean?
A Adults used to say someone was ‘brazen’, or ‘bold as brass’, cheeky, never admitting you’re wrong. I use brazening as a verb. If you use a good verb you never need an adverb. I chose all the verbs carefully: ‘brazening’, ‘gloved’, ‘wrenched’, ‘hung’, ‘swam’, ‘furled’. I think they make a difference. What if, instead, I’d used something like ‘was’, ‘went’, ‘came’, or ‘did’ instead of some of those words?
Q Why do you say the cow’s belly is a cathedral?
A I’ve often thought that walking in a cathedral is like being inside the rib cage of a giant animal. A baby is small, curled inside the bag of water in the mother’s body. Her heart beats like a bell in the ears of the baby. Bells tell us the time. It was time for the calf to be born.
Q What is the horror?
A Well, it might have turned out badly. The cow had been calling for ages. You only send for the vet in an emergency. The calf might have died. I was scared.
Q What is the pool?
A The pool is the amniotic fluid in which the calf ‘swims’ before birth. When the vet broke the waters, it became ‘a rope of water’. The rope hints that you ring a church bell with a rope. In the last verse the calf is a salmon, and the waters are a waterfall.
Q Why do you say ‘his brimming mother’?
A The cow brims with milk, like a full vessel.
Q It has a happy ending, but why did you put in horror words like knife and butchery?
A I wanted a contrast between the worst that might have happened, and the beautiful moment when the calf was born, wet and shining, ready to be licked clean and fed by his mother. Magic!
The Water Diviner
In 1976, a hot dry year in Britain, the well ran dry at our little farmhouse in Ceredigion, used then as a retreat from the city, but where I now live. We called in a water diviner. Using a divining rod, holding it over the ground and walking slowly, he felt a tremor, then a strong pull, in the rod. He thus found a strong source of water under our garden. The bore hole was drilled, and water found 54 feet down.
Although divining is a respectable way of discovering underground water or minerals, the science is not understood. The procedure seemed almost like magic to me. The echo through the hose dipped into the deep borehole, as we waited for the water to rise and fill the pipe, really did sound like ‘dwr’, which is the Welsh word for water. Welsh is Britain’s first language, and was once spoken throughout Western Britain as far as central Scotland. That day, out of the deep and ancient earth, even the water spoke Welsh. A ‘thorough bass’ is a musical term.
White Rose
Q Is the poem true?
A If you read a prose story that begins:
‘Outside the green velvet sitting room white roses bloom after rain’,
you assume it is fiction, that the writer knows such a room and is using it to set the scene for an imagined story. If you read a poem that begins:
‘Outside the green velvet sitting room
white roses bloom after rain’
you know it’s a poem and assume it is a real place. You’d be right. Both poet and novelist use real places, one to serve invention, the other to serve truth.
Q What is the meaning of the poem?
A Do not trouble yourself with ‘meaning’. The poet doesn’t. Just read the poem and figure it out first as a narrative. I am telling you about something that happened.
First, picture the scene, meet the characters, take in the facts, follow the events. Once that is clear, you might notice the tricks language is playing on your imagination, the effects it is having on your own response. Then you’ll bring your mind, heart, experience to the language of the poem, and you will respond. You may find in your mind ideas that were not consciously recognised by the poet. That’s fine. That’s why poetry has such a power to work on us long after the poet has disappeared.
First the scene: a room, green velvet, white roses outside the window, sunlit but wet with recent rain. Roses: it must be summer. Velvet and roses: a suburb, maybe. You assume the poet is a neighbour or friend of the boy’s family.
Next, meet two people in the room: a sleeping boy, a person (the poet) watching over the boy. Note ‘cold bloom’, (the white rose of a tumour), ‘terrible speed’, ( a deadly missile), the ‘splinter of ice’ in his blood, (like the boy in the fairy story with the Ice Queen’s splinter moving towards his heart). The boy is very ill, so ill that he will die before the rose outside his window. He wakes and smiles bravely at his minder. He moves and the pain wakes and makes him grit his teeth. In the last line of verse 3, pain is a ‘red blaze’, a fire, and it burns him. He feels for a moment like Guy Fawkes on a bonfire, his bones are spars and bed-springs, like burning furniture. Even his beloved cat hurts him. The poet watches, terrified to see him suffer, hoping he will sleep again until his mother returns.
In the last verse he has died. Life is careless of the dead - the cat still tracks the thrush, the thrush hunts for a worm, the sun shines, and the rose lives a few more days before its petals fall. This shows the indifference of nature and the triumph of life over death. In the end these natural things live, and can console us, help us to grieve and be healed. So life wins, always.
Do think of a poem as a little story. Read it out loud in your head. Work it out for yourself. Every word counts. The whole meaning lies in the words. Sometimes layers of meaning come through slowly. No one, not even the poet, sees every possible meaning in a word or phrase all at once. Bring your own experience and response to understanding a poem.
Don’t invent what you can’t prove by quoting the poem. Don’t jump to conclusions before you’ve read every word and worked it out. Don’t assume the poem is the poet’s own life story. Poems are made from experience, imagination, a love of language, and a lot of creative energy.
A Difficult Birth Easter 1998
Q What’s the poem about?
A There are 3 stories tangled up here, and you need to know them:
1) 2000 years ago, the story goes, on the Friday before the day now known as Easter Sunday, Jesus was crucified, and his body placed in a tomb with a stone blocking the entrance. The story tells that later, when people went to look, the stone had been rolled away, and the body was gone. Christians believe he had risen from the dead.
2) The second story happened on Good Friday 1998. After 30 years of violence involving the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland, with the British Army as ‘piggy in the middle’, something called ‘the peace process’ was about to be agreed in Belfast. All sides had to sign it. And they did.
3) Story number three stars a five year old ewe (female sheep) who’d never had a lamb. She was due to lamb at any moment. She was 5, which is old for a first time lambing, so we were warned she might have trouble, and we might have to call the vet. The lambs were born safely, without the vet.
So what’s the poem about? Difficulties overcome.
Q Why is she ‘hoofing the straw’?
A She is making a nest. You can tell the ewe is in labour when she scrapes the ground with her hoof and turns round and round to make herself a bed.
Q Who are the whitecoats?
A Doctors, or those doctors who think they know more about birth than mothers do, and the ‘whitecoats’ symbolise know-alls who think they know better than nature does. The statement is slightly ironic, a note of caution rather than a serious condemnation of surgical intervention in birth. It is a gentle rebuke, not a condemnation of doctors, vets, or science.
Q What do you mean by her ‘opened door’?
A The ‘opened door’ is the exit from the womb after the first lamb was born. The second twin just slipped into the straw without a hitch.
Q What does ‘the stone rolled away’ mean?
A In a way there’s a word missing in the last line of the poem. I could have written, ‘the stone having rolled away’. Sometimes I read it like that, to make the meaning quite clear, but I don’t like the sound of it, and it’s not strictly needed. You should read the line slowly, with the last 3 words stressed: ‘the stone rolled away’. The image connects the empty tomb on Good Friday 2000 years ago, the womb of the ewe once the first lamb is born, and the prospect of peace at last in Northern Ireland. In all three cases, life wins.
Baby-Sitting
Q My teacher and some of my class think the poem is about post-natal depression. I think it's about baby-sitting. Who is right?
A You are right. You've listened carefully to the language of the poem, and trusted the poet. The evidence is on your side. Start with the title: 'Baby-Sitting'. This is a deliberate choice, and intended to guide the reader. In line 1 and line 2 there are two important words: 'strange' to describe the room, and 'wrong' to describe the baby. I, the baby-sitter, am telling you, the reader, that I am sitting in an unfamiliar room, not in my own house. Then I tell you that I am listening for 'the wrong baby', that is, not my baby. Later, I emphasise this: 'I don't love this baby.' Look at the last two lines of the first verse: that this baby's breath 'fails to enchant me' implies that I understand the experience of being enchanted by a baby's breath. I use the word 'perfume' - something joyfully experienced as a mother.
The second verse is all about the baby's feeling in the company of a stranger. It describes the baby's fear and loneliness. Further proof that the baby-sitter is not sorry for herself, but sorry for the baby.
Readers who think about post natal depression must say that it is THEIR thought, and must first take note of the clear intention of the poet before they add their own thoughts
Q What is 'the monstrous land'?
A The baby's bad dream. Maybe what woke the baby was a dream about monsters.
Q Why have you used the words 'snuffly, roseate, bubbling sleep.'?
A The words describe a baby sleeping, snuffly, with rosy cheeks and a bubbly nose.
Q Why have you used capital letters at the start of each line even when it's not a new sentence?
A I wrote the poem a long time ago. Poems used to be printed with capital letters at the start of the line. I don't do it now. I think it looks old fashioned.
Q What do you mean by ‘the wrong baby’?
A From its birth a baby knows its own mother, and a mother knows her baby. There is, usually, a powerful bond from the start. There has to be for us human beings to survive. If you watch a flock of sheep you’ll see how the lambs, which all look the same to us, run crying to find their mothers. The ‘wrong baby’ is the wrong lamb. There is no bond between the baby sitter and the baby, so they are wrong for each other.
Q Why are you afraid of the baby?
A The baby sitter is scared that the baby will wake, and she won’t be able to comfort her.
Q What is ‘the bleached bone in the terminal ward’?
A I imagine a man dying in a hospital ward, the curtains drawn about his bed, his wife watching. His body is a bony shape under the white sheet, like, I thought, a ‘bleached bone’ on a beach. Surely a baby crying for its mother feels as abandoned as that woman seeing her husband die. I am still surprised that such a bleak image came to me as I wrote about such an ordinary activity as baby sitting. I was trying to look at loss from a baby’s point of view.
Blodeuwedd
(‘blodau’: flowers: Welsh)
Blodeuwedd is a character from the British (Welsh) mythology called The Mabinogion. Lleu needed a wife, and Blodeuwedd was created for him out of flowers by a wizard called Gwydion. According to the myth the flowers were yellow broom, meadow sweet and oak blossom. After a period of contentment Blodeuwedd fell in love with another man. They plotted to kill Lleu. Gwydion punished her by turning her into an owl, condemned to the night without human company or the company of birds.
Hendre is a farmhouse in mountains close to the sea in Gwynedd, North Wales, where I was staying with two woman friends. A colony of barn owls lived in an old building close to the farm. We couldn’t help thinking about Blodeuwedd as we heard the owls calling.
Buzzard
This poem considers, observes and describes with great care a simple and beautiful thing - the skull of a buzzard. In the last three verses the bird is imagined alive and hunting, falling from the sky in one swift stoop on a mouse moving in a barley field.
Cardiff Elms
Since the arrival of Dutch Elm Disease in Britain in the 1970s, almost all the elm trees in our landscape have disappeared. Cardiff City Centre had a magnificent avenue of elm trees, flanking a wide, rose-red road, running between fine, white stone buildings. I loved them since my university days, when every day I walked in their shade on my way to lectures. This poem is about their loss.
Catrin
Q What's the poem about?
A Why did my beautiful baby have to become a teenager! At least, I think that's what it's about.
Q What is 'the tight red rope of love'?
A The umbilical cord.
Q So what's 'that old rope'
A The invisible umbilical cord that ties parents and children even when children grow up. I was also thinking of the image of a boat tied to a harbour wall. The rope is hidden. The boat looks as if it's free, but it isn't.
Q Couldn't it be the tug of war between teenager and parent?
A Brilliant! I hadn't thought of that. It proves that if you bring your personal experience to a poem you find ever deeper layers of meaning in the words.
Q Or about letting your child go?
A Even more brilliant.
Q In the last lines is an image of the daughter asking to 'skate in the dark for one more hour'. Isn't that the baby in the womb wanting to 'skate in the dark' one more hour before being born?
A A beautiful, amazing question! You've seen something I didn't see when I wrote the poem. It proves that poems are not carved in stone. Interpretations change as the world changes. When Catrin was born they didn't scan babies in the womb. Now we all know what a baby in the womb looks like, so your question gives the words new meaning. Nobody can stop you reading a poem in your own way, thank goodness.
Q So what did you mean by skating in the dark?
A Just that! Children asking if they could stay out in the street skating as darkness fell. I chose the request as an example of the sort of thing children want to do that mothers refuse. I chose it because it was a romantic, poetic request, and I wanted something that showed it is beautiful and dangerous to be young.
Q Doesn't 'in the dark' mean the mother and daughter have yet to explore their relationship?
A Another one I hadn't thought of. Of course you're right. The language proves it - 'in the dark' means not knowing something.
Q What is 'the glass tank'?
A The hospital.
Q Do the changing traffic lights symbolise the progress of labour and changing relationships?
A Another clever idea I hadn't thought of. I thought I was describing ordinary life going on in the city while inside the hospital momentous events were happening in people's lives.
Q What do you think about students analysing your poems and finding meanings you didn't intend?
A I'm grateful to you for reading them and for revealing to me what you find. Poets write instinctively, and don't always see every possible meaning in the words they choose. If you find something, and prove it with quotations, then it's there, and you're right, and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
Q Could 'that old rope' suggest the chains of DNA handed down from mother to daughter?
A It certainly could. When the poem was written the genetic map had not yet been written, nor had the method of identifying people from their DNA been used. This proves that poetry and language move on, and new meanings can be found.
Cold Knap Lake
Q Is it a real lake? If so, where is it?
A Yes, it is real. It is a large artificial lake in a park in Barry in South Wales. The name is haunting, because of the word ‘cold’. That’s one reason I remember the lake. I have written several poems about it.
Q Is it a true story?
A Yes, as true as I and my memory can make it. It happened when I was a young child, about 6.
Q Does it rhyme? Or is it just at the end?
A I use half rhyme, except for the last two lines which use full rhyme. Examples of half rhymes are ‘crowd’ and ‘dead’, ‘lake’ and silk’, where just the last letters rhyme. You will find rhyme in every verse, if you look and listen for it.
Q Why do you describe your mother’s dress as ‘her wartime cotton frock’?
A During the second World War, when I was a baby, and for several years afterwards, you couldn’t buy nice clothes. My mother, who was very young and pretty at the time, made all her own clothes, and mine and my sister’s too. The fashions were dull, and cut from the least possible cloth. Old photographs will show you what I mean. I deliberately use the old word ‘frock’, to conjure the period of the War.
Q What’s the ‘water’s long green silk’?
A Water weed, and streams of water falling from the child’s clothes.
Q Why did the family beat the child?
A I suppose because they were so upset that they’d nearly lost her.
Q What was the ‘poor house’?
A Just a shabby place. They were a poor family.
Q What does the 4th verse mean?
A When you recapture a memory from early childhood, you’re sometimes not sure if you were really there, if someone told you about it, or if you read it in a story. The lake was not deep, but deep enough to drown in. I’d read fairy stories and legends about people drowning in mysterious lakes. I’d seen a famous painting of a drowned girl floating in a brook. Lake stories often have swans in them. Swans can be fierce, and pretty scary to a child who thinks they are beautiful beings out of legend. The little girl nearly drowned. Did the swans try to take her to their kingdom under the water? That’s the kind of story that haunted me when I was a child. The rhyme at the end connects the real event with a fairy story, I think.
Death of a Cat
When he was a child, my son Dylan had a bad dream. He woke up to hear cats wailing outside. One of our cats had been run over by a car the day before, and we’d buried it in the garden. Dylan went to the window to see what was going on. It was dawn. He saw our other two cats sitting on the compost heap close to the grave, howling. It seemed as if they were grieving, holding a wake for their lost one.
East Moors
East Moors steelworks in Cardiff was closed about 30 years ago, leaving many people out of work. It was shut on the first of May, a cold wet May Day. Penylan is a comfortable suburb of Cardiff, Roath and Rumney are less affluent suburbs closer to the steelworks. The ‘two blue islands’ are Flatholm and Steepholm, landmarks in the Bristol Channel, visible from the hills on which Cardiff is built. I was born and brought up in Cardiff, and lived in an old family house. The poem tells a true story, the details accurately noted.
Friesian Bull
The Friesian bull, like the male of most breeds of dairy cattle, is a dangerous animal, and must be kept confined in a strong pen. The bull was on my uncle’s farm on the banks of the River Dee in North Wales. The bull could always be heard crashing about in his stall, knocking the steel bars, kicking and bellowing. The heifer (young female) could only be brought to him for fertilisation by confining her in a narrow passage, too narrow for the bull, and then raising the iron gate between the bull and the heifer. It seemed to me a sad and savage procedure. Yet he had been a calf once, in a field under the sky. His ancestors roamed freely in herds. Do the scents on the wind remind him of these things?
Heron at Port Talbot
Port Talbot, in South Wales, has a famous steel works which dominates the town, but which has been declining for many years. The town, flanked by the motorway (M4), lies between the sea and the mountains, and would be beautiful were it not for the industrial sprawl of the works. In the incident I describe, I was driving in a snow storm, when a heron flew off the waters of a lake on the sea side of the M4, heading inland for the mountains. It flew right across my windscreen, close enough to see his eye. It was a moment of danger, but also of intimacy with the creature. Both of us were scared. Both ‘braked’. Both, I guess, continued our journey with faster beating hearts.
Jac Codi Baw
‘Jac Codi Baw’ is the Welsh child’s name for a J.C.B digger machine, and it translates literally as Jack Dig Dirt. The poem tells what happened. In the two hours it took to do some shopping, a fine old warehouse was reduced to a pile of rubble. The street looked completely unfamiliar. Everything was covered with dust. The familiar city skyline was suddenly strange.
Kingfishers at Condat
This is one of three poems from a journal written on a holiday in France. It’s an account of an incident on a hot September afternoon at Condat, a small town in the Dordogne. The rivers Coly and Vezere meet in a confluence near Condat, where we swam and watched kingfishers flashing over the water. Later, into the peaceful scene where we sit thinking about our happy day, a gang of bikers roar in to the square, as bright as kingfishers, but loud, intrusive. The kingfishers’ electric blue flashed secretly, silently, like private joy.
Lament
‘Lament’ is an elegy, an expression of grief. It can be a sad, military tune played on a bugle. The poem uses the title as the start of a list of lamented people, events, creatures and other things hurt in the war, so after the word ‘lament’, every verse, and 11 lines, begin with ‘for’.
The poem is about the Gulf War, which happened in 1991 when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the United States, with Britain’s help, bombed Iraq. This war has never really stopped. As we begin a new school year, it still threatens the world.
War can’t be waged without grave damage to every aspect of life. All the details in the poem came from reports in the media. There were newspaper photographs of cormorants covered with oil - ‘in his funeral silk’. ‘The veil of iridescence on the sand’ and ‘the shadow on the sea’ show the spreading stain of oil from bombed oil wells. The burning oil seemed to put the sun out, and poisoned the land and the sea. The ‘boy fusilier who joined for the company,’ and ‘the farmer’s sons, in it for the music’, came from hearing radio interviews with their mothers. The creatures were listed by Friends of the Earth as being at risk of destruction by oil pollution, and ‘the soldier in his uniform of fire’ was a horrific photograph of a soldier burnt when his tank was bombed. The ashes of language are the death of truth during war
Last Rites
Q Is the story true?
A Yes. If a poem uses the poet’s own voice, and tells a story from his or her own viewpoint, it is true. The point of view, the personal voice, the place names, the reference to an inquest, the precise description, all tell you it is fact. Sometimes a poet takes the viewpoint of a character, not his or her self. Then the poet uses imagination.
Q What happened?
A It’s all in the poem. On a beautiful morning in the longest, hottest summer I ever remember, a 20 year old motor cyclist was killed in a collision with a milk tanker. His fiancee was saved. It happened 50 metres from my house, in the quiet countryside.
Q What does ‘stigmata’ mean?
A It’s the wound made by nails in the hands and feet of Jesus when he was crucified.
Q Why do you say the road ‘has kept its stigmata of dust and barley seed’?
A It was the ‘summer of the long drought, 1976 - there was no significant rain for about 9 months, from January to September - so there was not a stream, pond or puddle for the policeman to get water to wash the blood and oil from the road. He gathered handfuls of barley and earth from the field, and threw it onto the mess on the road. There was no rain for several more months, so the stain remained on the road, like the scar of the stigmata that won’t heal.
Q Does ‘a mains hum only, no message coning through’ refer to an emergency phone call?
A If you put the three lines together, you will notice that the image connects the pulse with the radio message. ‘His pulse dangerous in my hands/ A mains hum only, no message/ Coming through’. I was thinking of the mains hum on a radio after the station has closed down. His pulse is beating still, but his brain is dead. However, I can see it might also make you think of a phone call, so that’s a good idea too.
Q Why do you call it ‘Last Rites’?
A The image is a priest giving the last rites of the church to a dying person. All I could do was cover him with a blanket, and wait by his side until the emergency services arrived.
Q Who is ‘his cariad’?
A His fiancee. It’s a Welsh word for a person you love.
Q Does ‘his blood on my hands’ mean you felt guilty?
A Yes. His real blood was on my hands, but we all feel guilty at being alive when someone else dies in tragic circumstances.
Les Grottes
This two-part poem (one of three in the collection) from the French journal refers to two of the famous caves (les grottes: the caves) of the Dordogne. They are magnificent, cathedral-like places, their walls painted and carved with images of animals by the people who lived in them and used them thousands of years ago. They were originally hollowed from the limestone millions of years ago by the force of rivers.
1. Rouffinac
The contrast between the summer heat above ground and the icy cold of the underground caves is striking. In the first poem, the mammoth look as innocent as a ‘nursery frieze’, the parade of animals on a child’s bedroom wall, or in a circus. But the place is haunted with thoughts of the tribes who carved these images, the savage lives they lived, and, even longer ago, before mankind lived on earth, the long millennia when the rivers were cutting the caves out of ancient rock:
‘The Vezere is a ghost,/ its footprints everywhere./ Even the kitchen taps// run cloudy into the palms/ of our hands, fill our mouths/ with chalk.’
You can see and taste the chalk in water that flows out of limestone.
2. Font de Gaume
In this poem I am struck by human creativity, the one characteristic which distinguishes human from other animals. I am inspired to write a poem. 14,000 years ago early human beings were inspired to carve images. Imagination cries for symbols, for the means to create, for tools, a pen, a chisel, to rejoice, celebrate, lament, praise, remember, or to please the gods. Suddenly that artist from so long ago seems to be, not a savage, but my brother or my sister.
Letters from Bosnia
In the closing decade of the 20th century, all the small countries that formed the former Yugoslavia declared their wish to be free. Croatia, Serbia, and other smaller countries, had been rolled into one, big country, Yugoslavia, which had been ruled for most of the 20th century as a single, atheist, communist state, although many of its people were Muslim and many were Christian. When the Bosnian people wanted their freedom, the Serbian army used brutal force in an effort to suppress them. It was a terrible war. Many innocent people died. People were murdered for their religion or their ethnic identity. Christians and Muslims who had been good neighbours became suspicious of each other. Peaceful communities were destroyed. Friends became enemies.
As in many towns in Britain, the people in the small mid-Wales town of Llanidloes collected money, food, clothes and blankets and sent them to Bosnia. The children in the primary school sent letters to children in Vites, and pen friendships were formed. One April day just before Easter I was writing poetry with the children when the post arrived from Bosnia. One letter was from Misha to Ben. There were Easter cards made by the Bosnian children, and a photograph of the class in Vites. They looked exactly like Welsh children, smiling in the sunshine in their tee shirts and trainers, some signalling, thumbs up, for the camera. Behind them was a shabby wall, marked by what looked like bullet holes.
All this is in the poem. Read it, and find the facts, all set out in as few words as possible. In a poem every word counts. One word often serves two purposes. The children in Llanidloes are also the children in Vites. The European spring is happening is in Wales and Bosnia. We share Easter. We are all Europeans. ‘April is all indecision’, just as Europe is. The cherry blossom is beautiful, but it is torn by sharp April rain, just as the beautiful children are torn by sudden war. The ‘bullet holes’ in the final line is intended to be shocking, and a warning. What if it happened here?
Llŷr
Llŷr, a British King whose story is told in the Mabinogion (British/Welsh mythology), is the source of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The poem was commissioned by the late Sam Wanamaker for an anthology called ‘Poems for Shakespeare’.
The idea for my poem arose while I was staying in a house in the Llyn peninsula in North Wales, close to the then home of the great Welsh poet R.S.Thomas, who was often to be seen striding the cliffs of Llyn. (He appears in the poem in verse 2, line 9). The two settings of the poem are the mountain-seascape where it was written, and the remembered experience of seeing my first Shakespeare play, ‘King Lear’, at Stratford on Avon when I was 10 years old. ‘River’ in Welsh is ‘afon’, the ‘f’ pronounced ‘v’. It’s the origin of the name of the River Avon.
The poem was at first written as three sonnets, but I abandoned the formal rhyme scheme in favour of a more natural use of echoes and half-rhymes while using iambic pentameter, until the final rhyming verse, and the closing couplet. There are several references and quotations from King Lear in the poem. ‘Nothing’, for example, is all Cordelia had to say when her father, Lear, demanded a public declaration of love from her.
Login
Login is a small village in Carmarthenshire. The title and first three lines of description set the scene for the story of how a return visit to the village results in a surprising and romantic discovery. The words portray a pretty village deep in a valley at the foot of a steep, wooded hill. The day is hot. It is summer. All this is sketched in the first 3 lines.
The story is told from the point of view of the poet, the ‘I’ in lines 4 and 5. Then verse 2, line 2, introduces a second person, a woman who opens her cottage door to the poet’s knock. They don’t know each other, but the poet hopes that the woman will remember her father. The place is connected with her father’s youth. The poem suggests that her father is dead.
Although the poem does not say so, you can infer from verses 2 and 3 that the woman who opens the door and lets the strangers in does indeed remember him. His name is enough for the poet and her young son to ‘gain entry’. The welcome is warm. The woman brings tea, spreads a lace cloth - a special cloth for important visitors - on the table. She ‘ruffles my son’s brown hair’, an intimate action which suggests that she sees in the boy someone she once loved. The fact that past love is hinted at but not spoken of lies in the atmosphere, the language chosen, the mood of the poem. There are hints in those ‘glances converging’ that ‘could not span such giddy water’. Love lies in language like ‘headlong fall’, ‘fast water’, ‘the bridge burns’, ‘brilliance’. The landscape is described in a passionate language.
In the final verse the boy runs down the lane to the bridge while the two women linger, saying goodbye. The poet imagines her son, many years later, looking back on this day and remembering how he saw his mother and the woman standing in the sun. He might think of it like an old photograph, just as his mother thinks of the past love between her father and this elderly woman as being like a faded sepia photograph from another age.
I am fascinated by the way the past, present and future can converge in one place. This poem has something in common with ‘Siege’, where I make connections between the past and the present as well between the ‘here’ of the poem and something happening at that moment far away.
Mali
Q Why did you write the poem?
A ‘Mali’ celebrates the birth of a first granddaughter. The first 3 verses recall a beautiful September day when a young woman went into labour 3 weeks early at her mother’s house by the sea. They drove to the nearest hospital where the baby was born quickly and easily. Next day the family took the new baby to the beach. Verse four, exactly three years later, describes the child’s third birthday celebration at the same house by the sea.
Q What are the ‘three drops of last blood?
A The birth of a baby involves great commitment. It’s a ‘life sentence’. The ‘blood’ in the poem is the blood of belonging, tribal, genetic, as well as the blood of fertility, birth, menstruation. Last blood is the very last drop of menstrual blood in a woman’s life. No woman ever knows at the time when last blood has been shed. One generation’s fertility ends in blood, and the next generation arrives in blood.
Q What’s the poem about?
A The poem is about babies, generations, and time. The body has an internal clock. Planet Earth too has a clock that makes night and day, and the seasons of the year. Shakespeare said: “Ripeness is all.” There are words and phrases in the poem connecting the ripeness of the body with the ripeness of the season. The tides of the sea are pulled by the moon’s gravitational force. The moon has the same 28 day rhythm as an average woman has. There’s a symbolic connection between the moon and the sea, and the moon and women. In the last verse it is September again, three years later, time for a party, a cake, balloons, candles. So, as well as being a poem about babies, I suppose it’s about Life, the Universe, and Everything.
PS: Teachers may like to know that ‘Mali’ is fifth in a sequence of 7 poems under the general title, ‘Blood’. The sequence is published in my collection, The King of Britain’s Daughter. (Carcanet Press). There are clues in other poems in the sequence that cast light on ‘Mali’, phrases such as ‘brim of blood’, ‘dish of seed’, ‘the silted well’, ‘a taste of salt’, ‘month of the high tides’, and words like newborn, afterbirth, quicken, sea and moon.
Marged
Marged - Welsh for Margaret - killed herself in 1930, in the house where I now live. She died as a result of poverty. In ‘Letter from a Far Country' I imagine that tragic day,
'Middle-aged, poor, isolated,
she could not recover
from mourning an old parent's death.
Influenza brought an hour
too black, too narrow to escape.'
In the same long poem I describe the little house as I found it, and bought it, 40 years after her death, a neglected ruin.
'In that innocent smallholding
where the swallows live and field mice
winter and the sheep barge in
under the browbone, the windows
are blind, are doors for owls,
bolt—holes for dreams. The thoughts have flown.
The last death was a suicide.'
'Marged' is a sonnet. It has 14 lines, each with 5 strong beats, and a rhyme scheme that goes like this:
a,b,a,b/c,d,d,c/e,f,e,f/ g,g.
The form came naturally, following the tune of the first two lines. I used the pattern of the sonnet to tell a simple story, enjoying the contrast between form and content. The rhyme too seemed to fall into place.
'Parlwr' is Welsh - Marged's language - the word for one of two main rooms in her simple, traditional longhouse. A longhouse is a two roomed croft, with sleeping space in the roof, a barn, cowshed and dairy all under one roof.
In 1984, I moved from Cardiff to the countryside, to live alone, by choice, for one winter in Blaen Cwrt. The cottage was romantically primitive, with oil lamps, a wood-burning stove and spring water. It was far from romantic for Marged half a century earlier. The poem is prompted by my guilt about Marged's life and death, my gratitude for our life today in her house, my sympathy for her, as a woman, the things we had in common, the differences between us, between women's lives then and now. These differences lie in the poem's language: contrast the pleasures of
'Lighting the lamps, November afternoons,
a reading book, whisky gold in my glass.'
with Marged's isolation and poverty,
'the old dark parlwr where she died
alone in winter, ill and penniless'
Miracle on St David’s Day
Q Why did you write the poem?
A Because it happened. It’s a true story. I was invited to read poetry to patients in the Occupational Therapy Department of a mental hospital in South Wales. The reading was organised to celebrate St Davids Day - March 1st.
Q What are the links between your poem and Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’?
A The man who could not speak suddenly stood up and recited Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’, word for word, just as he had learned it when he was a child at school. I suppose the sight of the daffodils never left the mind of Wordsworth, and came to him whenever he was in a ‘pensive mood’, and the poem never left the mind of the man in the hospital. In both cases the sight of ten thousand daffodils set memory going, and fired the mind.
Q Why couldn’t he speak?
A He was what is called an elected mute. That is, he was dumb because of his mental illness, not from any physical cause. He was suffering from long-term depression.
Q What made him recite the poem?
A I think two things set the poem going in his mind. One was the daffodils in the room and in the grass outside. The other was that I was reading poetry. The rhythm of the poems and the sight of the daffodils reminded him that he had loved poetry once, and the moment set him free from dumbness.
Q What do you mean by the image of the woman ‘in a cage of first March sun’?
A The sun casts the shadows of window bars into the room. A woman sits in the sunlight and the shadows as if she is in a cage. She is also in the cage of her depression.
Q In verse 6, using words like ‘frozen’ and ‘still as wax’, you suggest an unlit candle. In the last line of the poem you light the candle. Is this a symbol of hope?
A A wonderful question. I hadn’t noticed the connection between ‘wax’ and the ‘flame’ at the end. But you are right. The words prove it. The way it works is that one image suggests another in the poet’s mind.
Q Why does the thrush sing?
A Because it did. We listened to the man reciting the poem, and when we fell silent for a moment before applauding him, a thrush began to sing just outside the window. It is surprising how often I have read this poem on the 1st March, and heard either a blackbird or a thrush sing outside an open window.
My Box
Q Why did you write the poem?
A I asked primary school children to write a poem called ‘My Box’. They had to think of a container - the sea, an acorn, anything that contained something - and write 3 verses, the first beginning, ‘My box is made of...’, verse 2 beginning, ‘In my box...’. The final verse must describe what you do with your box. We all wrote together in the classroom.
Q What inspired you?
A An oak box my husband made for my birthday. I keep my journals in it. I’ve kept a diary since I was 14. In the box are my journals. In the journals is my life.
Q Why do you say you found heartsease? Were you thinking of love?
A Because we found that flower, though I’m aware of the resonance in the name.
Q The poem doesn’t rhyme.
A Yes it does! The poem rhymes all the way through. The rhyme was made like music, by listening, not by following rules. The rhyme is clearly heard, less easily seen. It does not always occur at line endings. Sometimes it is half rhyme. Sometimes it is internal rhyme. The snag about conventional rhyme is that it can be predictable, and create a dum-de-dum poetry. I’m trying for something more subtle. I use repetition, chiming, half rhyme, and a few end rhymes.
Verse 1: ‘oak’ half rhymes with ‘lock’, ‘me’ with ‘key’, linking with ‘he’ on the next line. ‘Nights’ chimes with ‘bright’ (line 4), and if you read the last 2 lines without stopping till you get to the comma, you hear ‘brass’ repeated, and pick up the main rhyming ‘e’ sound in the words ‘a golden tree.’ The rhymes slow the poem, the details set the scene.
Verse 2: This verse breaks away from traditional rhyme and it’s all one sentence. But in line 1, ‘box’ rhymes with ‘books’. Lines 2 and 3 are linked by ‘down’ and ‘how’, lines 3 and 4 by ‘planed’ with ‘planted’, and so on to the refrain, ‘and planted a golden tree’.
Verse 3: This verse end-rhymes throughout, using just 3 rhyme sounds: ‘box’, ‘lock’, and ‘box’ again; ‘read’, ‘dead’, and ‘made’; ‘me’ and ‘tree’. The whole poem is held together by the repeating final line.
Q What rhythm did you choose?
A Verse 1 goes 4,3,4,3,4,3,4,3. Verse 2 is again the odd one out, to be read like a headlong list, and it goes 4,3,4,4,4,4,4,3. Verse 3 is back to the pattern of 4,3,4,3,4,3,4,3.
Q Did you use the building of a wall to symbolise building a marriage, and digging a well to symbolise making a relationship deeper?
A No, but that doesn’t mean you’re wrong. A poet selects details and facts to tell the story. I made it sound like a nursery rhyme with phrases like the golden oak, the bright key, the 12 black books, etc. But these are all real, and the wall and the well are real. We restored a derelict, 200 year old longhouse, made a garden, and drilled a 54 foot deep well, or borehole, to find a water supply. However, there are layers of meaning in language, so the symbolism is for you to find.
The trick is to write about it knowing the fact and symbolism. Accept the facts the poet presents you with - a box, a partner, books, a tree, birds, flowers, walls, a garden, and a well. These things set the scene and tell the story. Then you add your own interpretation, proving your point by quoting from the poem.
October
Q Who’s the poem about?
A A friend who was a poet and an actress. Her name was Frances Horovitz. When someone the same age as you dies, it is shocking. She was too young to die.
Q Why did you call it October?
A She died in October. It can be a sad month. Summer is over, as her life was. The weather was wet and stormy, reflecting our emotions.
Q Where are you in the first verse? Is it a different place from where the funeral took place?
A Yes, two different places. The first verse describes the scene in the garden on the October day when the poem was written. Summer’s finished, the flowers are dead. Wind has broken a branch in one of five poplar trees. The tree itself, and the other trees, are healthy and sound, their leaves turning gold - just as I and most of my friends and family were alive and well. There is a parallel between the trees and the friends, the living and the dead. I wrote the poem while remembering the funeral, a few days earlier, where rain and tears mixed on people’s faces.
Q Did you write the poem as therapy? If not, why did you write it?
A I make poems about everything because I am a poet, never for therapy, though poetry does help you to think about difficult things, like death.
Q What are the wind’s white steps? Why does the pen run?
A When wind blows over long grass, green turns silver. The death of a friend makes you determined to waste no time and to make the most of your life. So ‘I must write like the wind’. The wind over the grass turns into an image for the feeling of panic to see, experience, record everything.
Q Why does health feel like pain?
A When someone your age dies you feel guilty about being alive and well.
Q What is the death-day?
A We are all born. We all die. We know our birthday, but not our death day. I was suddenly aware that I pass that date every year without knowing it, ‘winning ground’.
On the Train
Q Which train crash was it?
A The Paddington train crash of October 1999
Q Did you write it at the time of the crash?
A My poems try to be truthful as well as accurately factual. I find the best way to make the poem live is to begin with the here and now. The poem was written, as you see from the details, on a train at about 8 in the morning as the crash was being reported on Radio 4’s Today programme. I was travelling from Manchester to Wales, not, as I often do, from Paddington.
Q What is ‘the blazing bone-ship’?
A The coach which was on fire, containing an unknown number of passengers.
Q Was it an image for a place of death? The station, maybe? A charnel house?
A I wasn’t thinking of a charnel house, though I agree the words suggest it as a possible image. I was thinking of the burning funeral ships the Celts used to push out to sea, containing the bodies of their heroes. I wanted to suggest something noble, tragic, heroic, because real people would be grieving, and deserved no less than the dignity of the noblest image I could conjure.
Q Why do you mention mobile phones? They’re not very poetic.
A I hope I’ve made them poetic. It’s a poet’s job to use real things and make it into poetry. The mobile phone is the modern messenger of love and tragedy as well as chat. They featured too in the tragic events in New York on September 11th. At the time of the train crash the mobile phone’s favourite cliché, ‘I’m on the train’, was suddenly the most important message in the world.
Peregrine Falcon
Q Who is the person speaking in the poem?
A 'I' in verse two, and 'we' in verse 5, tell you that the viewpoint is the poet's, that the poet is not alone to witness the peregrine killing and butchering the pigeon.
Q What is the scullery?
A It’s a special room next to a kitchen in an old house, and it’s where the washing up was done. I chose it for its old associations, and its sound. I like the way the word echoes ‘skull’, a place of skulls, the peregrine’s kitchen and killing place. Note the word ‘table’ in verse 3.
Q Why is her house air?
A Because birds live in the air. The air is their staircase.
Q What do you mean by : ‘I touch the raw wire/ of vertigo/ feet from the edge'?
A Vertigo is a fear of heights. It's like an electric shock, like touching a raw wire.
Q What is ‘the edge’?
A Since vertigo is fear of heights, 'the edge' must be the edge of a cliff or quarry. Peregrine falcons nest on cliffs. The peregrine in the poem killed her prey on the cliff before taking it back to her nest half way down the cliff face. The meaning is in the language. The language suggests height, flight, descent, falling, the sky, the earth.
Q What does 'The pigeon bursts like a city' mean?.
A This is my personal favourite image. Have you seen news footage of aerial bombing? I imply the bursting of intricate, perfect complexity, heart, arteries, lungs, feathers, bones, like streets, centres of government, galleries, cathedrals, etc.
Plums
This is a love poem, but it is also about a year when our plum trees produced a particularly abundant crop of fruit, as happens every few years. The poem celebrates the moment lived fully, and the final line recognises that the joy and the beautiful summer won’t last forever.
Ram
The skeleton of the ram lay on a mountain called the Fan, (pronounced Van) in the Brecon Beacons in South Wales. It is a meditation on the life, death and disintegration of the ram, while taking a close look at the skull, a beautiful object picked clean, washed and bleached by sun and rain. The poem links the skull of the ram with the mountain landscape where it lies. It ends with images of life and fruitfulness, and suggests, and rejects, a new use for the skull.
Scything
I am often asked if a poem is personal. I reply, not personal, but true. All writers use personal experience, even those who seem to be making things up. All poets , all fiction writers, use a mixture of experience and imaginative invention.
‘Scything’ is about a mother and her 11 year old son clearing long grass and brambles from a country garden. They are using a scythe. They are sad about something, working quietly. Silence is mentioned twice in the poem. They accidentally destroy a willow warbler’s nest. This event is the catalyst that breaks the silence. They are so upset that for a moment they blame each other, the way people do in any family at a high emotional moment. Restraint is gone. They first shout, then weep, then feel guilty and sad. All of a beautiful May day the little bird reminds them of their hurt, their regret, their guilt, as she searches for her lost nest of eggs. The song of the willow warbler is one the loveliest songs of the spring garden. The mother bird searched in silence, and the potential birdsong of a nest of fledglings was lost too.
A mother always feels guilty when she shouts at her child. I have not revealed in the poem what the cause of their sorrow was. In a way it is not important to know the cause. However, in the context of the collection in Six Women Poets students might like to know that the poem was written at the same time as ‘White Roses’, and that the death of the young boy in that poem is what weighs on the minds of mother and son in ‘Scything’. The boys were best friends. For some reason grief is always associated with guilt. When we grieve for someone we also feel glad and guilty to be alive and healthy. We wish we had done more for the dying, or dead person.
The scythe is a real tool, and we were using it to cut the grass. I never tell lies in a poem. If I say I am using a scythe, it is true. But the scythe is also often seen as a symbol of death, and death often portrayed as a reaper carrying a scythe. Thus Death is the harvester, taking life when its time has come. In Welsh we talk of ‘killing’ the corn. Yet how can we say that a twelve year old boy’s time has come? It was no more time for a 12 year old to die than for the hatching eggs of a willow warbler to be destroyed. The scythe was a ‘scalpel’, the shell the bones of babies.
In the last line I recall the heat of birth, of the sudden breaking of birth waters, the waters of life. I intend the poem to end with life, not death, and of course the mother and son are soon sorry for shouting, talking about their grief at last, and able to comfort each other.
Seamstress at St Leon
This is the second of three poems here included taken from a journal from France. It’s an attempt to capture the atmosphere of an afternoon using the details of what we saw, heard and sensed. We stopped to look at the river, and noticed a house where a seamstress lived. She was absent, but the signs of her recent presence and of her needlework were everywhere: her tea, her cloth, silks, sewing machines. Even her garden looked as though she had embroidered it. Flowers and greenery covered her little house. The Singers are her old, treadle sewing machines.
Shadows in Llanbadarn
This is a poem of observation. It’s about watching, from an upstairs window, a kitten playing on a ladder leaning on a wall, and ‘you’ (my husband) working in the garden, while the sun slowly sank in the sky leaving the garden in shadow. It’s autumn. The days are shortening. Then ‘you’ disappear into the house. ‘Your shadow turns.’ I see only his shadow, then hear him climbing the stairs.
I’m enjoying the game of rhyme, the parallel themes of a scene and a day and a season ending. Even such a simple scene is to be relished while it lasts.
Sheila na Gig at Kilpeck
The ‘Sheila na Gig’ is a Celtic fertility figure carved, in this case, as a corbel stone which is part of a frieze of beautiful carved figures running round the eaves of Kilpeck Church, on the Welsh Borders of Herefordshire. I take a personal, female view of the figure, and consider the bodily upheavals of the birthing mother. In her case, of course, she is a fertility goddess and therefore responsible for all fruitfulness. Inside every woman there is a ‘clock’ regulating menstruation, pregnancy, menopause. I imagine it as a little golden clock, a miraculous mechanism made of perfectly turning gold cogs. There are many symbols of sexuality and birth in the poem.
Siege
We live in a world where what is happening on the other side of the world often seems as close as what is happening in our own homes. This affects us, and makes us conscious of things never known to poets who wrote before radio, television, e-mail, the internet, the mobile phone. A poet writing now cannot leave out of her work what she knows is happening in the wider world.
The siege happened at the Iranian embassy in London, in the 1980s. Nine people, (I think) were shot dead when the police stormed the building, and it happened live on radio and television. It was one of the first occasions that people died as we watched or listened to a live broadcast, and it was very shocking - as shocking then as the twin towers was in 2001.
There are shifts both of place and of time in the poem - I am interested in these shifts, and have tried to write about them more than once. The scene shifts between the garden outside the kitchen window of the family house where I was born and lived until 1984, and the Iranian embassy in London. Time shifts between the summer day in the ‘80s when the siege happened, the photographs were sorted, and the poem was written, to the past when I was a baby, or even before I was born. The scenes of the past are conjured by the pile of old photographs on the kitchen table. The events of the poem’s present are shown in ordinary type. The events in the photographs are shown in italicised, indented verses.
What am I trying to do in this poem? To make the writer’s mind the stage on which all the drama happens. To show that, in one garden, on one summer day, an embassy is stormed, 9 people die while a yellow butterfly is crossing a lawn, blossoms open while blood flows, I write a poem, and sort photographs. Outside the window in the garden my father holds me in his arms 40 years earlier; my mother, even earlier, poses for a picture holding the bridle of a horse. In verse 3, lines 7-10, is a memory of riding over the field and down the lane on the top of a load of hay, when I was a child on my grandmother’s farm.
In the last verse, the wren sings - our smallest bird produces more young than any other - thus ‘that song of lust and burgeoning’. My parents’ images from the photographs stand in the garden, ‘never clearer’, the butterfly has almost reached the other side of the garden, and 9 people are dead in London. These things crossed the barriers of space and time. They happened in the poem’s now, in the poet’s consciousness, and it was all over in a few minutes.
Suicide on Pentwyn Bridge
This story is true, half heard from people talking about it, half learned from the local newspaper. Pentwyn Bridge carries a road over a dual carriageway in Cardiff. A man told his terrified wife he was going out to kill himself. He jumped from the bridge and was severely injured. He died many months later, never having left hospital.
Sunday
This poem is a detailed description of the pleasures of getting up early on a spring Sunday morning in Cyncoed, a leafy suburb of Cardiff, of enjoying the sunshine and silence before the family wake up. Then I turn to the newspapers, and the world’s news of war, famine, cruelty, terrorism, bring the shadow of a warning to spoil the morning’s simple joy.
Swimming with Seals
Q Did you really swim with seals?
A Yes. It’s quite common in west Wales to find seals or dolphins swimming in the sea quite close to people.
Q Why are there two horizons?
A One is the real one, where the sea meets the sky. The other is the one you see when you’re swimming, where the surface of the sea meets the submarine world. If you duck your head you see that other world.
Q What are the stars and shoals?
A Starfish, little shoals of fish and seaweed, like a garden.
Q Why do you say the elderly bask at the edge of what they’ve lost?
A People who never get out of their cars, but just look at the sea through the car windscreen, or binoculars, have forgotten what they’re missing.
Q When you say ‘she’s gone’, who are you talking about?
A The seal.
Q Why do you say ‘all earth’s weight’ is beneath the old?
A Gravity, the pull of the earth. Children seem light footed, denying gravity, but old people seem to be pulled down towards the earth.
Q What do you mean by ‘rolling in amnion’?
A Amnion is the amniotic fluid, or waters of the womb. The seals is pregnant. Her calf, or pup, will be born in autumn. We are swimming, diving under the water to look at the submarine world. We are swimming underwater like the seal pup in the womb.
Taid’s Funeral
Taid is a Welsh word for Grandfather. My Taid died when I was about 2 years old. One day when I was about 18, searching for something in a drawer, I found a scrap of the dress I had worn as a two-year old child on that long ago day. Suddenly, in a flash, I remembered the funeral. In the poem I struggle to remember more details from that day and to understand what I remembered. Yet the images remain a puzzle, and the child’s eye view of them renders them merely mysterious to the adult mind.
The Field Mouse
Q Why is the long grass a ‘snare drum’?
A The insects in the grass make the field sound like a snare drum.
Q What does ‘the air hums with jets’ mean?
A The jets are military aircraft, practising low flying over hill country. When war threatens somewhere in the world, and Britain is involved, the activity increases. The noise is sometimes a terrifyingly sudden scream, and sometimes a continuous roar, like deep humming.
Q What is the ‘terrible news’ on the radio?
A It was the war in Bosnia, in the former Yugoslavia.
Q What is lime?
A This lime comes from limestone, and is naturally present in alkaline soil. In acid soil lime is deficient, and farmers add it to help the crops to grow. It sweetens the soil, so I describe the cloud drifting onto our land as ‘a chance gift of sweetness’.
Q Why do you talk about Summer in Europe’?
A British people and Bosnian people are both Europeans. We are alike. Summer, whether in the countryside in Wales (where I am) or in Bosnia, is hay making time. Farmers cut long grass, dry it, and store it to feed their animals in the winter. They wait for a good weather forecast before cutting the hay, as it needs to dry in the sun for a few days before it is baled and stored. All children love playing in the hay. It is a sunny, happy, busy time.
Q So why do ‘the fields hurt’?
A Small animals get killed in the long grass during hay making. Think also of the word ‘battlefield’. Here, little creatures were killed. In Bosnia men, women and children were killed. We call hay making cutting the hay, but the Welsh equivalent translates as ‘killing the hay’.
Q Who are the children and what are they staring at?
A There are two countries, Wales and Bosnia, and two groups of children, here, and there. The children here are sad to see small animals injured. In Bosnia the children see people die. I’m also thinking of the children of the world watching adults wreck our planet. They stare at what we, the adults, have crushed.
Q What do you mean by ‘the wrong that woke from a rumour of pain’?
A The rumour of pain, the world’s pain, comes from the media, wars and rumours of wars. I am reminded of the world’s troubles by the sight of the injured field mouse brought to me by a four year old boy. We try to save the mouse. It is tiny, but its agony is as big as if it were a man. It has been hurt by accident, but it reminds me of the war I’ve been trying to forget about all day, I’ve been trying to enjoy a happy day in the sunshine, picnicking with the children in the hayfield. The death of one small mouse brings the pain close.
Q What do the last lines of the poem mean?
A It’s a nightmare, a bad dream about the children being as frail and vulnerable as field mice, and there’s gunfire in the air. The poem asks what if this were Bosnia, and my neighbour hated me just because we had different religions and different ethnic backgrounds? What if instead of a cloud of lime he threw stones at me?
The Sundial
The poem is about a child who makes a sundial out of 12 stones and a broken bean stick. It is also about time, about light and shade, about a child’s nightmare, stone circles, lions in the night and the lion-sun burning down on a garden next day.
Owain is a six year old boy who wakes at night from a bad dream, shouting to his mother that there is a lion in his bedroom. The poem is written next day, a hot summer day which mother and child spend in the garden. After a sleepless night the child is quiet, ‘dry and pale’, ‘intelligently adult’. The fever has made him still, able to concentrate on his task. The mother is tired, sleepily watching as the child works out where to place the stones. He checks the time on his watch, and places a stone where the shadow cast by the stick falls on the circle of paper. This is ‘the mathematics of sunshine’. Primitive people used the ‘mathematics of sunshine’ when they raised stone circles such as Stonehenge, calculating from sunlight and shadows the hours of the day and the seasons of the year.
The sun is the lion of the child’s frightening dream. In children’s books, illustrations of a lion’s face or the face of the sun look similar. Time is a circle. The clock face is a circle. At the end of the poem the lion-sun becomes the lion trainer, takes up the whip and points it at mother and child. We are ‘caged’. We can’t escape time.
Why does the mother think about time as she watches her child, recovering from a fever? Does the language and imagery of the poem suggest anxiety? If, in the early hours of the morning, a child wakes screaming, hot and frightened, would any parent fear the worst?
The Vet
Q Is it a true story?
A As true as I can remember it.
Q Who’s speaking in the first two lines?
A The vet. It was my grandmother’s farm. The cow was about to calve. I’d never seen a calf born and I wanted to be there. I wanted to be a vet when I grew up. The cow was in trouble and the vet thought I was too young to watch, in case it turned out badly.
Q How old were you?
A I don’t know. 8. 10. Something like that.
Q Why did you say you were stuck with it?
A When you’ve whinged and wined for something, it’s hard to admit you’ve changed your mind. I was a bit scared by what the vet said, but I stayed anyway, ‘brazening out the cowshed and the chance of horror’.
Q Why do you use a word like brazening and what does it mean?
A Adults used to say someone was ‘brazen’, or ‘bold as brass’, cheeky, never admitting you’re wrong. I use brazening as a verb. If you use a good verb you never need an adverb. I chose all the verbs carefully: ‘brazening’, ‘gloved’, ‘wrenched’, ‘hung’, ‘swam’, ‘furled’. I think they make a difference. What if, instead, I’d used something like ‘was’, ‘went’, ‘came’, or ‘did’ instead of some of those words?
Q Why do you say the cow’s belly is a cathedral?
A I’ve often thought that walking in a cathedral is like being inside the rib cage of a giant animal. A baby is small, curled inside the bag of water in the mother’s body. Her heart beats like a bell in the ears of the baby. Bells tell us the time. It was time for the calf to be born.
Q What is the horror?
A Well, it might have turned out badly. The cow had been calling for ages. You only send for the vet in an emergency. The calf might have died. I was scared.
Q What is the pool?
A The pool is the amniotic fluid in which the calf ‘swims’ before birth. When the vet broke the waters, it became ‘a rope of water’. The rope hints that you ring a church bell with a rope. In the last verse the calf is a salmon, and the waters are a waterfall.
Q Why do you say ‘his brimming mother’?
A The cow brims with milk, like a full vessel.
Q It has a happy ending, but why did you put in horror words like knife and butchery?
A I wanted a contrast between the worst that might have happened, and the beautiful moment when the calf was born, wet and shining, ready to be licked clean and fed by his mother. Magic!
The Water Diviner
In 1976, a hot dry year in Britain, the well ran dry at our little farmhouse in Ceredigion, used then as a retreat from the city, but where I now live. We called in a water diviner. Using a divining rod, holding it over the ground and walking slowly, he felt a tremor, then a strong pull, in the rod. He thus found a strong source of water under our garden. The bore hole was drilled, and water found 54 feet down.
Although divining is a respectable way of discovering underground water or minerals, the science is not understood. The procedure seemed almost like magic to me. The echo through the hose dipped into the deep borehole, as we waited for the water to rise and fill the pipe, really did sound like ‘dwr’, which is the Welsh word for water. Welsh is Britain’s first language, and was once spoken throughout Western Britain as far as central Scotland. That day, out of the deep and ancient earth, even the water spoke Welsh. A ‘thorough bass’ is a musical term.
White Rose
Q Is the poem true?
A If you read a prose story that begins:
‘Outside the green velvet sitting room white roses bloom after rain’,
you assume it is fiction, that the writer knows such a room and is using it to set the scene for an imagined story. If you read a poem that begins:
‘Outside the green velvet sitting room
white roses bloom after rain’
you know it’s a poem and assume it is a real place. You’d be right. Both poet and novelist use real places, one to serve invention, the other to serve truth.
Q What is the meaning of the poem?
A Do not trouble yourself with ‘meaning’. The poet doesn’t. Just read the poem and figure it out first as a narrative. I am telling you about something that happened.
First, picture the scene, meet the characters, take in the facts, follow the events. Once that is clear, you might notice the tricks language is playing on your imagination, the effects it is having on your own response. Then you’ll bring your mind, heart, experience to the language of the poem, and you will respond. You may find in your mind ideas that were not consciously recognised by the poet. That’s fine. That’s why poetry has such a power to work on us long after the poet has disappeared.
First the scene: a room, green velvet, white roses outside the window, sunlit but wet with recent rain. Roses: it must be summer. Velvet and roses: a suburb, maybe. You assume the poet is a neighbour or friend of the boy’s family.
Next, meet two people in the room: a sleeping boy, a person (the poet) watching over the boy. Note ‘cold bloom’, (the white rose of a tumour), ‘terrible speed’, ( a deadly missile), the ‘splinter of ice’ in his blood, (like the boy in the fairy story with the Ice Queen’s splinter moving towards his heart). The boy is very ill, so ill that he will die before the rose outside his window. He wakes and smiles bravely at his minder. He moves and the pain wakes and makes him grit his teeth. In the last line of verse 3, pain is a ‘red blaze’, a fire, and it burns him. He feels for a moment like Guy Fawkes on a bonfire, his bones are spars and bed-springs, like burning furniture. Even his beloved cat hurts him. The poet watches, terrified to see him suffer, hoping he will sleep again until his mother returns.
In the last verse he has died. Life is careless of the dead - the cat still tracks the thrush, the thrush hunts for a worm, the sun shines, and the rose lives a few more days before its petals fall. This shows the indifference of nature and the triumph of life over death. In the end these natural things live, and can console us, help us to grieve and be healed. So life wins, always.
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