GCS English

When I Say I've Got Nothing To Do on the Eng Lit A-Level Course

2010-07-12T07:28:00.000-07:00

• Do my homework
• Update my thematic highlighting (Identity, Perception, Gender, Privacy Vs. Public, Expression)
• Work on my coursework
• Practice past paper questions
• Read outside of the central texts…
PROSE FICTION

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid’s Tale
Angela Carter - Wise Children *
Kiran Desai - Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard *
Roddy Doyle - The Woman Who Walked into Doors *
Michael Frayn - Spies *
David Guterson - Snow Falling on Cedars *
Toni Morrison - Beloved *
Alice Walker - The Color Purple
Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart (Penguin, 1958)
James Baldwin - Go Tell it on the Mountain (Penguin)
Nadine Gordimer - July’s People (Bloomsbury, 1981)
Radclyffe Hall - The Well of Loneliness + (Virago, 1928)
Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God + (Virago, 1937)
Andrea Levy Small Island * (Headline, 2004)
Patrick McCabe Breakfast on Pluto * (Picador, 1998)
Anne Michaels Fugitive Pieces * (Bloomsbury, 1996)
Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things * (Harper Perennial, 1997)
Robert Tressell The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists + (Flamingo, 1914)
Irvine Welsh Trainspotting * (Vintage, 1993)
Jeanette Winterson Oranges are not the only fruit (Vintage, 1984)
Richard Wright Native Son + (Vintage, 1940)
Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse 5 (Vintage, 1969)

PROSE NON-FICTION (Autobiographies and Biography, Diaries)

Maya Angelou - Autobiography, especially I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (Virago,1969)
Diana Souhami The Trials of Radclyffe Hall * (Virago, 1999)

Memoirs and Interviews

Silvia Calamati Women’s stories from the North of Ireland * (Beyond the Pale Publications, 2002)
Bobby Sands Skylark Sing Your Lonely Song (Mercier Press, 1982)
Malcolm X Malcolm X Talks to Young People (Pathfinder, 1964-1965)
Alice Walker The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult * (Phoenix, 1996)

Travelogues

Salman Rushdie -The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (Vintage, 1987)

History and cultural commentary, essays and speeches

David Beresford Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike (Harper Collins,1987)

Beverley Bryan, Suzanne Scafe,
Stella Dadzie
Germaine Greer The Female Eunuch (Harper Perennial, 1970)
Martin Luther King Jr. I Have A Dream: Writings And Speeches That Changed The World (Harper, 1956-68)
Adhaf Soueif
Amrit Wilson

Laws

Parliament - ‘Section 28 of the Education Act’ 1988

Literary Criticism

Ralph Ellison
Dolly A. McPherson
Kate Millet
Amrit Wilson
Richard Wright
Jeremy Hawthorn ed.

DRAMA

Brendan Behan - The Hostage (Methuen, 1958)
Sudhar Bhuchar - Child of the Divide * (Methuen Modern Plays)
Jim Cartwright - The Road (Methuen Modern Plays, 1986)
Caryl Churchill - All plays
Claire Dowie - Why is John Lennon Wearing a Skirt? * (Methuen Modern Plays, 1996)
Brian Friel - Dancing at Lughnasa * (Faber, 1990)
Lorraine Hansberry - A Raisin in the Sun (Methuen Modern Plays, 1959)
Sarah Kane - Complete Plays * (Methuen Drama, 1998-2006)
Tony Kushner - Angels in America * (Nick Herne Books, 1992)
Martin McDonagh - Beauty Queen of Leenane * (Methuen, 1996)
Sean O’Casey Three Dublin Plays: Juno and the Paycock + (1924), The Plough and the Stars + (1926), Shadow of a Gunman + (1923) (Faber)
Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman (Penguin, 1949)
Ntozake Shange - Shange Plays 1- (Includes For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enough)
Timberlake Wertenbaker - Our Country’s Good (Methuen, 1988)
Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire (Methuen, 1947)
International Connections (contributor Jackie Kay) - New Plays for Young People * (Faber 2003)

POETRY

Simon Armitage Dead Sea Poems * (Faber, 1995)
W.H Auden e.g ‘The Quarry’, ‘Funeral Blues’, ‘Refugee Blues’ + (1930s)
Gillian Clarke Letter From a Far Country (1985)
Carol Ann Duffy The Other Country * (Anvil, 1990)
Allan Ginsberg Howl (City Lights Pocket Poet Series, 1956)
Jackie Kay Life Mask * (Bloodaxe Books, 2005)
Liz Lockhead Collected Poems + (Vintage, 1930-1960)
Audre Lorde Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems (Polygon, 1984)
Grace Nichols The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (Virago, 1984)
Adrienne Rich
Lemn Sissay
Gertrude Stein Tender Buttons + (Dover, 1914)

Alice Walker
Benjamin Zephaniah Too Black, Too Strong * (Bloodaxe Books, 2001)

TEXTS IN TRANSLATION

Novels

Isabel Allende - The House of the Spirits (Chile/Spanish) (Black Swan, 1985)
Alexandra Kollontai - Love of Worker Bees + (USSR/Russian) (Virago, 1930)
Manuel Puig - Kiss of the Spider Woman (Argentina/Spanish) (Vintage, 1976)
Alexander Solzenichen

Poetry

Pablo Neruda

Drama

Bertolt Brecht - Mother Courage and her Children + (German) (Methuen, 1940)
Federico Garcia Lorca - The House of Bernarda Alba + (1936), Yerma + (1934), Blood Wedding + (1933) (Spanish) (Penguin)

Non fiction autobiography/diary/ travelogue

Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl (Dutch) (Penguin, 1947)
Che Guevara The Motorcycle Diaries (Argentina/Spanish) (Harper Perennial, 1952)
Nawal al-Saadawi Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (Egypt/Arabic) (1984)

Langston Hughes Poetry

2010-07-12T07:26:00.000-07:00

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human rivers
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Freedom’s Plow
When a man starts out with nothing,
When a man starts out with his hands
Empty, but clean,
When a man starts to build a world,
He starts first with himself
And the faith that is in his heart-
The strength there,
The will there to build.

First in the heart is the dream-
Then the mind starts seeking a way.
His eyes look out on the world,
On the great wooded world,
On the rich soil of the world,
On the rivers of the world.

The eyes see there materials for building,
See the difficulties, too, and the obstacles.
The mind seeks a way to overcome these obstacles.
The hand seeks tools to cut the wood,
To till the soil, and harness the power of the waters.
Then the hand seeks other hands to help,
A community of hands to help-
Thus the dream becomes not one man’s dream alone,
But a community dream.
Not my dream alone, but our dream.
Not my world alone,
But your world and my world,
Belonging to all the hands who build.

A long time ago, but not too long ago,
Ships came from across the sea
Bringing the Pilgrims and prayer-makers,
Adventurers and booty seekers,
Free men and indentured servants,
Slave men and slave masters, all new-
To a new world, America!

With billowing sails the galleons came
Bringing men and dreams, women and dreams.
In little bands together,
Heart reaching out to heart,
Hand reaching out to hand,
They began to build our land.
Some were free hands
Seeking a greater freedom,
Some were indentured hands
Hoping to find their freedom,
Some were slave hands
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
But the word was there always:
Freedom.

Down into the earth went the plow
In the free hands and the slave hands,
In indentured hands and adventurous hands,
Turning the rich soil went the plow in many hands
That planted and harvested the food that fed
And the cotton that clothed America.
Clang against the trees went the ax into many hands
That hewed and shaped the rooftops of America.
Splash into the rivers and the seas went the boat-hulls
That moved and transported America.
Crack went the whips that drove the horses
Across the plains of America.
Free hands and slave hands,
Indentured hands, adventurous hands,
White hands and black hands
Held the plow handles,
Ax handles, hammer handles,
Launched the boats and whipped the horses
That fed and housed and moved America.
Thus together through labor,
All these hands made America.

Labor! Out of labor came villages
And the towns that grew cities.
Labor! Out of labor came the rowboats
And the sailboats and the steamboats,
Came the wagons, and the coaches,
Covered wagons, stage coaches,
Out of labor came the factories,
Came the foundries, came the railroads.
Came the marts and markets, shops and stores,
Came the mighty products moulded, manufactured,
Sold in shops, piled in warehouses,
Shipped the wide world over:
Out of labor-white hands and black hands-
Came the dream, the strength, the will,
And the way to build America.
Now it is Me here, and You there.
Now it’s Manhattan, Chicago,
Seattle, New Orleans,
Boston and El Paso-
Now it’s the U.S.A.

A long time ago, but not too long ago, a man said:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL--
ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR
WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS--
AMONG THESE LIFE, LIBERTY
AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
His name was Jefferson. There were slaves then,
But in their hearts the slaves believed him, too,
And silently too for granted
That what he said was also meant for them.
It was a long time ago,
But not so long ago at that, Lincoln said:
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT THAT OTHER’S CONSENT.
There were slaves then, too,
But in their hearts the slaves knew
What he said must be meant for every human being-
Else it had no meaning for anyone.
Then a man said:
BETTER TO DIE FREE
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES
He was a colored man who had been a slave
But had run away to freedom.
And the slaves knew
What Frederick Douglass said was true.

With John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, Negroes died.
John Brown was hung.
Before the Civil War, days were dark,
And nobody knew for sure
When freedom would triumph
"Or if it would," thought some.
But others new it had to triumph.
In those dark days of slavery,
Guarding in their hearts the seed of freedom,
The slaves made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
That song meant just what it said: Hold On!
Freedom will come!
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
Out of war it came, bloody and terrible!
But it came!
Some there were, as always,
Who doubted that the war would end right,
That the slaves would be free,
Or that the union would stand,
But now we know how it all came out.
Out of the darkest days for people and a nation,
We know now how it came out.
There was light when the battle clouds rolled away.
There was a great wooded land,
And men united as a nation.

America is a dream.
The poet says it was promises.
The people say it is promises-that will come true.
The people do not always say things out loud,
Nor write them down on paper.
The people often hold
Great thoughts in their deepest hearts
And sometimes only blunderingly express them,
Haltingly and stumblingly say them,
And faultily put them into practice.
The people do not always understand each other.
But there is, somewhere there,
Always the trying to understand,
And the trying to say,
"You are a man. Together we are building our land."

America!
Land created in common,
Dream nourished in common,
Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!
If the house is not yet finished,
Don’t be discouraged, builder!
If the fight is not yet won,
Don’t be weary, soldier!
The plan and the pattern is here,
Woven from the beginning
Into the warp and woof of America:
ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.
NO MAN IS GOOD ENOUGH
TO GOVERN ANOTHER MAN
WITHOUT HIS CONSENT.
BETTER DIE FREE,
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES.
Who said those things? Americans!
Who owns those words? America!
Who is America? You, me!
We are America!
To the enemy who would conquer us from without,
We say, NO!
To the enemy who would divide
And conquer us from within,
We say, NO!
FREEDOM!
BROTHERHOOD!
DEMOCRACY!
To all the enemies of these great words:
We say, NO!

A long time ago,
An enslaved people heading toward freedom
Made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
The plow plowed a new furrow
Across the field of history.
Into that furrow the freedom seed was dropped.
From that seed a tree grew, is growing, will ever grow.
That tree is for everybody,
For all America, for all the world.
May its branches spread and shelter grow
Until all races and all peoples know its shade.
KEEP YOUR HAND ON THE PLOW! HOLD ON!

Mother to Son

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So, boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps.
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now—
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

The Negro Mother

Children, I come back today
To tell you a story of the long dark way
That I had to climb, that I had to know
In order that the race might live and grow.
Look at my face -- dark as the night --
Yet shining like the sun with love's true light.
I am the dark girl who crossed the red sea
Carrying in my body the seed of the free.
I am the woman who worked in the field
Bringing the cotton and the corn to yield.
I am the one who labored as a slave,
Beaten and mistreated for the work that I gave --
Children sold away from me, I'm husband sold, too.
No safety , no love, no respect was I due.

Three hundred years in the deepest South:
But God put a song and a prayer in my mouth .
God put a dream like steel in my soul.
Now, through my children, I'm reaching the goal.

Now, through my children, young and free,
I realized the blessing deed to me.
I couldn't read then. I couldn't write.
I had nothing, back there in the night.
Sometimes, the valley was filled with tears,
But I kept trudging on through the lonely years.
Sometimes, the road was hot with the sun,
But I had to keep on till my work was done:
I had to keep on! No stopping for me --
I was the seed of the coming Free.
I nourished the dream that nothing could smother
Deep in my breast -- the Negro mother.
I had only hope then , but now through you,
Dark ones of today, my dreams must come true:
All you dark children in the world out there,
Remember my sweat, my pain, my despair.
Remember my years, heavy with sorrow --
And make of those years a torch for tomorrow.
Make of my pass a road to the light
Out of the darkness, the ignorance, the night.
Lift high my banner out of the dust.
Stand like free men supporting my trust.
Believe in the right, let none push you back.
Remember the whip and the slaver's track.
Remember how the strong in struggle and strife
Still bar you the way, and deny you life --
But march ever forward, breaking down bars.
Look ever upward at the sun and the stars.
Oh, my dark children, may my dreams and my prayers
Impel you forever up the great stairs --
For I will be with you till no white brother
Dares keep down the children of the Negro Mother.

The Bitter River
(Dedicated to the memory of Charlie Lang and Ernest Green, each 14 years old when lynched together beneath the Shubuta Bridge over the Chicasawhay River in Mississippi, October 12th, i942.)

There is a bitter river
Flowing through the South.
Too long has the taste of its water Been in my mouth.
There is a bitter river Dark with filth and mud.
Too long has its evil poison
Poisoned my blood.
I've drunk of the bitter river
And its gall coats the red of my tongue,
Mixed with the blood of the lynched boys
From its iron bridge hung,
Mixed with the hopes that are drowned there
In the snake-like hiss of its stream
Where I drank of the bitter river
That strangled my dream:
The book studied-but useless,
Tool handled-but unused,
Knowledge acquired but thrown away,
Ambition battered and bruised.
Oh, water of the bitter river
With your taste of blood and clay,
You reflect no stars by night,
No sun by day.
The bitter river reflects no stars-
It gives back only the glint of steel bars
And dark bitter faces behind steel bars:
The Scottsboro boys behind steel bars,
Lewis Jones behind steel bars,
The voteless share-cropper behind steel bars,
The labor leader behind steel bars,
The soldier thrown from a Jim Crow bus behind steel bars,
The 150 mugger behind steel bars,
The girl who sells her body behind steel bars,
And my grandfather's back with its ladder of scars
Long ago, long ago-the whip and steel bars -
The bitter river reflects no stars.
"Wait, be patient," you say.
"Your folks will have a better day."
But the swirl of the bitter river
Takes your words away.
"Work, education, patience
Will bring a better day-"
The swirl of the bitter river
Carries your "patience" away.
"Disrupter! Agitator!
Trouble maker!"you say.
The swirl of the bitter river
Sweeps your lies away.
I did not ask for this river
Nor the taste of its bitter brew.
I was given its water
As a gift from you.
Yours has been the power
To force my back to the wall
And make me drink of the bitter cup
Mixed with blood and gall.
You have lynched my comrades
Where the iron bridge crosses the stream,
Underpaid me for my labor,
And spit in the face of my dream.
You forced me to the bitter river
With the hiss of its snake-like song-
Now your words no longer have meaning-
I have drunk at the river too long:
Dreamer of dreams to be broken,
Builder of hopes to be smashed,
Loser from an empty pocket
Of my meagre cash,
Bitter bearer of burdens
And singer of weary song,
I've drunk at the bitter river
With its filth and its mud too long.
Tired now of the bitter river,
Tired now of the pat on the back,
Tired now of the steel bars
Because my face is black,
I'm tired of segregation,
Tired of filth and mud,
I've drunk of the bitter river
And it's turned to steel in my blood.
Oh, tragic bitter river
Where the lynched boys hung,
The gall of your bitter water
Coats my tongue.
The blood of your bitter water
For me gives back no stars.
I'm tired of the bitter river!
Tired of the bars!

Suicide
Ma sweet good man has
Packed his trunk and left.
Ma sweet good man has
Packed his trunk and left.
Nobody to loive me:
I’m gonna kill ma self.

I’m gonna buy me a knife with
A blade ten inches long.
Gonna buy a knife with
A blade ten inches long.
Shall I carve ma self or
That man that done me wrong?

‘Lieve I’ll jump in de river
Eighty-nine feet deep.
‘Lieve I’ll jump in de river
Eighty-nine feet deep.
Cause de river’s quiet
An’ a po’, po’ gal can sleep.

A Song For a Negro Wash Woman

Oh wash-woman,
Arms elbow-deep in white suds,
Soul washed clean,
Clothes washed clean, -
I have many songs to sing you
Could I but find the words.

Was it four o’clock or six o’clock on a winter afternoon,
I saw you wringing out the last shirt in Miss White
Lady’s kitchen? Was it four o’clock or six o’clock?
I don’t remember.

But I know, at seven one spring morning you were on
Vermont Street with a bundle in your arms going to
wash clothes.
And I know I’ve seen you in a New York subway train in
the late afternoon coming home from washing clothes.

Yes, I know you, wash-woman.
I know how you send your children to school, and high-
school and even college.
I know how you work and help your man when times are
hard.
I know how you build your house up from the wash-tub
and call it home.
And how you raise your churches from white suds for the
service of the Holy God.

And I’ve seen you singing, wash-woman. Out in the back-
yard garden under the apple trees, singing, hanging
white clothes on long lines in the sun-shine.
And I’ve seen you in church a Sunday morning singing,
praising your Jesus, because some day you’re going to
sit on the right hand of the Son of God and forget
you were ever a wash-woman. And the aching back
and the bundle of clothes will be unremembered
then.
Yes, I’ve seen you singing.

And for you,
O singing wash-woman,
For you, singing little brown woman,
Singing strong black woman,
Singing tall yellow woman,
Arms deep in white suds,
Soul clean,
Clothes clean, -
For you I have many songs to make
Could I but find the words.

Cubes
In the dark days of the broken cubes of Picasso
And in the days of the broken songs of the young men
A little too drunk to sing
And the young women
A little unsure of love to love –
I met on the boulevards of Paris
An African from Senegal.

God
Knows why the French
Amuse themselves bringing to Paris
Negroes from Senegal.

It’s the old game of the boss and the bossed,
boss and the bossed
amused
and
amusing,
worked and working,
Behind the cubes of black and white,
black and white,
black and white

But since it is the old game,
For fun
They give him the three old prostitutes of France –
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity –
And all three of ‘em sick
In spite of the tax to the government
And the legal houses
And the doctors
And the Marseillance.

Of course, the young African from Senegal
Carries back from Paris
A little more disease
To spread among the black girls in the palm huts.
He brings them a gift
disease –
From light to darkness
disease –
From the boss to the bossed
disease –
From the game of black and white
disease
From the city of broken cubes of Picasso
d
i
s
e
a
s
e

I, Too

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

Ballard of the Killer Boy
Bernice said she wanted
A diamond or two.
I said, Baby,
I’ll get ‘em for you.

Bernice said she wanted
A Packard car.
I said, Sugar,
Here you are.

Bernice said she needed
A bank full of cash.
I said, honey,
That’s nothing but trash.

I pulled that job
In the broad daylight
The cashier trembled
And turned dead white.

He tried to guard
Other people’s gold.
I said to hell
With your stingy soul!

There ain’t no reason
To let you live!
I filled him full of holes
Like a sieve.

Now they’ve locked me
In the death house.
I’m gonna die!

Ask that woman –
She knows why.

Ballard of Sam Soloman

Sam Solomon said,
You may call out the Klan
But you must’ve forgot
That a Negro is a MAN.
It was down in Miami
A few years ago.
Negroes never voted but
Sam said, It’s time to go
To the polls election day
And make your choice known
Cause the vote is not restricted
To white folks alone.
The fact we never voted
In the past
Is something that surely
Ain’t due to last.
Sam Solomon called on
Every colored man
To qualify and register
And take a stand
And be up and out and ready
On election day
To vote at the polls,
Come what may.
The crackers said, Sam,
If you carry this through,
Ain’t no telling what
We’ll do to you.
Sam Soloman answered,
I don’t pay you no mind.
The crackers said, Boy,
Are you deaf, dumb, and blind?
Sam Solomon said, I’m
Neither one nor the other –
But we intend to vote
On election day, brother.
The crackers said, Sam,
Are you a fool or a dunce?
Sam Soloman said, A MAN
Can’t die but once.
They called out the Klan.
They had a parade.
But Sam Solomon
Was not afraid.
On election day
He led his colored delegation
To take their rightful part
In the voting of the nation.
The crackers thought
The Ku Klux was tough –
But the Negroes in Miami
Called their bluff.
Sam Solomon said,
Go get out your Klan –
But you must’ve forgotten
A Negro is a MAN.

God to Hungry Child

Hungry child I did not make this world for you.
You didn't buy any stock in my railroad.
You didn't invest in my corporation.
Where are your shares in standard oil?
I made the world for the rich
And the will-be-rich
and the have-always-been-rich.
Not for you,
hungry child.

Question [1]

When the old junk man Death
Comes to gather up our bodies
And toss them into the sack of oblivion,
I wonder if he will find
The corpse of a white multi-millionaire
Worth more pennies of eternity,
Than the black torso of
A Negro cotton-picker.

Goodbye Christ

Listen, Christ,
You did alright in your day, I reckon-
But that day’s gone now.
They ghosted you up a swell story, too,
Called it Bible-
But it’s dead now,
The popes and the preachers’ve
Made too much money from it.
They’ve sold you to too many
Kings, generals, robbers, and killers-
Even to the Tzar and the Cossacks,
Even to Rockefeller’s Church,
Even to THE SATURDAY EVENING POST.
You ain’t no good no more.
They’ve pawned you
Till you’ve done wore out.
Goodbye,
Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova,
Beat it on away from here now.
Make way for a new guy with no religion at all-
A real guy named
Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME-
I said, ME!
Go ahead on now,
You’re getting in the way of things, Lord.
And please take Saint Gandhi with you when you go,
And Saint Pope Pius,
And Saint Aimee McPherson,
And big black Saint Becton
Of the Consecrated Dime.
And step on the gas, Christ!
Move!
Don’t be so slow about movin?
The world is mine from now on-
And nobody’s gonna sell ME
To a king, or a general,
Or a millionaire.
A New Song
I speak in the name of the black millions
Awakening to action.
Let all others keep silent a moment
I have this word to bring,
This thing to say,
This song to sing:
Bitter was the day
When I bowed my back
Beneath the slaver's whip.
That day is past.
Bitter was the day
When I saw my children unschooled,
My young men without a voice in the world,
My women taken as the body-toys
Of a thieving people.
That day is past.
Bitter was the day, I say,
When the lyncher's rope
Hung about my neck,
And the fire scorched my feet,
And the oppressors had no pity,
And only in the sorrow songs
Relief was found.
That day is past.
I know full well now
Only my own hands,
Dark as the earth,
Can make my earth-dark body free.
O thieves, exploiters, killers,
No longer shall you say
With arrogant eyes and scornful lips:
"You are my servant,
Black man-
I, the free!"
That day is past-
For now,
In many mouths-
Dark mouths where red tongues burn
And white teeth gleam-
New words are formed,
Bitter
With the past
But sweet
With the dream.
Tense,
Unyielding,
Strong and sure,
They sweep the earth-
Revolt! Arise!
The Black
And White World
Shall be one!
The Worker's World!
The past is done!
A new dream flames
Against
The sun!

Poem to a Dead Soldier
Ice-cold passion
And a bitter breath
Adorned the bed
Of the youth and Death-
Youth, the young soldier
Who went to the wars
And embraced white Death,
the vilest of whores.

Now we spread roses
Over your tomb-
We who sent you
To your doom.
Now we make soft speeches
And sob soft cries
And through soft flowers
And utter soft lies.

We would mould you in metal
And carve you in stone,
Not daring to make statue
Of your dead flesh and bone,
Not daring to mention
The bitter breath
Nor the ice-cold passion
Of your love-night with Death.

We make soft speeches
We sob soft cries
We throw soft flowers,
And utter soft lies.
And you who were young
When you went to the wars
Have lost your youth now
With the vilest of whores.

White Man
Sure I know you!
You’re a White Man.
I’m a Negro.
You take all the best jobs
And leave us the garbage cans to empty
and
The halls to clean.
You have a good time in a big house at
Palm Beach
And rent us the back alleys
And the dirty slums.
You enjoy Rome –
And take Ethiopia.
White Man! White Man!
Let Louis Armstrong play it –
And you copyright it
And make the money.
You’re the smart guy, White Man!
You got everything!
But now,
I hear your name ain’t really White
Man.
I hear it’s something
Marx wrote down
Fifty years ago –
That rich people don’t like to read.
Is that true, White Man?
Is your name in a book
Called the Communist Manifesto?
Is your name spelled
C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-T?
Are you always a White Man?
Huh?

Ku Klux

They took me out
To some lonesome place.
They said, “Do you believe
In the great white race?”

I said, “Mister,
To tell you the truth,
I’d believe in anything
If you’d just turn me loose.”

The white man said, “Boy,
Can it be
You’re a-standin’ there
A-sassin’ Me?”

They hit me in the head
And knocked me down.
And then they kicked me
On the ground.

A klansman said, “Nigger,
Look me in the face –
And tell me you believe in
The great white race.”

Jazzonia

Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.

Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!

Were Eve's eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?

Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!

In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.

Cabaret

Does a jazz-band ever sob?
They say a jazz-band’s gay.
Yet as the vulgar dancers whirled
And the wan night wore away,
One said she heard the jazz-band sob
When the little dawn was grey.

Harlem Night Club

Sleek black boys in a cabaret.
Jazz-band, jazz-band,--
Play, plAY, PLAY!
Tomorrow....who knows?
Dance today!

White girls' eyes
Call gay black boys.
Black boys' lips
Grin jungle joys.

Dark brown girls
In blond men's arms.
Jazz-band, jazz-band,--
Sing Eve's charm!

White ones, brown ones,
What do you know
About tomorrow
Where all paths go?

Jazz-boys, jazz-boys,--
Play, plAY, PLAY!
Tomorrow....is darkness.
Joy today!

Madam’s Past History

My name is Johnson--
Madam Alberta K.
The Madam stands for business.
I'm smart that way.

I had a
HAIR-DRESSING PARLOR
Before
The depression put
The prices lower.

Then I had a
BARBECUE STAND
Till I got mixed up
With a no-good man.

Cause I had a insurance
The WPA
Said, We can't use you
Wealthy that way.

I said,
DON'T WORRY 'BOUT ME!
Just like the song,
You WPA folks take care of yourself--
And I'll get along.

I do cooking,
Day's work, too!
Alberta K. Johnson--
Madam to you.

Madam’s Calling Cards
I had some cards printed
The other day.
They cost me more
Than I wanted to pay.
I told the man
I wasn't no mint,
But I hankered to see
My name in print.
MADAM JOHNSON,
ALBERTA K.
He said, Your name looks good
Madam'd that way.
Shall I use Old English
Or a Roman letter?
I said, Use American.
American's better.
There's nothing foreign
To my pedigree:
Alberta K. Johnson--
American that's me.

Madam and the Army

They put my boy-friend
In 1-A.
But I can’t figure out
How he got that way.

He wouldn’t work,
Said he wasn’t able.
Just drug himself
To the dinner table.

Couldn’t get on relief
Neither WPA.
He wouldn’t even try
Cause he slept all day.

I nagged at him
Till I thought he was deaf –
But I never could get him
Above 4-F.

But Uncle Sam
Put him in 1-A
And now has taken
That man away.

If Uncle Sam
Makes him lift a hand,
Uncle’s really
A powerful man!

Madam and the Wrong Visitor

A man knocked three times.
I never seen him before.
He said, Are you Madam?
I said, What’s the score?

He said, I reckon
You don’t know my name,
But I’ve come to call
On you just the same.

I stepped back
Like he had a charm.
He said, I really
Don’t mean no harm.

I’m just Old Death
And I thought I might
Pay you a visit
Before night.

He said, You’re Johnson –
Madam Alberta K?
I said, Yes – but Alberta
Ain’t goin’ with you today!

No sooner had I told him
Than I awoke.
The doctor said, Madam,
You’re fever’s broke –

Nurse, put her on a diet,
And buy her some chicken.
I said, Better buy two –
Cause I’m still here kickin’!

What were they like

2010-05-17T23:17:00.000-07:00

This is a famous poem, written in 1971, as a protest against the Vietnamese War (1954-1975. This was originally a civil war between communist North and capitalist South Vietnam; the south received support from western countries, notably the USA. In 1973 President Nixon withdrew the US forces, in 1975 the armies of North Vietnam were victorious, and the country was reunited the following year. More recently, Vietnam has adopted democratic government and opened itself up to visitors from the west.) Denise Levertov protested in public against the war, and spent time in jail. In the poem, inspired by the violence of the US bombing campaign, she imagines a future in which the people have been destroyed and there is no record or memory of their culture. (In the light of the Nazis' genocide of European Jews, this was not an unreasonable fear.) In fact, the people and culture of Vietnam are thriving today but attempted genocide (now we call it “ethnic cleansing”) has devastated Cambodia, Ruanda and Burundi and the former Yugoslavia.

The poem is in the form of a series of questions, as a future visitor might pose them to a cultural historian. The questions are mostly straightforward, but the answers are quite subversive. Together they create a sympathetic portrait of a gentle, simple peasant people, living a dignified if humble life amid the paddy fields. This contrasts with the violent effects of war, as children are killed, bones are charred and people scream as bombs smash the paddy fields. The final lines of the poem show how utterly the people have been forgotten - the report of their singing (of which there is no record) is hopelessly vague - it resembled, supposedly, “the flight of moths in moonlight” - but no one knows, since it is silent now. Happily the reader today can readily find examples of Vietnamese song, and we can satisfy ourselves that it is nothing like the flight of moths in moonlight.

The poem shows the Vietnamese as rather childlike, innocent and vulnerable - a way of seeing them that seemed to be confirmed by some events in the war, lie the destruction of the forests with napalm, and by the notorious photographic image of a naked burning child running from her devastated village. But the people of Vietnam eventually proved more resilient than in this well-meaning but rather patronising western view. On the other hand, it was protests like that in the poem that changed US public opinion, so that President Nixon withdrew their forces from combat - which helped the Northern Communist forces win the war, and reunite Vietnam by force.

This poem became very well-known when it was first published - but the poet's fears for Vietnam have not come true (though things that are perhaps just as bad have happened in Cambodia, Ruanda-Burundi and the former Yugoslavia). Does it still have anything to say to us or has history made it irrelevant?
What do you think of the question and answer format in the poem?
Do you think that Vietnamese people would like to be depicted as gentle peasants who know only “rice and bamboo”? You may have some Vietnamese friends - so you could ask them. Is it ever a good idea for people from one culture to try to describe another, or is there a risk of stereotyping and patronizing?
How might singing be like “the flight of moths in moonlight”? Does this mean anything or is it pretentious and misleading? You might check this by finding out what traditional Vietnamese music is really like.
This poem is not about individuals but about big political events. What do you think of the way the poet presents history and politics here?

Vultures

2010-05-17T23:16:00.000-07:00

This is one of the most challenging poems in the anthology. The vultures of the title are real birds of prey but (like William Blake's Tyger) more important, perhaps, for what they represent - people of a certain kind. Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian writer, but has a traditional English-speaking liberal education: the poem is written in a highly literate manner with a close eye for detail.

The poem introduces us to the vultures and their unpleasant diet; in spite of this, they appear to care for each other. From this Achebe goes on to note how even the worst of human beings show some touches of humanity - the concentration camp commandant, having spent the day burning human corpses, buys chocolate for his “tender offspring” (child or children). This leads to an ambiguous conclusion:

on the one hand, Achebe tells us to “praise bounteous providence” that even the worst of creatures has a little goodness, “a tiny glow-worm tenderness”;
on the other hand, he concludes in despair, it is the little bit of “kindred love” (love of one's own kind or relations) which permits the “perpetuity of evil” (allows it to survive, because the evil person can think himself to be not completely depraved).
We are reminded, perhaps, by the words about the “Commandant at Belsen”, that Adolf Hitler was said to love children and animals.

The poem is in the form of free verse, in short lines which are not end-stopped and have no pattern of stress or metre. Achebe moves from

images of things which are actually present,
to the imagined scene of the commandant picking up chocolate for his children,
to the final section of the poem in which appears the conventional metaphor of the “glow-worm tenderness” in the “icy caverns of a cruel heart”.
In studying this poem, you should spend a lot of time in making sure you understand all of the unfamiliar vocabulary. Look out, also, for familiar words which are used in surprising ways, because of their context. For example, we read of the commandant “going home...with fumes of human roast clinging rebelliously to his hairy nostrils” - it is as if he wants to get rid of the smell (put it out of nose and mind) but the smell refuses to go away, rebelling against his authority: something he cannot command.

As you think or write about the first part of the poem, you should try to describe in your own words the different things on which the vultures feed, while looking for the evidence of the birds' love for each other. Like William Blake's Tyger, the vulture is a creature about which we will have ideas before we read; because it feasts on corpses, it has come to symbolize anyone or anything that benefits by another's suffering. (The vultures here are shown far less sympathetically, for example, than the scorpion in Nissim Ezekiel's poem.)

Is this poem really about vultures at all or does the poet use them only to make comments on some kinds of people?
How does the poet try to make the reader feel disgust towards the vultures? Is this fair?
The ending of this poem is highly ambiguous - the poet recommends both “praise” for “providence” and then “despair” (because the little bit of goodness in otherwise evil things allows them to keep going, in “perpetuity”). Which of these conclusions do you think the poet feels more strongly, if either?
Chinua Achebe refers to Belsen, the Nazi death camp - do you think this is a powerful way of suggesting evil, or might readers now and in the future not know what Belsen is or what happened there? (Some younger readers may know of it mainly because Anne Frank died there, at the age of 15.)

Night of the Scorpion

2010-05-17T23:15:00.000-07:00

In this poem Nissim Ezekiel recalls “the night” his “mother was stung by a scorpion”. The poem is not really about the scorpion or its sting, but contrasts the reactions of family, neighbours and his father, with the mother's dignity and courage. The scorpion (sympathetically) is shown as sheltering from ten hours of rain, but so fearful of people that it “risk(s) the rain again” after stinging the poet's mother.

What follows is an account of various superstitious reactions:

the peasants' efforts to “paralyse the Evil One” (the devil, who is identified with the scorpion);
the peasants' belief that the creature's movements make the poison move in his victim's blood;
their hope that this suffering may be a cleansing from some sin in the past (“your previous birth”) or still to come (“your next birth”).

The poison is even seen as making the poet's mother better through her suffering: “May the poison purify your flesh/of desire and the spirit of ambition/they said”. The poet's father normally does not share such superstitions (he is “sceptic, rationalist” - a doubter of superstition and a believer in scientific reason). But he is now worse than the other peasants, as he tries “every curse and blessing” as well as every possible antidote of which he can think. The “holy man” performs “rites” (religious ritual actions) but the only effective relief comes with time: “After twenty hours it lost its sting”.

The conclusion of the poem is its most effective part: where everyone else has been concerned for the mother, who has been in too much pain to talk (she “twisted...groaning on a mat”) she thinks of her children, and thanks God the scorpion has spared them (the sting might be fatal to a smaller person; certainly a child would be less able to bear the pain).

Ezekiel's poetic technique is quite simple here. The most obvious point to make is the contrast between the very long first section, detailing the frantic responses of everyone but the mother, and the simple, brief, understated account of her selfless courage in the second section. The lines are of irregular length and unrhymed but there is a loose pattern of two stresses in each line; the lines are not end-stopped but run on (this is sometimes known as enjambement).

Instead of metaphor or simile the images are of what was literally present (the candles and the lanterns and the shadows on the walls). The poem is in the form of a short narrative. One final interesting feature to note is the repeated use of reported (indirect) speech - we are told what people said, but not necessarily in their exact words, and never enclosed in speech marks. The poem may surprise us in the insight it gives into another culture: compare Ezekiel's account with what would happen if your mother were stung by a scorpion (or, if this seems a bit unlikely, bitten by an adder, say).

Some comments about Nissim Ezekiel that you might find helpful in relation to Night of the Scorpion are these: he writes in a free style and colloquial manner (like ordinary speech); he makes direct statements and employs few images.

The title of the poem seems more fitting almost to an old horror film - do you think it is a suitable title for the poem that follows?
How do the people try to make sense of the scorpion's attack, or even see it as a good thing?
Are scorpions really evil? Does the poet share the peasants' view of a “diabolic” animal?
How does the attack bring out different qualities in the father and the mother?
What does the poem teach us about the beliefs of people in the poet's home culture?
In what way is this a poem rather than a short story broken into lines?
How does the poet make use of what people said, to bring the poem to life?

Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes

2010-05-17T23:14:00.000-07:00

The poem's title alerts us to the simple contrast that is its subject. “Beautiful people” is perhaps written with a mild sense of irony - as this phrase was originally coined by the hippie movement in 1967 (maybe earlier) to refer to the “flower children” who shared the counter-culture ideals of peace and love. The couple in the poem are not beautiful people in this sense but wealthy and elegant.

The poem is deceptively simple - in places it is written as if in bright primary colours, so we read of the “yellow garbage truck” and the “red plastic blazers”, we get exact details of time and place, and we see the precise position of the four people: all waiting at a stoplight and the garbage collectors looking down (literally but not metaphorically) into the “elegant open Mercedes” and the matching couple in it. The details of their dress and hair could be directions for a film-maker.

Ferlinghetti contrasts the people in various ways. The wealthy couple are on their way to the man's place of work, while the “scavengers” are coming home, having worked through the early hours. The couple in the Mercedes are clean and cool; the scavengers are dirty. But while one scavenger is old, hunched and with grey hair, the other is about the same age as the Mercedes driver and, like him, has long hair and sunglasses. The older man is depicted as the opposite of beautiful - he is compared both to a gargoyle (an ugly grotesque caricature used to decorate mediaeval churches, and ward off evil spirits) and to Quasimodo (the name means “almost human”) the main character in Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The poem moves to an ambiguous conclusion. The two scavengers see the young couple, not as real people, but as characters in a “TV ad/in which everything is always possible” - as if, that is, with determination and effort, the scavengers could change their own lifestyle for the better. But the adjective “odorless” suggests that this is a fantasy - and their smelly truck is the reality.

The poem also considers the fundamental American belief that “all men are created equal” - and the red light is democratic, because it stops everyone. It holds them together “as if anything at all were possible/between them”. They are separated by a “small gulf” and the gulf is “in the high seas of democracy” - which suggests that, with courage and effort, anyone can cross it. But the poet started this statement with “as if” - and we do not know if this is an illusion or a real possibility.

The form of the poem is striking on the page - Ferlinghetti begins a new line with a capital letter, but splits most lines to mark pauses, while he omits punctuation other than hyphens in compound-words, full stops in abbreviations and occasional ampersands (the & symbol).

The poem challenges the reader - are we like the cool couple or the scavengers? And which is better to be? Of which couple does the poet seem to approve more? TV ads may be “odorless” but without garbage collectors, we would be overwhelmed by unpleasant smells - especially in the heat of San Francisco. The garbage truck and the Mercedes in a way become symbols for public service and for private enterprise.

How does this poem show the gap between rich and poor?
Does the poet really think “everything is always possible”, or is this an illusion?
Why does the poet call the couple in the Mercedes “beautiful people”? How does he use this phrase in a different sense from what it originally meant? Does the poet approve more of the scavengers or the beautiful people?
What do you think of how the poem looks on the page? Does this help you as you read it?
Perhaps a modern society needs both architects and street-cleaners. But is it right that we should pay them so unequally? Which would you miss the most if they stopped working?

Blessing

2010-05-17T23:13:00.001-07:00

This poem is about water: in a hot country, where the supply is inadequate, the poet sees water as a gift from a god. When a pipe bursts, the flood which follows is like a miracle, but the “blessing” is ambiguous - it is such accidents which at other times cause the supply to be so little.

The opening lines of the poem compare human skin to a seedpod, drying out till it cracks. Why? Because there is “never enough water”. Ms. Dharker asks the reader to imagine it dripping slowly into a cup. When the “municipal pipe” (the main pipe supplying a town) bursts, it is seen as unexpected good luck (a “sudden rush of fortune”), and everyone rushes to help themselves. But the end of the poem reminds us of the sun, which causes skin to crack “like a pod” - today's blessing is tomorrow's drought. The poet celebrates the joyous sense with which the people, especially the children, come to life when there is, for once, more than “enough water”.

The poem has a single central metaphor - the giving of water as a “blessing” from a “kindly god”. The religious metaphor is repeated, as the bursting of the pipe becomes a “rush of fortune”, and the people who come to claim the water are described as a “congregation” (people gathering for worship).

The water is a source of other metaphors - fortune is seen as a “rush” (like water rushing out of the burst pipe), and the sound of the flow is matched by that of the people who seek it - their tongues are a “roar”, like the gushing water. Most tellingly of all, water is likened to “silver” which “crashes to the ground”. In India (where Ms. Dharker lives), in Pakistan (from where she comes) and in other Asian countries, it is common for wealthy people to throw silver coins to the ground, for the poor to pick up. The water from the burst pipe is like this - a short-lived “blessing for a few”. But there is no regular supply of “silver”. And finally, the light from the sun is seen as “liquid” - yet the sun aggravates the problems of drought.

The poem is written in unrhymed lines, mostly brief, some of which run on, while others are end-stopped, creating an effect of natural speech. The poet writes lists for the people (“man woman/child”) and the vessels they bring (“. ..with pots/brass, copper, aluminium,/plastic buckets”). The poem appeals to the reader's senses, with references to the dripping noise of water (as if the hearer is waiting for there to be enough to drink) and the flashing sunlight.

We have a clear sense of the writer's world - in her culture water is valued, as life depends upon the supply: in the west, we take it for granted. This is a culture in which belief in “a kindly god” is seen as natural, but the poet does not express this in terms of any established religion (note the lower-case “g” on “god”). She suggests a vague and general religious belief, or superstition. The poem ends with a picture of children - “naked” and “screaming”. The sense of their beauty (“highlights polished to perfection”) is balanced by the idea of their fragility, as the “blessing sings/over their small bones”.

How does this poem present water as the source of life?
“There is never enough water” - do readers in the west take water too much for granted?
Why does Imtiaz Dharker call the poem Blessing?
Why might the poet end by mentioning the “small bones” of the children?

Island Man

2010-05-17T23:11:00.002-07:00

The subtitle really explains this simple poem - it tells of a man from the Caribbean, who lives in London but always thinks of his home.

The poem opens with daybreak, as the island man seems to hear the sound of surf - and perhaps to imagine he sees it, since we are told the colour. This is followed by simple images:

the fishermen pushing their boat out,
the sun climbing in the sky,
the island, emerald green.
The island man always returns to the island, in his mind, but in thinking of it he must “always” come “back” literally to his immediate surroundings - hearing the traffic on London's North Circular Road.

Grace Nichols ends the poem with the image of coming up out of the sea - but the reality is the bed, and the waves are only the folds of a “crumpled pillow”. The last line of the poem is presented as the harsh reality.

Many Afro-Caribbeans in Britain live a split existence. They may yearn for the warmth and simple pleasures of the islands they think of as home, yet they find themselves, with friends and family, in a cold northern climate. This poem neatly captures this division - between a fantasy of the simple life and the working daily reality. But perhaps it is not really a serious choice - if one were to stay on the island, then one would bring one's problems there, too. In fact, this man is like most other British people - he does not relish work, but faces up to it.

After reading the whole poem, one sees that it is ambiguous - the island is both in the Caribbean and Great Britain.

Grace Nichols also challenges us to think about where home really lies. Is it

the place we dream about,
the place where we, our friends and family live, or
the place where we do our work?

Nothing's Changed

2010-05-17T23:11:00.001-07:00

This poem depicts a society where rich and poor are divided. In the apartheid era of racial segregation in South Africa, where the poem is set, laws, enforced by the police, kept apart black and white people. The poet looks at attempts to change this system, and shows how they are ineffective, making no real difference. Jackie Fielding writes:

“I had always assumed that the poem was written post-apartheid and reflected the bitterness that knowing “one's place” in society is so deeply ingrained that the I-persona can't bring himself to accept his new-found freedom under Mandela. I also find it interesting that the poet is not South African and not black.”
“District Six” is the name of a poor area of Cape Town (one of South Africa's two capital cities; the other is Pretoria). This area was bulldozed as a slum in 1966, but never properly rebuilt. Although there is no sign there, the poet can feel that this is where he is: “...my feet know/and my hands.”

Similarly the “up-market” inn (“brash with glass” and the bright sign ,“flaring like a flag”, which shows its name) is meant for white customers only. There is no sign to show this (as there would have been under apartheid) but black and coloured people, being poor, will not be allowed past the “guard at the gatepost”. The “whites only inn” is elegant, with linen tablecloths and a “single rose” on each table. It is contrasted with the fast-food “working man's cafe” which sells the local snack (“bunny chows”). There is no tablecloth, just a plastic top, and there is nowhere to wash one's hands after eating: “wipe your fingers on your jeans”. In the third stanza the sense of contrast is most clear: the smart inn “squats” amid “grass and weeds”.

Perhaps the most important image in the poem is that of the “glass” which shuts out the speaker in the poem. It is a symbol of the divisions of colour, and class - often the same thing in South Africa. As he backs away from it at the end of the poem, Afrika sees himself as a “boy again”, who has left the imprint of his “small, mean mouth” on the glass. He wants “a stone, a bomb” to break the glass - he may wish literally to break the window of this inn, but this is clearly meant in a symbolic sense. He wants to break down the system, which separates white and black, rich and poor, in South Africa.

The title of the poem suggests not just that things have not changed, but a disappointment that an expected change has not happened. The poem uses the technique of contrast to explore the theme of inequality. It has a clear structure of eight-line stanzas. The lines are short, of varying length, but usually with two stressed syllables. The poet assumes that the reader knows South Africa, referring to places, plants and local food. The poem is obviously about the unfairness of a country where “Nothing's changed”. But this protest could also apply to other countries where those in power resist progress and deny justice to the common people.

What does the poet think about change in his home country?
How does the poem contrast the rich and the poor in South Africa?
Why does the poet write about two places where people buy food?
Comment on the image of the plate-glass window to show how poor people are shut out of things in South Africa. What does the poet want to do to change this?

Limbo

2010-05-17T23:10:00.000-07:00

This poem tells the story of slavery in a rhyming, rhythmic dance. It is ambitious and complex. There are two narratives running in parallel:

the actions of the dance, and
the history of a people which is being enacted.
Going down and under the limbo stick is likened to the slaves' going down into the hold of the ship, which carries them into slavery. In Roman Catholic tradition, limbo is a place to which the souls of people go, if they are not good enough for heaven or bad enough for hell, between which limbo lies; it has come to mean any unpleasant place, or a state (of mind or body) from which it is difficult to escape. The story of slavery told in the poem is very easy to follow, yet full of vivid detail and lively action.

The poem has a very strong beat, suggesting the dance it describes: where the word limbo appears as a complete line, it should be spoken slowly, the first syllable extended and both syllables stressed: Lím-bó. While the italics give the refrain (or chorus) which reminds us of the dance, the rest of the poem tells the story enacted in the dance: these lines are beautifully rhythmic, and almost every syllable is stressed, until the very last line, where the rhythm is broken, suggesting the completion of the dance, and the end of the narrative.

This poem is suited to dramatic performance - there is the dancing under the limbo pole (difficult for most Europeans) and the acting out of the voyage into slavery. The poem can be chanted or sung, with a rhythmic accompaniment to bring out the drama in it (percussion, generally, is appropriate but drums, specifically, are ideal: in fact, the text refers to the “drummer” and the “music”).

What do you find interesting in

the way the poem appears on the page
sound effects in the poem
repetition in the poem
the way the limbo dance tells the story of slavery
Is this a serious or comic poem? Is it optimistic or pessimistic?

Thoughts on Search for My Tongue by Josh L, Josh P, Jack R, Anthony, Nemanjza, Sulemann, Vin and Adil

2010-05-16T08:58:00.000-07:00

F - The poem has 3 stanzas, and in the opening stanza it gives you the idea that you can speak 2 languages but after a while one "rots and dies in your mouth." The middle stanza is like a dream. The final stanza is the poet basically reuniting with their old language and the language is coming back to them.

The gujarati is there as this is the language she dreams in, but in normal life she doesn't. This shows it is the unknown language which blossoms back to her. As a reader we don't necessarily understand this section.

The gujarati could be seen like the tongue in the middle of the poem, and the two english sections like the head / jaw.

L / I - The poet talks about "the" mother tongue rather than my in line 37. This is describing the language as a thing, as if it isn't her language anymore. She has lost the connection to her mother and her culture. The first section directs you to the second, telling you how it feels (using natural imagery) to get the mother tongue back. This keeps resurfacing, as in lines 36 - 38. She contradicts herself here as she suggests that this mother tongue can't be forgotten, no matter how hard you try.

R /T - The other language is used because it allows both English and Gujarati speakers to understand and experience the poem, without it, the poem would be empty and just appeal to one group. It could be said that the tone of this poem is mournful because of the poet's loss of tongue: "I ask you, what would you do / if you had two tongues in your mouth." She could also be sad that she has lost this heritage.

S - The poet feels strongly about the loss of her tongue because she uses negative, strong words like "spit, rot die." She addresses the reader as you in the poem, to bring you in. There is a confused message as some non-English speakers want to forget their culture to move on, but others see it as really important to preserve it.

This Room

2010-05-16T08:56:00.000-07:00

F – The poem is in 4 stanzas with a deliberate use of enjambment at the end to show how the narrator’s hands are outside clapping. This could also be said to represent the break up of the room in the poem. The lines are different lengths again to show the break out of this room.

L / I – The central image is that of the room breaking up, the poet uses personification to show that it is adapting and changing. It is ironic that the bed is “lifting out of its nightmares.” Dharker also uses onomatopoeia to enliven the poem and demonstrate noise and movement. The use of spices also hints at “other culture” and a slightly magical and uplifting feel to the poem.

R – Lines 11, 12 & 13 all rhyme, placed right in the centre of the poem for effect.

T/ S – This is a optimistic poem about what happens when we are freed from constraints. We could say it’s the constraint of a culture, or self imposed.

Not My Business

2010-05-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

F – The poet uses a chorus to show what the narrator is really thinking / worried about – food. The last stanza doesn’t have a chorus because the narrator is being taken by the government

L – Personification is used a lot to show how dangerous the environment is

I – Lots of natural imagery, clay – to show a basic culture

R – Rhythm is created through the repetitive chorus

T – It’s an attack on what’s happening with human rights in the narrator’s country, so it’s a sad poem, with the narrator accepting these terrible things

Extended info: The poet is a champion for Human rights and was imprisoned by the police for speaking out against his government. The yam is part of an extended metaphor, representing food and the narrator’s only happiness in this country

Last Minute Revision Tips

2010-05-16T08:49:00.000-07:00

LAST MINUTE REVISION TIPS

Paper 1

Section A : Read two texts and answer questions.
• Don’t waste loads of time on the first question, it’s usually asking you to find information so just do that, don’t spend ten minutes explaining stuff unless you’re asked to.

• Always look at how many marks is on offer and WRITE ENOUGH TO EARN THAT MANY!

• You should usually use quotes from the two texts. It can’t hurt. But sometimes a question will say ‘in your own words’ so be careful of that.

• There will be a question on fact and opinion – remember facts often involve numbers and figures, because they are believable.

• There will always be a question on presentational devices – that’s pictures, style and size of font, colours, bold headlines, subheadings, text boxes – does it look stylish and adult, cute and girly, fun and childish, simple, complicated, formal or informal etc?

• If the question is about presentation DO NOT start talking about word choices/language.

• If the question is about language, look at what kinds of words are chosen, is it formal, chatty, friendly, factual etc. Don’t mention pictures and font if the question is about language.

Section B : Choose PERSUADE question and use GRIPPERS!
[Group of three,
Repetition,
Identify with celebrity,
Punctuation range,
Presentational devices,
Exaggeration(hyperbole)
Rhetorical questions,
Shocking (emotive)language.]

Paper 2
Section A : Poetry (Stay in the cluster you've been taught)

1. Underline 3 key words in question
2. Compare = differences and similarities
3. ‘the ways’ or ‘the methods’ = SUSTIT / FLIRTS
4. In opening paragraph, use one sentence to show that you
understand what the question refers to and a second sentence
to say which other poem you have chosen and why.

Section B : Choose DESCRIBE question and use MASSGIVER!
[Metaphor,
Alliteration,
Simile,
Sentence lengths,
Group of three,
Imagery,
Variety of sentence starts,
Exaggeration,
Range of punctuation.]
. , ; : ? ! … ()
“ -

Michael Woods writes about Salome

2009-03-15T02:29:00.000-07:00

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.

Michael Woods writes about Before You Were Mine

2009-03-15T02:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Michael Woods writes about Education for Leisure

2009-03-15T02:27:00.000-07:00

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.

Michael Woods writes about Elvis' Twin Sister

2009-03-15T02:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Michael Woods writes about Anne Hathaway

2009-03-15T02:25:00.000-07:00

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.

Michael Woods writes about Havisham

2009-03-15T02:24:00.000-07:00

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.

Michael Woods writes about Stealing

2009-03-15T02:23:00.000-07:00

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).

Michael Woods writes about We Remember Your Childhood Well

2009-03-15T02:18:00.000-07:00

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.

Michael Woods writes about all of Gillian Clarke's AQA poems

2009-03-15T02:15:00.000-07:00

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

Gillian Clarke writes about ALL her exam poems

2009-03-15T02:13:00.000-07:00

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.

A - Z of Poetic Techniques by Gillian Clarke

2009-03-15T02:11:00.000-07:00

ALLITERATION
Alliteration is the recurring sound of a consonant. That is, the sound of any letter except a vowel. Just to remind ourselves, of the first six sounds of the alphabet, B, C, D and F are consonants, A and E are vowels.

Sometimes several consonants play together, weaving in and out. Alliteration comes naturally to all of us, including poets. Without even thinking of it we use it in nicknames, find it in comics and nursery rhymes. From my childhood I remember Desperate Dan, Korky the Cat, Lucy Locket. Advertisers exploit it. Poets sing it. Children chant it. Poets using Old English over a thousand years ago, and even earlier in the much older British language (Welsh), relished alliteration. Here are a few selected examples from the AQA anthology:

In Seamus Heaney’s poem, Perch, listen for the ‘r’ sound in ‘runty and ready’, and ‘f’, ‘n’, ‘l’ and ‘d’ in ‘the finland of perch, in the fenland of alder’. You’ll find such sounds in almost all of Heaney’s poems. In Digging the ‘spade sinks’ into ‘gravelly ground’. In At a Potato Digging the workers form ‘a higgledy line from hedge to headland.’ These are the very sounds of the earth, the flow of water, the suction of mud and the beat of tools and work.

In my (Gillian Clarke) poem, Baby-Sitting hear the ‘s’ in the first line, like breathing: ‘sitting in a strange room listening’. The baby ‘is sleeping a snuffly, roseate, bubbling sleep.These are snuffly sound. ‘Catrin’ s hair is ‘straight strong long’. The Field-Mouse begins, ‘Summer, and the long grass is a snare drum’, and ends with three lines full of ‘b’ sounds, a few ‘t’s, and again that sighing ‘s’:

‘their bones brittle as mouse ribs, the air
stammering with gunfire, my neighbour turned
stranger, wounding my land with stones.’

Note the first two lines of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, Havisham: ‘sweetheart bastard’, and ‘wished him dead’ It’s a shock to see such words as ‘sweetheart’ and ‘bastard’ side by side. One is tender, the other is angry. It’s the ‘s’ and ‘t’ sounds that connect those words, and ‘w’ and ‘d’ in ‘wished him dead’ underline the anger. Note ‘midnight’, ‘magnificent’, ‘mute’, ‘mate’, ‘mind’, in the first three lines of Stealing.

In Simon Armitage’s Homecoming, listen for ‘c’ sounds in verse two:

‘The second, one canary-yellow cotton jacket
on a cloakroom floor, uncoupled from its hook,
becoming scuffed and blackened underfoot’.

The words are commonplace, but the rhythm and sound of the consonants are pleasing.

ASSONANCE
Assonance is a kind of rhyme made of vowel sounds. Poetry makes music from assonance as often as from alliteration. Read any good poem aloud and hear the assonance sing. Listen for echoes, not just at line-endings but anywhere in a poem. Poetry uses ‘w’ and ‘y’ for assonance as well as the long, short and combined sounds made by the 5 vowels: A,E,I,O,U.

‘O, wild west wind, thou breath of autumn’s being’ wrote the poet Shelley nearly two hundred years ago. You can hear the west wind in the first five words.

There are words made of nothing but vowel sounds, words like where, why, away, oh, woe, you, I, we. Actually, with a bit of punctuation and some dramatic expression you could make a poem out of just those words!

Seamus Heaney has a wonderful way with assonance. Listen to Perch, and read it aloud for ‘alder-dapple’, ‘grunts...flood-slubs, runty’, then ‘guzzling the current...muscle and slur’, and in the last lines, ‘hold’, ‘flows’, and ‘go’. Search Blackberry-Picking for ‘summer’s blood’ followed by ‘tongue’, ‘lust’, ‘hunger’.

In my (Gillian Clarke) poem Catrin, listen for ‘there’, ‘hair’, ‘glare’, and ‘old rope’. In Baby-Sitting watch for ‘snuffly’ and ‘bubbling’, ‘cold’ and ‘lonely’. In Mali, ‘so slowly home’, ‘sweet’ and ‘easy’, ‘towed’ and ‘moon’. In A Difficult Birth, ‘peace deal’ and ‘serious’, ‘broke’, ‘ago’, then ‘her own lost salty ocean’. Finally, ‘opened’ is echoed by ‘stone’.

In Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, We Remember Your Childhood Well, the assonance works as an occasional internal rhyme. That is, rhyme that is inside the lines, not at the ends of the lines. Listen for ‘moors’, ‘saw’, ‘door’. In Education for Leisure, note the way ‘ignored’, ‘ordinary’, ‘boredom’, and even ‘God’ echo, and therefore connect with each other.

In the poem beginning ‘Those bastards in their mansions’, Simon Armitage plays with ‘lawns’, ‘door’, ‘porches’, ‘torches’, the last two words fully rhyming. These are all words which draw attention to each other, because as we hear them we instinctively connect them. The sound affects the meaning of the poem.

ENJAMBMENT
This is the word for one of poetry’s dance steps. It’s the nanosecond pause at the end of one line and the start of another, or the two nanoseconds between verses, where the meaning overruns the line, leaps the gap and lands at the start of the next line, or the next verse. The sentence pauses, and continues, like the toe-to-heel step of a dancer who reaches the edge of the space, and turns without stopping the dance. It’s the nose of the goldfish nudging the glass on its journey round the tank.

Prose is made of sentences, poetry is made of lines. Poetry uses sentences too, but in a poem the lines are in charge, and they decide the way we read it. The pattern a poem makes on the page is musical notation, or choreography. Enjambment stops the sentence in its stride, forcing it to dance to poetry’s tune. Most examples below are of sentence-breaks at verse-endings.

In Seamus Heaney’s At a Potato Digging, between verses 2, 3 and 4, the meaning overruns the verse-endings. Meaning leaps the gap. The gap divides ‘stand’ from ‘tall’, and ‘turf’ from ‘recurs’. Why? The poet has more to say, but wants to keep to his rhyme scheme: ‘stand’ rhymes with ‘headland’, ‘turf’ rhymes with ‘surf’. The enjambment holds the poem together, lets it flow, stops it from jerking to a stop at the line-endings, and varies the rhythm.

In my (Gillian Clarke) poem, A Difficult Birth, the link between lines 21 and 22 is important. Line 21 ends with ‘and you find us’, which lays stress on ‘us’, and line 22 begins with the word ‘peaceful’, which stresses that word. Without enjambment the meaning would be quite different. It would just say ‘you find us peaceful’. The lines need that pause so that ‘us’ and ‘peaceful’ can be heard separately.

Carol Ann Duffy is doing something similar in Haversham. Verse two ends with ‘who did this’ and verse three begins with ‘to me?’ Verse three ends with ‘Love’s’, then verse four begins with ‘hate behind a white veil.’ Waiting that nanosecond for the second part of the sentence helps us weigh the word for a moment before being shocked by the next five words.

Simon Armitage’s Hitcher gives us good examples of enjambment at verse endings. The last three verses are linked in this way. Verse three ends with ‘I dropped it into third’, verse four begins, ‘and leant across’; verse four ends ‘he’d said he liked the breeze’, and verse five begins, ‘to run its fingers/ through his hair.’ The breaking of those words from each other is like someone trying to gasp out a desperate story, and mimics, I think, the stop-go of the journey, the violence of the story.

IAMBIC PENTAMETER
Look up ‘metre’ in a book of poetry terms, and you’ll find too much to take in, so I’ve chosen the important one, Shakespeare’s favourite, and the one you’ll often hear in every day speech. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll hear iambic pentameter everywhere. In the weather forecast: ‘A deep depression moving from the west’. In the street: ‘Diana dyes her hair I’m sure she does.’ In the ordinary things people say: ‘Would anybody like a cup of tea?’ Those examples echo the tune Shakespeare used in his plays and in his sonnets.

The word ‘iambic’ describes a line where the stressed beat falls on the second of two syllables. (When the stress falls on the first syllable, as in ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’, it’s called ‘trochaic’ metre.) Pentameter means five beats in a line. Tap the line with your foot, and you’ll find five good thumps in the rhythm of each line. Of course, poets can do what they like, and even Shakespeare varied it whenever he fancied.

In my (Gillian Clarke) poem On the Train, you’ll find examples of five-beat lines. The first two verses are written in this way, five beats to a line, chosen instinctively, setting the scene that leads to the tragic moment of the train crash. Verse three, when the automatic Vodafone voice speaks, the rhythm breaks into short, stuttering lines, then picks up again for the last three lines. In verse four, the iambic pentameter is lost again. It is a solemn rhythm and it suits the story. The story, and the rhythm, give way to grief. Maybe this suggests that I begin as the storyteller, and gradually imagine I am the traveller involved in the event, or a grieving partner at home. The break in rhythm suggests a struggle to speak and breathe.

Seamus Heaney also lets this rhythm come and go in his poems. You can hear it surface in five of the eight Anthology poems. In Storm on the Island it is maintained in every line. (You may stress the line slightly differently, but you should still come up with five stressed beats): ‘We are prepared: we build our houses squat’. You can hear it in lines from Death of a Naturalist: ‘All year the flax-dam festered in the heart’, and line 4: ‘Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.’ In those lines the familiar beat also draws attention to words which connect with assonant and alliterative sounds, words like: ‘festered’ and ‘sweltered’, and ‘punishing sun’.

Carol Ann Duffy uses very little iambic pentameter in her Anthology selection, choosing other rhythms, a different heartbeat. The poem Anne Hathaway is the one exception, and she chooses the rhythm here for a good reason. The poem is a typical Shakespearean sonnet, spoken as if in the voice of Shakespeare’s widow. All the way through you should be able to hear the five beats in every line. Read it aloud to find where to put the stressed beats.

Simon Armitage is listening to other rhythms in his eight poems included in the Anthology. Compare the rhythms used in his poems with those illustrated above.

LINEATION
Lines. Why do poets use them? What are they for? How do you decide where a line-break goes? Does it make a difference? Is poetry chopped up prose? Poetry is NOT chopped up prose. Poems need lines because poems are songs, but that’s not the whole story - all songs have different tunes. Some poems rhyme, some don’t. Line-lengths can vary. Some poems use lines with a regular beat. Some poems have a delicate rhythm, like breathing, or natural speech.

A line makes you pause at the end, then your eyes flick to the beginning of the next one. The pause lasts a split second, shorter even than a comma, too short to breathe. We take in the line’s last word before reading the first on the next line. The pause lays stress on the last and the first words. That doesn’t happen in prose.

Seamus Heaney’s poems in the anthology mainly rhyme, and the rhyming word clearly marks the line-ending. However, in Death of a Naturalist , which doesn’t rhyme, ‘festered in the heart’ ends line one, and ‘Of the townland’ begins line two. For a moment we’re left with the idea that the flax-dam is festering in the human heart. But no! The flax-dam festers at ‘the heart/ of the townland’, the centre of the area where the poet lived as a child. The two meanings of the word ‘heart’ add force to the image.

My (Gillian Clarke) poem Catrin takes the story forward line by line, ending each one with an important word before moving on. October splits ‘the slow/ fall of flowers’ from ‘Over the page the pen/ runs faster than wind’, with a verse break between the two. The line itself is split, one half in verse two, and the other half in verse three, the first half looking back, the second half moving on towards the future.

Look at Carol Ann Duffy’s Havisham, and Anne Hathaway, for different ways of ending, and breaking, the lines and the verses. Anne Hathaway is a sonnet, so rhythm and rhyme decide. Havisham has an interesting break between verses three and four, where ‘Love’s// hate behind a white veil’ is one sentence, but those two words are separated by the line-ending and the verse break, like Miss Havisham herself, jilted by her fiance on her wedding day.

In Simon Armitage’s poem about his mother helping him to measure a new house, (first line, ‘Mother, any distance greater than a single span’) the lines come in all shapes and sizes. It rhymes, but not all the way to the end, so rhyme doesn’t make all the decisions. Take verses three and four. Three ends with ‘Kite.’ Four begins with ‘I space-walk’, which is what kites do. The short and long lines are like the distances in the house - the stairs, the loft, the skylight. At the end of the poem the poet’s mother is left downstairs holding one end of the tape, while he, in the loft, looks through the skylight at ‘an endless sky/ to fall or fly’. The line break suggests the holding on and letting go, between mother and son.

METAPHOR
A metaphor happens when one image suggests another without using the word ‘like’. The best metaphor is a mere hint. It suggests the companion image with a single word. Metaphor should trust us, allowing our imagination to see how metaphor works like a flash of touching wires. R.S. Thomas, in a poem about the cruelty of nature, writes of the stoat sipping from ‘the brimming rabbit’. One word, ‘brimming’, turns the rabbit into a vessel full of blood set before the stoat. It’s a wonderful metaphor, shocking and exciting.

Metaphor is used every day in spoken English, so no wonder poets use it without even thinking about it. Time flies. Snowdrops peep. Rain dances. You’re burning with rage. In fact, time has no wings, snowdrops have no eyes, rain has no feet, and you have a feeling inside you, not a fire. The thrilling thing about metaphor is that it fills ordinary language with colour, it haunts the way we talk, illuminates plain fact, and is the interesting part of everyday story telling. In contemporary poetry, it is one of the most commonly used poetry devices.

In his poem At a Potato Digging, Seamus Heaney sees the field as a sea. The diggers return ‘to fish a new load from the crumbled surf.’ The earth is also ‘the black mother’, and ‘a seasonal altar’. In Follower, too, Heaney suggests the field is a sea with words like ‘wake’ for the mark the plough leaves behind. In Mid-Term Break the body of his little brother is ‘wearing a poppy bruise’. Frogs are ‘mud grenades’ in Death of a Naturalist.

I, (Gillian Clarke), think of the hospital in which Catrin was born as ‘the glass tank’, the umbilical cord as the ‘red rope of love’, and later as ‘that old rope’. In On the Train, the burning carriage of the crashed train becomes ‘the blazing bone-ship’, like a funeral ship in which the ancient Celts might place the body of a dead hero before setting the boat on fire and launching it on the sea. In The Field Mouse, the ‘long grass is a snare drum.’

In Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Anne Hathaway, (William Shakespeare’s widow) the couple’s bed was ‘a spinning world’, ‘words were shooting stars’, and the widow still holds her dead husband in the ‘casket’ of her head. In lines 5-9, there is a beautiful extended metaphor where their bed was a page where the lovers ‘rhyme’, Anne Hathaway’s body was ‘now echo, assonance’, and her husband’s touch was ‘a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.’

Simon Armitage writes of ‘the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors’ in the new house his mother is helping him to measure. In the poem beginning ‘I’ve made out a will’, he has metaphors for the whole human body. Blood is ‘a gallon exactly of bilberry soup’, the brain is a ‘loaf’, the rib-cage ‘a cathedral of bone’, the heart a ‘pendulum’.

ONOMATOPOEIA
On-o-mat-o-poe-ia! One-tom-a-to-pizz-a! I-am-gonna-pay-ya! I love the word, and can’t resist playing with it. It comes from Greek and means ‘word-making’. Onomatopoeia imitates the sound of the thing it describes, and because it uses musical effects it’s perfect for poetry. Children make new words using it: quack-quack; bow-wow; moo cow; brmm-brmm, and nee-naw is an excellent word for a fire engine or police car.

Widely used in primitive language, it’s at the root of many English words, words like wind, owl, cuckoo, sizzle. A snake hisses and slithers, like the sound of its voice and its movement through grass. The most obvious examples are words like ‘pop’, ‘bang’, ‘hush!’ In parts of south-west Britain plimsolls, or pumps, are known as daps, which is the sound they make as you run. ‘Get your daps on!’ means ‘Hurry!’ A poet’s use of onomatopoeia is occasional, even rare. It is not easy to find examples in the GCSE anthology. It would be easier to find examples in comics!

I (Gillian Clarke) have found a few examples in my poem The Field-Mouse, where the sound of a word expresses its meaning. Examples are words like ‘hums’, ‘drum’, and the ‘stammering’ of gunfire.

In Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist the sounds made by frogs in muddy places are heard in ‘bubbles gargled’, ‘slobber’, ‘croaking’, ‘slap’, ‘pop’.

Carol Ann Duffy, in her poem We Remember Your Childhood Well, uses ‘Boom. Boom. Boom.’ for the sound of voices, and in Stealing, the word-sound ‘Aah’ for breathing on a mirror.

Simon Armitage uses ‘scuffed’ for the marks made by children treading on his yellow jacket in Homecoming, and you can hear the scuff-scuffle of feet in the word.

RHYME
Some poets in the late twentieth century seemed to think rhyme was a crime. Of course, rhyme can be a trap. It can sound glib. Classical Greek poets didn’t use it. Early British (Welsh) and Old English poets relied on assonance and alliteration. Rhyme is heard at line endings, and the effect is in the echo of twin sounds. Because English spelling is crazy, there’s extra fun to be had in the ill matched appearance of rhyming words like ‘after’ and ‘laughter’, and ‘daughter’ and ‘water’. Children love rhyme. It’s great for insults, name calling, ring games, talking to babies, spells, jokes, hymns, incantation, and remembering. Rhyme can make us laugh. It can add poignancy to an elegy like W.H. Auden’s ‘Stop All the Clocks’. Shakespeare uses rhyming couplets to end a scene, or a play:

‘For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.’

Poetry also uses half rhyme, and internal rhyme.

My poem (Gillian Clarke) Cold Knap Lake uses half rhyme, with a rhyming couplet at the end. Stanza one pairs ‘crowd’ with ‘dead’, ‘lake’ with ‘silk’, and so on. The poem tells the true story of a child who almost drowned in a lake close to where we lived when I was five. By the end of the poem the true story has almost become a legend. A fully rhyming couplet seems the right way to end a fairy story.

In Seamus Heaney’s Mid-Term Break saves rhyme for the last two lines, where he closes the poem by a rhyming couplet ending with ‘clear’ and ‘year’, a typical Shakespearean way to end a scene. The first five lines of Digging rhyme, the rest do not. Storm on the Island uses a loose pattern of half-rhyme. Look for the final letter of the last word in each line, the t of ‘squat’ and ‘slate’, then the s of ‘us’ and ‘stacks’, then s, l, s, l, of ‘stacks’, ‘trees’, ‘full’, ‘branches’. Some lines don’t rhyme at all; but again he ends with a half rhyming couplet, with ‘air’ and ‘fear’. Compare that with Perch, written in five fully rhyming couplets.

Carol Ann Duffy is a dazzling rhymer, and she has her own way of using it. Salome illustrates this well. You don’t need to look for end rhymes, or bother with half-rhymes. Read it aloud and just listen! Find ‘later’, ‘matter’, ‘matted’, ‘lighter’, ‘laughter’, ‘flatter’, ‘pewter’, ‘Peter’, and so on. There are 21 words all rhyming with each other. It makes the poem playful, and makes Salome defiant, witty, and makes a gruesome story funny.

Simon Armitage often uses rhyme, in his own way and with great skill. He doesn’t obey the old rules. He loves popular music, and uses rhyme rather as songs do. Kid rhymes all the way through with two-syllable words, all with a stress on the second syllable from last, and all of them ending in ‘er’. Look at and listen to, ‘order’, ‘wander’, ‘yonder’, and so on. The poem beginning, ‘Mother, any distance greater than a single span’ opens with rhyming pairs, then breaks the pattern, but at the end you feel you’ve heard a rhyming poem. That’s because there are internal rhymes too, and the final rhyming lines, ‘sky’ and ‘fly’, confirm it.

RHYTHM
Walk, run, use a hammer, a pen, a shovel, a pair of oars, a garden fork. Heartbeat, breathing, being alive. That’s where rhythm comes from. The language that poets use takes its rhythm from the way we live and move. Poets today are also influenced by three main English language sources. Here is a brief summary of these main influences on poetry, as well as the way we speak and write.

1. The BALLAD, or working song is the oldest. Ballads usually rhyme. Often they use a stressed 4/3 beat, with 4 thumps in the first line, 3 in the second, like this:

‘I married a man from County Roscommon
And I live at the back of beyond
With a field of cows and a yard of hens
And six white geese on the pond.’

(‘Overheard in County Sligo’. GC)

2. SHAKESPEARE didn’t invent the 5 beats of iambic pentameter that he used in his poems and plays: ‘It was the nightingale and not the lark’. (Romeo and Juliet). It was probably the way people spoke. No doubt Shakespeare heard it and spoke it. Even today we still often use this speech rhythm: ‘Come on, a cup of tea will do you good.’ ‘Get out of bed and do a bit of work!’ (See the page on Iambic Pentameter for more on this.)

3. NATURAL SPEECH. Then came the way we think and speak now. The rhythms of our speech today are as natural to us as breathing and are the drums that beat in the poetry of today. These, and something unique in each one of us, create that special thing, the poet’s voice.

Seamus Heaney‘s rhythms come from all the above original sources. 4 of the 8 poems follow the iambics of Shakespeare that we all still use, whether we know it or not. To this he adds accents and words common in the North of Ireland. You could say he hears two drums beating, the drums of educated, literary English, and of Catholic Ireland. A ‘townland’ is a rural place of a few houses, too scattered to be a village. The rhythm uses one-syllable words like ‘grunts’, ’slub’, ‘sod’, ‘pluck’, mixed with Latin words like ‘libation’, from his Catholic background. .In Mid-Term Break neighbours say they are ‘sorry for your trouble’, the Irish way to express condolences to the bereaved. In Digging he says:

‘My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.’

which sound like lines from a ballad. Once you’ve heard him read, you never read his poetry any other way.

My poem (Gillian Clarke) On the Train uses, more or less, iambic pentameter until the moment when the automatic Vodafone voice speaks, the trains have crashed at Paddington, and everything breaks down. Iambic pentameter is a dignified rhythm, and expresses the tragedy. As the poem moves from setting the scene to the catastrophe, the rhythm breaks. The poem gradually enter the mind of a traveller involved in the event, or a grieving person waiting at home. The broken rhythms suggest chaos. The rhythm of Cold Knap Lake also expresses a transition from the story I remembered as a five-year old witness, to the rhythm of a myth or nursery rhyme in the final two lines.

Carol Ann Duffy‘s rhythms always suit the subject. Each one is different. Elvis’s Twin Sister uses the short lines of an Elvis song, quoting the songs and mixing them with words and phrases of a convent. Anne Hathaway is written in iambic pentameter. Salome cleverly slips in asides, extra remarks like ‘sooner or later’, and ‘what did it matter’, between the rhythm of iambic pentameter in the first few lines. This rhythm comes and goes throughout the poem. Before You Were Mine is an example of the special Carol Ann Duffy style. It’s a speaking voice, but it’s as rhythmic to read aloud as the ballrooms, the dance bands, the cha cha of her mother’s youth. We Remember Your Childhood Well and Education for Leisure are both told through another voice, not the poet’s own. Both take their rhythm from natural speech, the way we speak now, the way we tell a story.

Simon Armitage loves popular music, and knows a lot about it. His poetry reflects this. The tune and language of his native Yorkshire is strong in every poem, and his 8 poems in the anthology have fewer lines of iambic pentameter than the other poets mentioned here. In ‘Mother, any distance greater than a single span/ requires a second pair of hands’, the rhyme may be traditional, but the short and long lines sing to his own tune. His use of the things people say, ‘requires a second pair of hands’, for example, and the whole first verse of the next poem, contribute to this natural sound, this conversational beat.

My father thought it bloody queer,
the day I rolled home with a ring of silver in my ear
half hidden by a mop of hair. ‘You’ve lost your head.
If that’s how easily you’re led
you should’ve had it through your nose instead.’

It’s not only the quoted voice of his father, but the whole poem that uses phrases and therefore rhythms that come from real people speaking. All Simon Armitage’s poems do that.

SIMILE
Similes and metaphors are doing the same thing. They make a link in the reader’s mind between two images. A metaphor uses one image to suggest another without using the word ‘like’. It is a subtle hint, and it leaves the reader’s imagination to complete the connection. In ‘Catrin’ I turn the umbilical cord into ‘that old rope’. Grace Nichols talks of ‘The howling ship of the wind’. (‘Hurricane hits England’)

A simile is more direct. ‘Like’ can prevent a confusion of meaning. Grace Nicols, in the same poem, the same verse, says the wind is ‘Like some dark ancestral spectre’.

Seamus Heaney describes how the sea spray ‘spits like a tame cat/ turned savage.’ Indeed, there are similes in six out the eight set AQA Anthology poems by Seamus Heaney. In At a Potato Digging the people are ‘like crows’. In Follower his father’s shoulders are ‘like a full sail strung’. The sea, in Storm on the Island is ‘like a tame cat’. The fruit are like ‘a plate of eyes’ in Blackberry-Picking. The frogs are ‘like mud grenades’ in Death of a Naturalist. In At a Potato Digging the potatoes are ‘like inflated pebbles’, and ‘Hope rotted like a marrow’. The student should look at these similes and decide what effect they have on the poem and on what they make the reader see and understand about the poem.

There is one simile in my poems, (Gillian Clarke) but beware! In Mali, ‘I bake her a cake like our house’ is NOT a simile. It is a description of the cake, shaped and decorated to look like our house. It is a literal fact. I can find plenty of metaphors in almost every one of my poems, but in the AQA anthology selection I can find only one simile. It’s in the second line from the end of ‘October’: ‘I must write like the wind’. With that simile I picked up, quite instinctively, from a metaphor in the first two lines of that verse:

‘Over the page the pen
runs faster than wind’s white steps over grass.’

Carol Ann Duffy has one simile in her eight poems. Salome’s lover was ‘like a lamb to the slaughter’.

The nearest thing Simon Armitage comes to a simile in his 8 poems is when his character in Kid says ‘he was like a father to me.’ This is not a simile. It is a description of the person’s behaviour as being like a father’s behaviour. That does not make the strange connection that simile usually makes.

SONNET
Form is sound. Sound is form. The pattern on the page is the tune in your ear. A sonnet looks and sounds like a sonnet. This is because words are not silent. They speak aloud in your mind. The human ear and heart enjoy rhythm and rhyme as much as the human eye enjoys pattern. A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines written, usually, in iambic pentameter, that is, each line contained five strong beats, as in most of Shakespeare’s verse. See line 2 in the Shakespeare quotation below, how the five words ‘then’, ‘scorn’, ‘change’, ‘state’ and ‘kings’ carry five stressed beats.

(see also article on iambic pentameter)

A sonnet’s line endings rhyme in various ways. Using the alphabet as a code for the rhymes, look at the two main sonnet sound patterns: they are known as the Italian sonnet, which rhymes a,b,b,a/ a,b,b,a/ c,d,e,c,d,e, and the most common Shakespearean sonnet, a,b,b,a/ c,d,c,d/ e,f,e,f/ g,g. The Italian sonnet (also called the Petrarchan sonnet after the poet Petrarch) has 8 lines, then 6 lines. Often there’s a pause between the two parts, and often the thought shifts at that point.

The Shakespearean sonnet is usually printed in a block, without verses. Shakespeare’s sonnets are often love poems, and his concluding couplets are mood music for lovers:

‘For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.’

All four poets in the AQA Anthology sometimes write sonnets, but only one, Anne Hathaway by Carol Ann Duffy, is included in the selection. In the other section of the anthology, on page 50, there is a beautiful sonnet by William Shakespeare, a love poem known as Sonnet 130. It is a good idea to compare the two poems. Shakespeare follows the rules absolutely. His rhyme pattern, represented by the alphabet, is a, b, a, b, c, d, c, d, e, f, e, f, g, g. It ends, as Shakespeare’s always do, with a rhyming couplet. Carol Ann Duffy breaks the rules. Her sonnet ends with a rhyming couplet too, but in the 8 central lines she chooses the best word rather than force the rhyme into a pattern. She begins with a, b, a, b, and then allows the words at line-endings to echo a word somewhere in the poem, but she does not force it. She ends with a rhyming couplet.

Nevertheless the poem SOUNDS as if it rhymes. After reading it you think you’ve read a rhyming poem. Why is this? It is partly because she keeps to the iambic pentameter, Shakespeare’s favourite rhythm, and partly because the poem REFERS to Shakespeare. The subject is Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, to whom he left his ‘second best bed’ in his will. It is a love poem, as most of Shakespeare’s sonnets were. Many of the metaphors in Carol Ann Duffy’s poem make connections with language, words like rhyme, assonance, verb, noun, written, page, romance, drama, all used as metaphors for the relationship between the lovers.

Michael Woods writes about ALL of Heaney's Poems

2009-03-15T02:08:00.000-07:00

With the exception of ‘Perch’, all the poems are taken from Heaney’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966 when he was twenty-seven. As such, there is a coherence in the examination board’s selection. It would be a great pity, though, to limit yourself to reading only these poems as they do not reflect the tremendous range of Heaney’s poetic output.

It is important to differentiate between those poems that are clearly autobiographical in nature, and have been acknowledged as such by Heaney, and those poems that are not. “Storm on the Island” and “At a Potato Digging” are clearly not autobiographical in their stance. In general, one should be very careful when considering the use of the first person in poetry as it can lead to naïve or mistaken readings.

STORM ON THE ISLAND

Heaney writes in the voice of an islander (but one who seems representative of the island’s population) describing a way of like, the ravaging effects of a storm and the experience of living in a remote place.

There is a robust confidence at the beginning of the poem “We are prepared” suggests that the islanders are certainly ready to face a storm but their practices have clearly come about as a result of experience. This weather has conditioned their lives to the extent that it influences their architecture and farming methods. The way people deal with their environment is inevitably conditioned by the climate in which they live. The landscape of the island presented in the poem is bleak and exposed to the elements. The opening word “we” suggests a collective, cultural voice of solidarity; a community facing a common enemy that is the unpredictably tempestuous weather.

The landscape is inhospitable and bleak, allowing what we might consider subsistence without luxury. We are told that “The wizened earth” is too barren to yield hay. There are no “stacks” or “stooks” of it. We are also introduced to the extreme power of nature, isolation and the difference between real and perceived danger. On the one hand, the storm and its power are invisible and therefore a “huge nothing” (line 19) but, on the other, the effect on the island is palpable both in physical and psychological ways. The islanders have to adapt their farming practices to take account of the potentially ruinous effects of storms. For example, houses are built “squat” (line 1) their walls are well founded in “rock” (line 2) and they are roofed with heavy slate.

The idea of exposure and danger is well realised in throughout poem. An island is by its very nature, more acutely affected by rough weather than a much greater non-coastal land mass. There is not even the consolation of the company of trees that can “raise a tragic chorus in a gale” (line 8) to distract the listener from the alarming reality that the wind “pummels” houses as well as the surrounding landscape. This chorus reminds us the sort of lamentation of a Greek tragedy and as such reinforced the mournful atmosphere being created. A chorus in Greek tragedy also had the function of making sense of events, interpreting. Here, the absence of any anchor point leaves us with the sense that the islanders lack anything that might divert their attention away form the reality of their situation. It seems that they alone are prey to the gale.

The sea is inhospitable. It is described by Heaney as “Exploding comfortably down the cliffs” (line 13). The verb “exploding” is an image associated with the ordinance of war, something that is developed in subsequent lines. Explosions seem natural to the personified sea, which serves to reinforce how disconcerting it is for the querulous people on the receiving end of the storm’s onslaught. The manner in which weather can change very quickly as a storm begins is conveyed through the image of “a tame cat / Turned savage” (lines 15-16). We are all aware of how something as apparently benign as a domestic cat is capable of changing instantly into a violent creature, if provoked. The islanders endure the storm and “sit tight” (line 16). The untrammelled power of the storm is suggested through the powerfully alliterated sounds of “spray”, “hits”, “spits” and “cat”.

Assaulted by nature, the island is presented as being under attack. Extended military metaphor presents the storm as a fighter plane that “strafes invisibly”. This is reinforced with “strafed” and “bombarded”, terms normally used to describe a fighter pilot’s use of machine gun and bombs. This very violent imagery makes the storm seem like an air force seeking to wreak havoc upon the island. Heaney highlights the mysterious power of the wind by writing that it is “empty air” and “a huge nothing” that is the source of all this feared havoc. This poem does not simply concern itself with a storm on an island but engages with the idea that however practical and rooted we may be, there are forces beyond us that are ultimately more powerful and more unknowable than we are. This poem contemplates upon the power of nature and its effects on the human imagination as well those on the immediate environment.

The tone of the poem is conversational as befits a dramatic monologue. At one point the islander is clearly talking as if sharing a confidence with someone when he says, “you know what I mean” (line 7).

Heaney evokes atmosphere very powerfully and challenges idealised thinking about living on an island. This island is not a romantic retreat but somewhere to endure. We cannot always expect good weather in life. There will be times when we are required to call upon all our resources, our inner strength and to conquer our fear.

It suggests a blasted landscape, perhaps one of the Arran islands off the West coast of Ireland.

The houses have to be

Stooks – these are pyramidal shaped arrangement of hay in a field. Interestingly, Heaney uses the word employed by Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem ‘Hurrahing in Harvest’. Here, of course, Heaney is drawing attention to the fact that there can be no hurrahing as there is no harvest.

PERCH (Electric Light 2001)

This poem is taken from Heaney’s eleventh collection, Electric Light, which was published in 2001. Its subject is perch, the freshwater fish characterised by their stripy bodies and very sharp, spiny dorsal fins. The theme of the poem is the marvellous equipoise in nature that is paradoxically constant because of its constant change. There is also a clear sense of an appreciation of beauty in a particular place. Earth and water form the landscape chose details are quickly conveyed visually. Heaney uses the compound “alder-dapple” which both specifies the trees to be found on the bank of the River Bann (‘Bann’ is the Gaelic word for white) and their appearance as they sway or “waver”, a word which precisely captures the sense of flow that will develop later in the poem.

Not only is there a clear sense of a particular place established in the first couplet of this short ten line poem but also an insight into the shared language of the poet and those with him when he visited through the use of the word ‘grunts’ instead of perch. Apart from the sonic suggestion of the word, it is also one used by American soldiers to describe new recruits. Heaney’s description of the perch as “little flood-slubs, runty and ready” gives the impression of pugnacious little creatures ready to take on anything whatever its size. A slub is a slightly twisted roll of fibre, an image that gives a clear visual picture of the sinuous, flexing shape of the perch as viewed from above. The refracting quality of water in a river also has the effect making fish appear fatter and foreshortened.

Heaney is describing a return to the River Bann where he used to go fishing in his youth. “I saw and I see”, connects the past with the present with the suggestion that they are, in a sense, balanced. We might be reminded of “see-saw” by association. Also, the poem is written as a single sentence from start to finish so that there is a sense of the seamless connection between everything that is symbolised in the river’s movement, “In the everything flows and steady go of the world”. (line 10) There is an internal dynamic in everything, “flows” and “go” suggest movement and action while “steady” suggests constancy and stability. Here, Heaney deftly captures the idea that the only constant we can be sure of is change itself but may be reassured that this is all part of what is the imperative underpinning our world.

There is also a sense of the miraculous as Heaney describes remembering and seeing again, “the river’s glorified body / That is passable through. This centres on the idea that water is physical and weighty yet apparently without boundary, its anatomy invisible. The phrase “glorified body” is one traditionally associated with Christ after the resurrection and this only serves to reinforce the highly charged sense of the extraordinary that is perceived in what can easily be taken for granted. Water is synonymous with that which sustains life and, for the perch, this is obviously so. The revisiting of this river is also a renovating experience for the poet.

The title of the poem is ambiguous as it both names the fish that are ostensibly its subject but it is also a verb to denote a state of rest or poise. Normally associated with birds, these fish seem to be perched on the invisible as they achieve a stable position in the powerful flow of the river. The fish observed in their own element of water seem to be perched almost as birds might be in their own element of air:

In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on air
That is water..”

(lines 8-9)

Here, Heaney employs the consonance of “finland” and “fenland” to signal that not only is a river the natural element for fish but it is like another country. It is no accident that he has chosen to call the river after a country, in doing this he also taps into the linguistic energy of Anglos-Saxon poetry, in which images known as kennings were employed. For example, the sea was known as the “whale road”. So, “finland” conveys both a sense of the otherness of the perch’s environment but also suggests a river densely populated with them..

We know, though, that there is a subtle complexity of processes in the fish that allow it remain steady:

“Guzzling the current, against it, all muscle and slur”

(line 7).

The half-rhyme in the poem helps to reinforce the idea of equipoise and this is something that is maintained throughout. The unstable demarcation between the ancient idea of the elements is taken further by Heaney when he writes of “air / That is water” (lines 8-9).

The concluding line is both celebratory of the kinetic aspect of nature and allusive. “All things flow” (Gk: hen panta rei) is the famous statement of the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus who maintained that everything is in a constant state of flux. He also famously said, “You cannot step twice into the same river.” Another of his surviving fragments says, “The death of air is the borth of water”. Heaney seems to have these ideas in mind as he revisits the Bann, the same river as he visited years before but the current of time has moved everything on, just as the water in a river is constantly flowing. The perch seem to be objects of admiration, as they appear to be able to master the current, achieve stasis in the face of flux.

Allusion – a reference to another writer or work made in a poem or other text. It is rather like a quotation but is subtler, being assimilated into the fabric of the poem, as the reference to Heraclitus is here.

BLACKBERRY PICKING

The activity described in the poem is very familiar to most people. It is a childhood memory of picking blackberries. Heaney moves from a description of the activity to a reflection upon the manner in which the reality of disappointment is something that has to be dealt with as we grow up. Heaney addresses the transience of beauty and the manner in which our relationship with the world becomes less naïve and more complicated as we mature.

There is a recurrence of blood imagery in the poem and this operates in a symbolically complex manner. On the one hand, blood is obviously associated with the life force. The first ripe blackberry is described as “a glossy purple clot”. Heaney concentrates upon the sensual experience of eating new fruit, employing a simile to capture the taste of the berry’s “flesh” that “was sweet / Like thickened wine” (lines 5-6). Heaney’s use of the second person (“You ate that first one”) invites the reader to identify with the experience described which also has the effect of leaving that reader implicated in some sense, too. Certainly, there is a movement from simple enthusiasm to something of rapaciousness. The idea that “summer’s blood” was in the flesh of this first blackberry of the season is immediately followed by the reporting of the effects of picking it. The pickers’ tongues have “stains” (line 7) upon them, and we are immediately reminded of bloodstains. The word “lust” in the same line clearly conveys the manner in which those engaged in picking the blackberries are somehow possessed by a desire to strip the entire bush. Heaney is exploring both childish enthusiasm and the awakening eroticism in what appears to be a pre-adolescent persona. Once the hunt is on, “lust” is “replaced by “hunger” and the people depicted in the poem, presumably a group of siblings, set out to gather fruit. The sense that any container that came to hand was quickly taken form the family kitchen by the enthusiastic group is convincingly captured as we are told that “milk-cans, pea-tins and jam-pits” are taken out on the expedition through the “briar2” and “wet grass” that “bleached” the pickers’ boots. This is all finely observed detail. We are easily able to identify with the rushed grabbing of a container once we have it our minds to go in search of blackberries, just as we have seen the white tide mark that water from wet grass leaves on leather boots. There is a perfectly iambic rhythm in line 10 that sets u a curious tension between the agreeableness of the task in hand and the difficulty that has to be overcome in order to achieve it. There is physical pain and endurance required of the blackberry picker; the bush does not yield up its fruit without scarifying those who have “lust for / Picking…” (lines 7-8).

As is the case in several of Heaney’s poems focussing upon childhood, a dual perspective emerges in that we are given simultaneous insights into the adult and child in the personae presented. In common with ‘Death of a Naturalist’, this poem reflects upon the transience of innocence and the realities of bitter experience. There is a clear debt to William Wordsworth’s famous poem. ‘The Prelude’ in which there is a sense of retributive justice meted out by nature for crimes the guilty child believes her has committed. In Wordsworth’s case, he recalls being aware of “low breathings” following him after stealing a boat and these were, he records, “a trouble to my dreams”.

The poem, in common with ‘Death of a Naturalist’ has a bipartite structure. The first verse paragraph is largely descriptive of what seems to be a carefree experience but there is a subtle build up towards a sense of guilt that is associated with both sexuality and murder. Heaney describes “palms as sticky as Bluebeard’s, an infamous pirate in a story who killed several of his wives. The blackberries “burned / Like a plate of eyes” indicating that the speaker felt guilty about the “cache” (line 19) of berries. There is, too, a sense of initiation. The second verse paragraph explores the implications and results of picking the berries: what was once sweet turns sour. In some measure, this is a straightforward reflection upon the transition from innocence to experience but there is also a rather disturbing sense that nature is not uncomplicated, it exacts a kind of nemesis. This is certainly explicit in ‘Death of a Naturalist’ where the child “knew” that if he dipped his hand that “the spawn would clutch it”. The “rat-grey fungus that grows on the berries as they ferment in the byre is sinister and associated with fear. The fact that Heaney present is “glutting on our cache” presents a resentful response that is developed in the foot stamping outburst in the second verse paragraph where the growing child erupts with, “I felt it wasn’t fair / That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.” (lines 22-3). The “fresh berries” have turned from “sweet” to “sour”. It is a truism that life is not all sweet but it is one that we all have to learn as individuals. The earlier promise of “thickened wine” becomes “stinking juice”, and that which was once so attractive becomes repellent, as the reality of the situation has to be dealt with.

DEATH OF A NATURALIST

The death referred to in this poem is metaphorical and refers to the loss of innocent enthusiasm of a child as the realities of life begin to be sensed but not quite understood. A naturalist is, of course, someone who spends time enthusiastically studying nature. The idea of collecting and observing natural things and, notably, frogspawn is an almost universal activity in primary schools.

This poem is partly about the transition from innocence to experience and the fact that, as we grow up, we must come to terms with what might be unpalatable realities. In this poem, it is the reality of sexuality that “invades” the child’s consciousness. He is terrified at the end of the poem, being convinced that the “angry frogs” will seek vengeance for his having taken their spawn. And here is another facet of experience explored by Heaney in a more direct manner than in ‘Blackberry Picking’; it is that of punishment for deeds done. The fact that the child believed the frogs “Were gathered there for vengeance” and that he “knew” the spawn would “clutch” his hand suggests that he felt, in part at least, that he deserved their “vengeance”. This clearly shows that the child’s relationship with nature is sometimes a problematic one. The metamorphosis of the tadpoles into frogs corresponds in the poem to the change in the child’s perceptions as he sees the site of generation.

Despite the secure and untroubled presentation of the child’s primary school experience, there is an undertone of threat in the first six lines of the poem that pave the way for the much more openly aggressive aspects of the second section. The verbs “festered”, “rotted” and “sweltered” convey very effectively the effect of the “punishing sun”. It is the imagined punitive aspect of nature that scares the child at the end of the poem. Lines 5 and 6 foreground details that would surely be fascinating to the young naturalist. Not only does Heaney give precise visual images, he creates a very accurate soundscape. The plosive alliterated b’s that link “Bubbles” and “bluebottles” is joined by the throaty “gargled” which is leavened by the adjective “delicately”. Line 6 employs the technique of synaesthesia (literally “senses together”) in order to make the atmosphere tangible so that we are given a simultaneous visual and aural experience of the flies that “Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell”.

The idea that underpins the poem is encapsulated in Wordsworth’s famous couplet from The Prelude (Book 1) in which he says:

Fair seed time had my soul and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.

Wordsworth presents, in natural terms, the idea of a plant being nurtured from a seed and links this to his personal growth through childhood and beyond. He carefully signals, though, that he experienced both “beauty” and “fear”. In the same way, Heaney writes about being entranced by the variegated beauty of nature as well as its frightening dimension.

In the first section of the poem, the young child’s sense of wonder and beauty is focused upon. He is nurtured in the context of innocence in an environment that is presided over by the protective presence of Miss Walls who preserves the children’s’ innocence by telling them that the way frogs reproduce simply involves a male frog croaking and the female laying eggs. No mention of the sexual reality is mentioned. The naïve view of the child is further emphasised in the fact that he attaches no more significance to the frogs’ reproductive process than to the idea that they might signal the weather: “For they were yellow in the sun and brown / In rain.”

The rhythm of the verse in lines 7-10 reflects the breathless enthusiasm of the child recounting the details of his naturalist’s investigations. There is real relish in the sense data of experience. Heaney marshals the noise of consonant and vowel to great effect in lines 8-9: “But best of all was the warm thick slobber / Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water…” The assonantal associations of sound capture the globular shape of the spawn as well as its tactile quality that is like mucus. Of course, that which is perceived as best becomes worst as the “great slime kings…gathered…for vengeance”.

The emergence of tadpoles form the spawn is conveyed in precise terms, too. The child would:

“wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles.”

(lines 13-15)

The alliterated w’s and b’s capture first the sense of protracted anticipation and then the eruption of the egg sacs as the tadpoles “burst” into their motile life. The short “i” sound in “nimble” and “swimming” reinforce the sense of freed action as the next stage in metamorphosis is effected.

There is a definite break between the two verse paragraphs beyond the obvious typographical division. The word “Then” signals a change and the adjectives “hot”, “rank”, “angry” and “coarse” communicate the effect on the child who had previously been innocently engaged with nature. There is also a shift form a female to a male imperative as the sounds we hear are prefaced as a “bass chorus”. A clear sense of male threat is evident here. There is an ominous atmosphere created and the sinister undertones detectable in the first paragraph become a more palpable threat through the imagery of potential violence and destruction. The frogs are described as being “cocked / On sods” (lines ) as if they are guns ready to be discharged. The sense of disgust and fear encapsulated in the sentence, “I sickened, turned and ran.” Is prepared for in Heaney’s lexical choices. The frogs are “gross-bellied” and an almost saurian impression is conveyed in “their loose necks pulsed like sails”. The words “hopped”, “slap” and “plop” suggest something of a drain or cistern where waste is egested. This idea is clinched in the shocking image of the frogs’ mouths being seen by the child as anuses discharging a foul afflatus with “their blunt heads farting”. The frogs are now seen as “The great slime kings” who “Were gathered there for vengeance”. There is no doubt in the child’s mind that he will be punished for taking spawn to out on the windowsill at school: “I knew / That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.”

The safe and enclosed world presided over by Miss Walls has become a dangerous place of exposure for the developing child. Security changes to threat just as the tadpoles metamorphose into frogs.

This poem signals a clear acknowledgement of the complexities of the awakening of sexual awareness and the simultaneous sense of loss and revulsion that is also linked to initiation in some way. The child will somehow have to negotiate a pathway through the kingdom of slime that leaves behind the classroom vision of nature that concentrates on the appeal of “dragonflies and spotted butterflies”. The young naturalist is annihilated by the real imperatives of life that show themselves to him somewhat prematurely. This rings true as there is a universal identification with the idea that childhood is raided too soon by the knowledge of the adult.

DIGGING

This is the first poem in Heaney’s first collection and it may be thought of as a poet’s credo or manifesto, in much the same way as W B Yeats’s ‘A Coat’ Here, Heaney sets out on his project of following his vocation. The spade/pen metaphor is worked right through the poem. His sense of the past is clearly articulated in the way he recalls “living roots” which are literally those that are cut through by his father and grandfather as they dig and dug and the metaphorical roots that constitute his cultural heritage, one that is rooted in agriculture.

From his window, the poet sees his father digging and this triggers memories of seeing the same thing when he was a boy. He feels great pride in the physical prowess of his father and grandfather physical and their hard-working, agricultural lives. However, he also realises he “has no spade to follow men like them”, recognising that his method of “digging” will be a metaphorical one by using his pen as a spade. The poet will keep his antecedents’ culture alive by preserving it and promoting it in his writing.

The poem opens with a mixture of precision and almost dangerous intent:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests snug as a gun.

(lines 1-2)

The opening couplet is typographically separated on the page from the first three line stanza to reinforce the contrast with the writer’s activity and that of his father who is engaged in the physical activity of digging, something that is observed by the poet but not shared. The observation takes the poet back “twenty years” to a time when his father was doing exactly the same thing. This establishes a sense of continuity, a central theme of the poem. The repetition of the word “digging” (lines 5, 9 & 24), which is also the title of the poem, clinches this. The activity of digging is observed with precision because it is a precise act in itself. The parts of the spade are carefully included; the “lug”, “shaft” and “edge” are as much part of his father’s and grandfather’s oral and working tradition, as they now become part of his written vocation. There is a careful contrast drawn between a “coarse boot” (line 10) and the fact that it “nestled” on the lug of the spade. The business of digging peat requires brute strength suggested in the strongly alliterated “buried the bright edge deep” (line 12) is skilled and this is reflected in the precision of “Nicking and slicing neatly” (line 22). The strength required to dig peat is not forgotten, though, and the enjambment of lines reflects the continuous, arduous process of digging: “heaving sods / Over his shoulder…” (lines 22-3).

There is real pride in the statements made in lines 15-16:

“By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.”

The tradition of working hard is focused on in the description of the poet’s grandfather who hardly stopped working except when he “straightened up” (line 20) to drink the milk his grandson took him in a bottle “Corked sloppily with paper.” (line 20).

Heaney has remarked that he sees the act of writing poems as sometimes analogous to embarking upon an archaeological dig. The cultural memory evoked in the poem is simultaneously personal and collective in that there are many people who may well have grown up in an agrarian environment but who, as a result of the 1944 Education Act, progressed to an education they would not otherwise have had. This demographic shift resulted in a new generation of people who earned their living in radically different ways from those of their parents. In this poem, Heaney communicates a sensitive awareness to the need to commemorate and celebrate a way of life that is of intrinsic, dignified value, even if he cannot physically follow in the footsteps of previous generations.

Heaney has said that poetry is “restoration of the culture to itself” and has referred to poems as “elements of continuity, with the aura and authenticity of archaeological finds, where the buried shard has am importance that is not diminished by the importance of the buried city; poetry as a dig, a dig for finds that end up being plants”. (Preoccupations p.41) Line 27 encapsulates the experiences of what it is to be ab artist in relation to past tradition: “…living roots awaken in my head”. Although many years have passed, the poet feels that his heritage is very much part of his poetic present and he will ensure that it will be remembered in posterity by enshrining its memory in his writing

He also draws attention to the poem’s significance in his own artistic development:

“‘Digging’, in fact, was the name of the first poem I wrote where I thought my feelings had got into words, or to put it more accurately, where I thought my feel had got into words. Its rhythms and noises still please me.”

(Preoccupations p.41)

We are very quickly aware that the pen and the spade are emblematic of two distinct ways of life, one academic and artistic, and the other manual and agricultural. Heaney says:

“The pen/spade analogy was the simple heart of the matter”

(Preoccupations p.42)

The poem opens and concludes with the image of a pen, first as weapon and then as instrument of cultural excavation. Paradoxically, by breaking with his father’s and grandfather’s way of making a living he is also continuing it by preserving it in the cultural memory. We are part of the reading community that is able to connect or reconnect with the rural past through Heaney’s poem. At the heart of the poem, of course, is the poet’s conscious decision to “dig” with the pen rather than the spade. Heaney also wrote:

I now believe that the ‘Digging’ poem had for me the force of an initiation

(Preoccupations p.42)

He went on to remark in a self deprecating way:

“I don’t want to overload ‘Digging’ with too much significance. It is a big coarse-grained navvy of a poem”

(Preoccupations p.43)

Despite the fact that he does capture the rough and ready aspect of the hard graft of digging, one of the striking aspects of the poem is Heaney’s precision with, and energising of, language. Unsurprisingly, he has written, “poetry involves a conscious savouring of words” (Preoccupations p.46). The sheer noise generated by his poetic diction is enough, on its own, to make this poem memorable. From the “clean rasping sound” (line 3) of his father’s spade in “gravelly ground” (line 4) to the “squelch and slap / of soggy peat” we hear a relishing of words for their power to evoke. We are struck by the energy of both alliteration and onomatopoeia in these examples.

Acutely aware of his rural “living roots” and his farming lineage, he decided to keep tradition alive, not by working the land but by investing his writing with its significances. He is, in a sense unearthing the past with his poem. Archaeological images appear repeatedly in subsequent collections, most notably in the magisterial collections, North and Wintering Out. Here is Heaney laying down his cultural coordinates, the latitude and longitude or the warp and weft of his poetic cloth.

As we read the poem progresses it first regresses then returns to its own occasion of writing. Heaney begins with himself, and then moves a description of his father, grandfather and finally of himself as he decides to “dig” with his pen.

This poem is pivotal in Heaney’s writing career because it made him feel that he had made “more than an arrangement of words”. It is of central importance in his work should not be underestimated, despite the fact that it appeared in his first collection over forty years ago. It was this poem that he recited (no book was necessary) to conclude his first public reading which was in Cheltenham Town Hall after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

MID-TERM BREAK

The subject of this poem is the death of Seamus Heaney’s younger brother, Christopher who was killed by a car at the age of four. It is a tremendously poignant poem and its emotional power derives in large measure form the fact that Heaney is very muted and understated with respect to his own emotional response. He chooses to focus more upon the reaction of his parents in order to convey the shocking impact of the death of their little boy. Usually, we must careful not to assume the “I” in a poem is, in fact, the poet. In this case, though, we may be sure that Mid-Term Break is purely and intensely autobiographical.

This beautiful lyric poem is certainly enormously moving. It presents an elder brother having to deal with a terrible trauma. As is frequently the case with Heaney, there is an arresting amalgam of manliness and tenderness in the writing that lends it both warmth and astringency at the same time. This poem is powerfully moving because of its emotional restraint and control of tone. Heaney concentrates on observed details and it is the accumulation of these details that helps to make the poem so memorable.

An elegiac tone is established at the beginning of the poem. An elegy is a poem written to commemorate a dead person who is traditionally resurrected in a benign landscape. Here, though, the little boy is recalled with clarity and realism; Heaney finishes with the rueful and terrible equation “A four foot box, a foot for every year”, which starkly conveys the shocking loss of a young child.

The poem opens with a line that might easily describe any child but the second line introduces a darkly foreboding atmosphere:

“I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.”

The word “knell” is appropriate in the context of a poem about death because it is the sound of a funeral bell. We do not normally associate school bells with death but this day was to prove horrifically different for the poet. The rhythm and alliteration also reinforce the mournful tone. The ‘c’ an ‘l’ sounda, as well as the internal rhyme of “bells” and “knelling” help to suggest both the idea of finality and of time seeming to slow down. The poet is driven home by his neighbours and not his parents, another unusual event preparing the reader for the idea that something is terribly wrong. The fact that Heaney remembers the precise time, “two o’clock” is convincing as we all tend to remember precise timings when recalling traumatic, like changing events.

Stanza two concentrates on the poet’s father’s emotional response who is “crying”. Heaney tells us that his father “had always taken funerals in his stride” but this death is unnatural as well as personal. The be bereft of a little child is unbearable for the normally rock solid father who would, we assume, be the sort of man to offer words of comfort to others just as “Big Jim Evans” offers his to Heaney’s family in “saying it was a hard blow.” (line 6) There is a terrible double meaning in the phrase “hard blow” because Jim Evans, by referring to the emotional impact of Christopher’s death, also unwittingly uses language that recalls the impact of the car that killed him.

The third stanza presents us with another contrast, the baby’s innocent joy at seeing his elder brother. Remembering the title of the poem, we might be tempted to hope, along with the Heaney family that this event is some terrible nightmare that might be woken up from. The baby’s normal behaviour, though, only accentuates the reality of the situation. From a technical point of view, Heaney’s skilful use of the iambic pentameter helps to emphasise the family drama that is played out in the poem. The baby’s innocent obliviousness to the tragic circumstance of his elder brother’s return from school is captured in, “The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram.” The bouncy emphatic rhythm is in direct contrast to the opening stanza’s measured pace. The unusual aspect of the situation is developed further in lines 8-11 as the young Heaney is “embarrassed” by the proffering of sympathy from “old men”. Their awkwardness is economically conveyed through their euphemistic use of language in telling him that “there were sorry” for his “trouble” (line10). The sibilant alliteration in “Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest” (line 11) captures the hushed, muted atmosphere in the house.

Heaney goes on to concentrate upon his mother’s reaction to her little boys’ death who says nothing but holds his hand in her own as she “coughed out angry tearless sighs” (line 13). The implication here is that she has cried so much that there is nothing more to cry but incensed by the driver’s failure to avoid her son. Line 14 begins with another precise time reference and the reality of the family having to receive “the corpse”. This is the first time that we know that the “trouble” is connected with.

The sixth stanza recounts the poet’s visit to his brother’s room. Heaney conveys the feeling of being unable to name the reality of the situation:

“Next morning I went up into the room.”

(line 16)

He does not go on to say that this is where his little brother is lying dead. Instead the surrounding details emphasise the atmosphere of quiet as the boys are reunited after “six weeks”. The snowdrops and candles are symbolic of life but they are also ritualistically funereal. The word “soothed” may be applicable to both the idea that the flowers and candles are placed as a comfort to the dead boy but they are also for the solace of the grieving family. Unable to articulate the reality of his brother’s death, the poet chooses to present his earlier self, noticing that he was “Paler” (line 18). Another flower image draws attention to the apparently insignificant injury that had such a devastating effect, as well as the fragility of life with which the poppy is traditionally associated:

“Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.”

The description here becomes almost unbearably powerful because of the restraint Heaney exercises. The young boy could easily be asleep but, tragically, it is only as if he were asleep. He will never wake up again. The word “cot”, along with the earlier use of “pram” in stanza three emphasises the unnatural eruption of death into the life of a family with very young children. It also helps to highlight the horror faced by any parent who is predeceased by a child. The final couplet is consistent in tone with the remainder of the poem. Heaney chooses to add a single line stanza to complete the poem that has seven three line stanzas preceding it. The effect of this is to present a terrible equation on its own, something that stands out baldly and inescapably. Just as there are “No gaudy scars” visible on the poor child’s body, so too there is no lurid concentration upon injury or any self-indulgent displays of grief. The final line is, in a sense, “knocked clear” of the rest of the poem through Heaney’s decision to separate it. There is a heartbreaking logic in the statement that reminds us both of the small stature of the child and the brevity of his young life.

As a lyric poem commemorating a terrible event, it is difficult to imagine anything to surpass it for control, truthfulness and austere reverential beauty.

FOLLOWER

The central idea in the poem is the way the relationship between parents and children shifts through time, and their cyclical nature. Heaney moves from the perspective of a young, admiring son to an exasperated one. The child literally followed in his father’s footsteps as he ploughed or worked around the farm but he also follows him in a generational way. Finally, he is ruefully aware of his father’s dependence upon him, realising that his responsibility “will not go away” (line 24).

The opening stanza presents the poet’s father as a very strong farmer whose physical strength is prodigious. Heaney presents his younger self’s admiration for his father. The description of his “shoulders globed like a full sail strung” creates a strong visual image of physical effort, the assonantal rhyme of the ‘o’ sounds helps to reinforce this phonically. Also, there is a mythic suggestion here, as if the poet’s father could be Atlas holding the whole of the earth. The muscular tension and effort required for ploughing is finely conveyed through the likening in a simile of his father’s shirted back to a “full sail”; the rhyming of “strung” and “tongue” accentuates this through sound. The poet’s father’s control and mastery is also emphasised in line four:

“The horses strained at his clicking tongue”

This shows that the man is able to control tonnes of horseflesh with just a click of the tongue. There is, though, enormous strength required, too. What Heaney emphasises here, though, is the importance of technique combined with brute strength. Ploughing is a very precise art.

The second stanza opens with a short sentence that sums up the ploughman in just two words; he is “An expert.” Like all skilled exponents of a particular art, the poet’s father knows hi equipment intimately. Heaney describes carefully the precise details of the plough’s parts; everything is done properly. We are able to hear the clank of metal in the alliterated t’s in the words “set”, “fit”, “bright” and “steel-pointed”. The expertise claimed for the father by the admiring son is proven in the actual execution of the work in hand. Satisfyingly, “The sod rolled over without breaking.” This is akin to peeling an apple all in one go but it is a great deal more difficult. The fourth line of the stanza is linked by both sense and enjambment to the third stanza in a brilliant poetic touch:

“At the headrig, with a single pluck
of reins, the sweating team turned round
and back into the land.”

(lines 8-10)

The headrig is at the extreme end of the furrow at eh edge of a field where the ploughman must turn (rather like a hairpin bend on a road) and return to start a new furrow. The turn is imitated by the verse being enjambed. The Latin word for turn is “versus” and it is clear that Heaney is deliberately employing this idea as the uses the word “turned”. His father’s consummate skill and control is again emphasised; all he needs to do is give “a single / pluck of reins” to make the horses turn. Of course, the “sweating team” comprises his father and his team of horses. The cooperation between and beast is presented here and it is intimately connected with the land. The remainder of the stanza concentrated on the precision of the poet’s father’s work. Terms normally associated with mathematics and cartography are employed:

"His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly

(lines 10-12)

The words “angled”, “mapped” and “exactly” tell us that the business of ploughing is very skilled and that being good at it requires a great deal of know how; there is a good deal more to it than meets the eye.

The first three stanzas concentrate on the poet’s father but the last three focus upon his own position as a child. Stanza four emphasises the child’s clumsiness in comparison with his skilled father, he “stumbled in his hobnailed wake”. The alliterated b’s with their plosive sound emphasise the physicality of the situation, while “wake” ties in with “sail” in stanza one – the boy is like a small boat in the wake of a big ship. The words “stumbled” and “fell” also prepare us for the idea of an old man becoming like the dependent child. There is a very effective rhythmical device in “dipping and rising to his plod”. Here, Heaney describes riding on his father’s back as he ploughed. This again emphasises the enormous strength of the father but also captures the up and down movement of his progress along the field through the use of vowel amplitude i.e. the short ‘i’ in ‘dipping’ and the long ‘i’ in ‘rising’.

Like all little boys, the poet wanted to emulate his father. The fact that he observed him minutely is revealed as he has clearly noticed that in order to achieve a good line he had to “close one eye”, and to keep control of the plough he had to “stiffen” an arm. The size of his father is emphasised again and his “broad shadow” is something that the child will be under until he is an independent adult.

The concluding stanza both develops the way in which the poet as boy felt as if he was a “nuisance, tripping, falling, / Yapping always.” (lines 21-2) and also presents us with another “turn” or volte face as the relationship between father and son shifts in time. This is signalled by the word “But” and the shift in tense of the verbs from past to present. This poem is an affectionate portrait of a strong man but it is also honest about the way we can all feel impatient with our parents at times.

AT A POTATO DIGGING

This is a poem concerned with Irish history. Looming over the scene depicted is the spectre of the potato famine that afflicted Ireland from 1845-49. The potato crop, staple for the Irish, failed, and with cataclysmic results. About half the population of three million died, while a million people emigrated – many to America.

The first section of the poem is written in alternately rhymed quatrains that describe a rural scene of potato digging that is clearly in progress much later than a similar scene around the time of the famine. Heaney describes a “mechanical digger” that “wrecks the drill”. Already we ain the machine age and there is a sense that it is destructive. Humans are presented as insects who “swarm in behind”, having to “stoop to fill / Wicker creels”. People seem obeisant to the mechanical digger and their baskets are the traditional containers for the crop, linking them with the potato diggers of the past. An ominous atmosphere is established - inhospitable weather makes “Fingers go dead in the cold”.

Having likened the potato gatherers to insects, Heaney goes on in stanza two to say they are “Like crows attacking crow-black fields”. This bleak image conjures the idea of carrion feeders as well as suggesting something of an omen. There is also nothing exceedingly organised about the operation as the people are in a “higgledy line”. This idea is emphasised through Heaney’s choice of the military word “ranks” premodified by the adjective “ragged”. The work is back breaking and it is clear that it is unremitting because the workers may only “stand / Tall for a moment but soon stumble back / to fish a new load from the crumbled surf” (lines 8-10). Their subservience to machine, soil and crop is made clear through further details such as “Heads bow, trunks bend, hands fumble…” (line 11). Their activity is described as “Processional stooping” (line 12) which conveys their numbers but also the idea that they are in a procession. This has both a religious connotation and one that is purely mortal. The resonance of the famine past gives us a sense that there is a queue for death being formed. The fact that this is presented as happening “mindlessly as autumn” is both potentially pejorative and indicative of the idea that there is an unquestioning continuance of this activity. The season of autumn is obviously that of harvest but is also the time of year when trees drop their leaves. So, there is a complexity of ideas being communicated here, particularly when one remembers the historical background relating to the potato and its crucial significance to Irish life. The crop being gathered in the poem’s present is garnered with the spectre of the past blight behind it. Heaney concludes the first part of the poem with overt references to the potato famine. The religiose quality that was hinted at previously is now explicit in “homage”, “famine god”, “humbled” and “seasonal altar”. The ground becomes the locus of worship each year as those harvesting are only too aware that such largesse in nature cannot be taken for granted. There is a primitive, pagan dimension to the description that aligns the potato diggers with cultures more ancient than the Christian.

Part II of the poem concentrated specifically on the potato itself rather than those who harvest it. They seem to be “petrified hearts of drills” (line 22). In this fine image, the potatoes are presented as having turned to stone, having been described previously as “inflated pebbles”. The common use of the word “petrified” is associated with fear. We are reminded of the trepidation with which each harvest is approached. Heaney goes on to say that these potatoes are “Split / by the spade” communicating both a very straightforward process but also suggesting that those digging in the time of the potato blight would have their own hearts metaphorically split by the act of cutting into a rotten crop. These, though “show white as cream”. Also, there is no rot in them, they are “knots” with a “solid feel”. There is a complicated image at the close of Part 2 that is redolent both of gratitude and horror. The potatoes are “piled in pits” and are described as “live skulls” which reminds us of victims of atrocity as well as conveying the arresting visual metaphor that convinces us that a potato can look like a skull. The fact that they are “blind-eyed” suggests that they are utterly unaware of the way in which they have, in the past, been intimately involved in a pivotal event in Irish history. The “live skulls image” prepares for its repetition in Part III that modulates from a metaphorical description of a potato to a shocking depiction of what human beings literally become as they are reduced to skeletal beings by hunger. From a stanzaic point of view, Part II closes with a sestet rather than a quatrain. This lends weight to the relief and importance associated with the success of the potato crop, something that is to be celebrated as a “clean birth”.

Part III is a much more direct and graphic contemplation upon the reality and impact of the Irish potato famine. Heaney opens with the image of starving people as “Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on / wild higgledy skeletons…” (lines 31-2). We are transported back in time to the mid nineteenth century where people could be “wild” with hunger. The word “higgledy” reminds us of the “higgledy line” of diggers described in Part I. This links the centuries and shows that the activity is the same and that, as humans, we are in thrall to the vicissitudes and unpredictability of nature. In our modern world we are all to familiar with the effects of famine around the world caused by crop failure. It is sobering to learn that so many people died so close to our own country. Shockingly, people were so hungry that they would eat rotten potatoes, and these poisoned them.

There is a macabre transformation described in stanza two of Part III. We left Part II with a description of a permanently sound potato crop but this one only seemed to be “sound as stone” (recalling the “inflated pebbles” in Part II). The solid “petrified” of Part II becomes the “putrefied” of this one. The “clay pit” suggests a place of human burial as well as the trench where potatoes rot. The line, “Millions rotted along with it” refers, on the surface, to potatoes but it also signals to us that the effect of this was to result in the death of mind boggling numbers of people, so dependant were they upon their staple crop.

The third stanza of Part III is uncompromising in it depiction of the effects of starvation on a human body: “Mouths tightened in, eyes died hard”. The image of “a plucked bird” suggests nakedness and death. The bird imagery is extended at the end of a stanza as Heaney presents “beaks of famine” that “snipped at guts”. Here we are given the horrific vision of people as carrion meat for vultures. Although this is metaphorical, it is nonetheless extremely powerful in evoking the pain of starvation. The people’s dwelling, “wicker huts” are places of privation, wheras the “wicker creels” in Part I are containers of plenty.

The land of Ireland itself is, we are reminded, the object of resentment for those who endured the terrible suffering of the Great Hunger. The cultural collective of “A people hungering from birth” takes on a political dimension as well as purely descriptive one. The degradation of having to grub “like plants” makes the people seem worth no more than weeds so it is unsurprising that they should feel that their land is “the bitch earth”. The verb “grafted” is normally used in gardening circles to describe a process that results in the enhancement of life or the production of a new, vigorous strain of plant. Here, though, the famine only results in a grafting to “sorrow”. The dismal “Hope rotted like a marrow” is only trumped by the description of the closing stanza of this part of the poem. The lines are littered with images of decay, rot and stench: “Stinking”, “fouled” “pus”, “filthy” and “running sore” remind us that although the famine is over, it lives on in the memory of the people. In writing the poem, of course, Heaney is keeping such memory alive. There was a great deal of resentment during and following the potato famine. While Irish people starved to death, some of the absentee landlords continued to bleed the country of its resources. While not all of them neglected their workers, there were many scandalous examples of entirely callous unconcern. It is shocking but true to record here that ships laden with food sailed from Ireland while its people starved. It was the English who were largely responsible. It is noticeable that as Heaney’s subject matter and imagery become more stark and astringent, his quatrains become more compact and shrunken, to become more relaxed and capacious again in Part IV.

Part IV modulates from an atmosphere of privation to one of plenty as we return to the diggers we met in Part I, or at least another group who are not deprived of food.. Although the workers in the field are “Dead-beat” they are not dying, they are simply exhausted form their work. There is a “gay flotilla of gulls” that gives the impression of a group of little boats around a great ocean-going vessel. This is a far cry form the ominous crows, plucked bird and the vulture-like spectre that we meet earlier in the poem. Although “The rhythm deadens” inevitably links in the reader’s mind to the death we have already been confronted with earlier in the poem, there is now a new mood of optimism. The workers eat “Brown bread” and drink “tea in bright canfuls”. Rather than simply being servants of the earth, they are “served for lunch”. In their tiredness they are able to “take their fill” in the way that their ancestors could not. Their labour will be rewarded with the satisfaction of garnering a sound potato crop, while their antecedents faced the despair of having worked until they too were “Dead-beat” but with only the spectre of death looming before them instead of the prospect of being served lunch as recompense for their labour. The “timeless fasts” are broken here but in the past they were eternal. The poem concludes with another complex set of ideas. As the workers stretch out in their rest, they are described lying on “faithless ground”. This reminds us of the fact that nature can set its face flint-like against humanity, we cannot predict how it will behave. Although the ground is faithless, a pagan image of an offering to the “bitch earth” of Part III is striking as the workers “spill / Libations of cold tea, scatter crusts.” As well as seeming like an offering to the earth (a libation is a drink offering to a god), there is also the clear sense that in times of plenty we tend to be profligate. No famine victim could afford to throw away tea dregs or crusts. The words “spill” and “scatter” capture this sense of ease most effectively. This is not to condemn those doing it, of course. Heaney is drawing attention, by contrast, to the terrible consequences of the failed potato crop in Ireland.

For a marvellous account of the Irish Potato Famine, one need look no further than Cecil Woodham Smith’s The Great Hunger. Patrick Kavanagh’s poem of the same title is required reading also.

Michael Woods writes about Mother Any Distance

2009-03-15T02:02:00.000-07:00

A mother and child, presumably a son, measure up the new house he is moving in to with a measure tape. He unreels the tape as he moves up through the house and this becomes a metaphor for the measuring of time as well as distance.

This poem is a touching contemplation upon the relationship between mother and son. As he grows older, the persona in the poem becomes increasingly aware of the distance in both physical and temporal terms between him and his mother. However, he also has an acute sense of the unbreakable attachment between them that will remain even if they will be living in separate houses.

The poem opens with the word “Mother”, the object of the persona’s address. The tone is relaxed and conversational and Armitage concentrates on the human, intimate detail of the hand. His reliance on his mother as “second pair of hands” is clear. In this first quatrain the distances explored are human and domestic at first but line 4 introduces a very different scale through the metaphorical references to “acres of walls” and “prairies of the floors”. Fields in England are measured in acres and prairies are vast expanses of arable land in America. These details deftly introduce a sense of continental distance. The son’s house move is clearly not a physical emigration but in an emotional sense, it is because he is moving to the new country that is not his mother’s house. A person is small in relation to an acre and miniscule in relation to a prairie. These huge areas help to convey the sense of being in a big new place and of being in need of something to offer a means of making sense of the dimensions of things. The persona’s mother helps him to measure “windows, pelmets, doors” (line 3) and is also an “Anchor” for him even though there are “unreeling / years” (lines 7-8) separating them. She is the anchor and he is the kite. The extended metaphor of measurement is used to convey the literal business of measuring up a new house for curtains, and so on but when Armitage writes of “reporting back to base” we are led to think about a message that may well go back to a “mother ship” from an astronaut, something that is clearly intended since line 9 opens with “I space-walk through the empty bedrooms”. This both conjures an image of a little boy imagining he is in space (something the speaker may well have done) but also reminds us that to become an independent adult is a difficult and sometimes perilous business. The verbs at the ends of lines 5-7, “recording”, “leaving” and “unreeling” are neatly ambiguous because they describe both what connects mother and son but also draws attention to the distance between them as the son has moved to his own house.

Armitage links the second and third stanzas through the image of a kite and an astronaut. No matter how much string is unreeled, the person flying the kite has hold of the end of its string, there is a connection between it and the flyer. In the same way, an astronaut is linked by what is called an umbilicus to the space ship (often called the mother ship). Both these ideas are expressive of the speaker’s connection with his mother. Obviously, the umbilicus that once linked her to him has been physically severed but the bond of love remains. As he moves into unknown territory, climbing the “ladder to the loft, to breaking point” we are given a sense of the kite string or anchor chain about to break but the “breaking point” as this is the speaker’s house – he has almost broken away from his mother. Another possibility is that the phrase is used to describe the speaker’s emotional state. The fact that “something / has to give” reflects the truism that we all have to make a break in our own lives sooner or later that is independent from our parents. There is, of course, a line break after “has to give” which typographically reinforces the idea that a big step into a new life must be taken.

The distance between mother and son is physically only “two floors” but emotionally it could be limitless like “an endless sky” (line 14). The strain being put on the metaphorical kite string is indeed intense as conveyed in the fine conclusion to this poem:

“your fingertips still pinch
the last one-hundredth of an inch…I reach
towards a hatch that opens on an endless sky
to fall or fly.” (lines 12-15)

The image of the mother just able to keep hold of the end of the tape measure kite string with a “pinch” shows that the son is aware of how she must be feeling, too. The limits of connection are being measures as well as the dimensions of a house. Armitage’s use of ellipsis is very clever in line 13 because it suggests the stretching even of this “last one-hundredth of an inch” The punctuation also suggests a decision being finally made that will result in having to “fall” like an anchor or “fly” like a kite. He must either remain dependent or become independent.

The precise though mundane details that Armitage chooses to focus upon in this poem help to remind us that it is the ordinary day to day shared activities that are the repositories of love. This love is unspoken on a day-to-day basis but this poem draws attention to that very fact by being emotionally understated. Armitage is extremely subtle in his choice of form, too. He employs the framework of a sonnet but does not elect to follow a standard rhyme scheme. The poem is organised into two quatrains and a sestet with a tailpiece, rather after the fashion of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s curtal (literally “cut-tailed” of curtailed) sonnet, “Pied Beauty”. In that poem, Hopkins chooses to write ten and a half lines, maintaining the proportions of the Italian sonnet. Here, Armitage gives us a poem that is recognisable as a sonnet but does not draw attention to itself in an ostentatious of way. This is in keeping with unemotional the tone of the poem, which leaves the reader to infer that the son has strong feelings of love and attachment to his mother. The fact that love was a traditional theme for the sonnet is also something that alerts us to the nature of the son’s feeling.

Michael Woods writes about My Father Thought it bloody Queer

2009-03-15T02:01:00.001-07:00

This poem is clearly paired with “Mother any distance…” as it has the speaker’s father as its subject. In common with the poem about his mother, this is a tripartite poem that is a fifteen line sonnet. Its three stanzas chart a memory of having an ear pierced and then the time, years later, when he decided to take the earring out.

The conversational tone of this poem is in keeping with the familiar struggle between fathers and sons as the son grows up and tries to assert his own identity. The opening line is written in the first person in the voice of the speaker recalling his father’s word in a way that make it very easy to hear him uttering the words himself:

“My father thought bloody queer,
The day I rolled home with a ring of silver in my ear”

We can hear the father’s voice very clearly even through the reported speech relayed by the speaker. There is also a very clear sense of the father’s disdain and the emphatic “bloody queer” tells us that at the very lest he thought it very odd but also a sign that his son was gay. These days, earrings are commonly worn by men but the generation of men to which the speaker’s father belongs generally sees such fashions as effeminate, to say the least. In lines 3-5 the speaker quotes his father directly, who sarcastically tells him he should have had the ring through his nose to be led like an ass.

The second stanza captures very well the nervousness of all of us when we really want to do something daring in order to become part of a gang but do not quite have the courage to go through with what would be a self-styled initiation or rite of passage because, as is so often the case in circumstances lie this, it will involve real pain or danger. Armitage plays with the idea of a sleeper (a ring used to keep the hole in the earlobe open so that other rings may be interchanged with it) and the act of sleeping, as if lying in wait. The fact that the “hole became a sore, became a wound and wept” (line 11) implies emotional outpouring, as well the primary meaning of leaking pus.

The passage of time between the suppurating experience of the septic ear and the decision “At twenty-nine” to remove the ring leaves the reader wondering of the sore wept for all this time. This leads one to read the poem at this point as reflecting upon the long lasting friction between father and son as the machismo of the former leaves the latter still looking for an identity but defeated by the infection of the earlobe and, in a sense, capitulating to his father’s emphatic advice that has more threat in its tone than friendly exhortation:

”If I were you,
I’d take it out and leave it out next year.”

Armitage’s choice of italics rather than the speech marks he employed to indicate the father’s words earlier in the poem suggests that he may be presenting the italicised section as an utterance of the speaker that is also a memory of the father’s words that erupt into the son’s consciousness and are spoken by him, compounding the fact that he has left his rebelliousness behind and slipped into conventional ways of dress. He becomes like his father by using his words in what seems to be an inevitable change:

“it come as no surprise to hear
my own voice breaking like a tear, released like water,
cried from way back in the spiral of the ear…” (lines 12-14)

The use of end and internal rhymes in “tear” and “ear” deftly signal the interior processes involved in both hearing and emotional response. The image of the voice breaking reminds the reader of male adolescence and the fact that this is a time in life when a young man tends to flex his muscles, clash with his father and look for ways of expressing his identity that are radically different from those of the previous generation. The “spiral of the ear” is the cochlea and is a clever image to use as one is able to imagine the ‘sight’ of the sound of the father’s voice trapped somewhere in it lie an archive and being released many years later, just as water is released if it enters the ear when we go swimming.

The way offspring choose to dress and the youth subculture that is so much bound up with styles of dress and the wearing of jewellery has been a reality ever since the concept of teenage and adolescence had an impact in the 1950s. This youth identity was, from the outset identified with music of rock and roll and in films by the archetypal figure of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.

The incident described in the poem would set it in the 1970s when Punk Rock was blowing away the cobwebs of what it thought were the rock “dinosaurs” like Genesis and Led Zeppelin. Punk rockers wore safety pins through their ears. The speaker in the poem “didn’t have the nerve” to pierce his own ear or wear a safety pin but opted for a “ring of silver”, a compromise that was made worse by the fact the that ring was “half hidden by a mop of hair” (line 3).

This poem is a fine study of the shifting relationship between father and son.

Michael Woods writes about Homecoming

2009-03-15T02:00:00.000-07:00

This poem deals with the complexity of family and romantic relationships and the way they change or endure. The frame of the poem is a memory of two things that become fused in the speaker’s mind in much the same way as a poet fuses ideas in a metaphor. In fact, Armitage’s opening line is a diagram of what poet’s do with language when they forge metaphors from apparently disparate ideas. In doing this, Armitage is drawing attention to his own craft, alerting the reader to “two things on their own” that may have autonomous and separate identities but also “both at once” so that they become fused and consequently more significant in relation to one another.

The opening word, “Think” requires the reader to be at mental attention. Armitage is preparing us for the kind of imaginative thought process that creates metaphors. The two separate things Armitage presents are a trust game and a yellow cotton jacket.

The first stanza draws attention to, and then describes, the game with which many of us will be familiar. One person spreads their arms and allows themselves to fall backwards, trusting that those behind them will catch her or him. The person investing the trust is described as being in “free-fall” like a parachutist who has just jumped out of an aeroplane and is in that phase of the drop before the chute opens – it is an experience filled with both fear and exhilaration; a leap into the unknown that requires absolute “blind” faith.

Stanza two introduces the second thing, “one canary-yellow cotton jacket”. The garment is owned by a child who discovers it “scuffed and blackened underfoot” (line 7) in the school cloakroom. “Back home” (line 7) the child’s mother thinks the child has been neglectful of the jacket. The ensuing conflict between mother and child is conveyed convincingly through a series of images and phrases that make the situation familiar to the reader. The speaker’s mother is “the very model of a model of a mother” which humorously takes the words of Major General Stanley a famous Gilbert and Sullivan operetta character in The Pirates of Penzance who sings: “I am the very model of a modern major general”. Armitage humorously aligns the mother with a figure of military authority but modifies the words of the song to convey the speaker’s rueful resignation to the fact that his mother is not just a “model” of a mother but a model for all models. The first “homecoming” related in the poem is fraught. The phrase “makes a proper fist of it” is ambiguous as to “make a proper fist” of something is a colloquialism for making a good attempt at it. Here, the idea of being a “model” mother, an example to all mothers, is undermined because the clear implication is that the situation is turned into violence against the child. The use of the word “yours” in line 8 alerts us to the sound of the poem being read aloud to an audience. The commas either side of “yours” indicate the timing of delivery and signal for us the comic effect this is likely to have ‘live’. We should not forget that Simon Armitage is a consummate performer of his poems. This sort of detail reminds us that poems need to be read aloud in our heads, even if we do not speak them aloud with our voices. Another phrase, “points the finger” (line 10) creates the visual image of the mother’s accusation of the child whilst simultaneously suggesting something of a detective accusing a criminal. The next two word sentence, “Temper, temper.” is again likely to raise a laugh with an audience depending on its pace and tone of delivery but it also introduces further ambiguity. Although the words are familiar to us as those used by an adult remonstrating with a naughty child, it seems that Armitage is inviting us to think of the mother’s temper who, it seems, in terms of the evidence presented, has falsely accused the child of negligence. The next sentence comically aggrandises the investigation into how a coat became dirty to the status of a parliamentary enquiry. “Questions / in the house” is the term used to describe proceedings in the House of Commons and reinforces the way the mother is blowing a trivial incident out of all proportion. The climax of the antagonism between mother and child is drawn using more well know phrases. The speaker is described as “seeing red” (line 11), while the crescendo of the row is “Blue murder”. The use of colour in them reminds us of the opposing parties in parliament. The Labour Party’s colour is red and the Conservative’s is blue. The mother has the power, though and the single word sentence, “Bed.” says a great deal about the way adults impose their wills on children. The reader is left wondering about the apparent injustice of the situation.

The child seems to be making a token gesture at running away from home, as so many children threaten after they feel a parent has dealt unfairly with them. Armitage, in an accurate observation humorously presents the child venturing “no further than the call box at the corner of the street” (line 13). This convincingly captures the simultaneous desire to flee mixed with the fear of doing it – just like a “free fall” parachutist, as well as wanting comfort from someone who might telephone. The child will be sixteen years older before he or she will have someone to talk to who will be able to help him or her face difficulty. Following this, Armitage again focuses upon the all too familiar scenario of a child who has been missed and being waited for by a “father figure” who “wants to set things straight”. It is noticeable that this is a “father figure” with the clear implication that the man might not be the child’s natural father. In wanting to “set things straight” he may want the child to see things in his and the mother’s way or perhaps to reconcile the child with the adults. Another alternative is that the words are a euphemism for a physical punishment. The fact the man is described “in silhouette” adds a gothic, sinister element which suggests malevolent intent. This reading is supported by the fact that the scene is set around “midnight”, the time when nasty things are traditionally abroad. This is the second “homecoming” described in the poem.

The concluding stanza returns to the jacket mentioned in the second. The garment becomes a metaphor that aligns parts of the body to features of the jacket. In this way, Armitage is sticking to the metaphorical technique whose method he sketched in the first line of the poem. Three metaphors in quick succession make this clear:

“These ribs are pleats or seams. These arms are sleeves.
These fingertips are buttons,...” (lines 18-19)

It appears that the speaker could be addressing his or her partner or mother and, perhaps, both. There is a universalised quality about what is being said because the jacket and its parts have become interchangeable with those of a person. The incident connected with the jacket, and the trust game are “two things…both at once”, brought together. Armitage seems to be saying that we need to able to rely on each other and be able to trust. Also, there is a sense that we can damage each other permanently by not trusting one another. The speaker invites the person he is addressing to “step backwards into it” as one might when a coat of jacket is being held for one but it also reminds us of the game of trust referred to in stanza one in which the subject must “free-fall / backwards”. The fact that the jacket “still fits” could mean that nothing has changed.

Michael Woods writes about November

2009-03-15T01:59:00.000-07:00

This poem is a memory of driving a friend’s terminally ill grandmother to a hospital or hospice where she will die. The title of the poem not only records the time of year in which the incident happened, it is coincidentally the month that is emphatically part of winter after the dying time of autumn.

The opening of the poem takes the reader right into the middle of the action described: “We walk to the ward from the badly parked car” (line 1) is an accurate presentation of a situation in which so many people with elderly relatives find themselves. The contrast between the able bodied younger adults and the frail, elderly grandmother is evident in the fact she takes “four short steps” to their “two” (line 2). The third line begins with the first person plural pronoun “We”, just as the first did, indicating a shared experience. The end of the line indicates the shared knowledge of the couple concerned who might not articulate the reality of the situation but do not need to: “We have brought her here to die and we know it” concludes the first stanza in a stark way that states what the grandchild and the speaker do not need to say to each other. The matter of fact nature of the reality of the statement is reinforced through Armitage’s us of monosyllabic words.

The second stanza shifts the focus form “we” to “you” as the speaker is clearly someone who is sensitive to the friend’s need to minister to her last needs. The need to treat the dying with dignity is foregrounded here. The grandson (John, we assume) tends to the grandmother’s needs, ensuring that her washing things and comforting “family trinkets” are with her. The phrase “parcel her in rough blankets” conveys a sense of someone about to be dispatched somewhere just as a package is through the post; the destination will, though, be the grave. The adjective “rough” reinforces the harsh reality of the situation and this is shockingly clinched in line 6, “she sinks down into her incontinence.”

Stanza three graphically confronts what old age does to the human body in a manner that is redolent of Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘The Old Fools’. In what reads like a litany of decay, the speaker catalogues “bloodless smiles”, “slack breasts”, “stunned brains” and “baldness”. He tells his friend in a moment of recognition that so often accompanies the experience of being so close to the elderly and to death when we ourselves reach a certain age: “we are almost these monsters” (line 9). The word “monsters” may seem a very harsh word to use about other human beings but it is not necessarily to be construed as callous in this context because the speaker is clearly envisioning his own decline and that of his friend, John as dying men. Nothing is more powerful than death to remind one of one’s own mortality.

The speaker continues his concern for his friend by driving his car home for him, having recognised that he is “shattered” (line 10). This word is clearly ambiguous in its use because we are used to it being used by people who are describing how tired they feel but we sometimes use it to describe being emotionally “shattered” , and this is clearly the case with John. The “drive / through the twilight zone” has air of surreality about it as it recalls the title of a science fiction series that these friends may well have watched on television together but it also keys into the limbo-like sense that we can have after being newly bereaved. The friends “numb” themselves with alcohol as much, we sense, to try to forget their own mortality as much as to come to terms with the death of John’s grandmother.

The friends “feel the terror of the dusk begin” in a description that clearly invites us to see the falling of night-time as a metaphor for the impending death of us all. The coming of night is inevitable and unstoppable. The speaker feels impotent as the friends find themselves “failing again” to do anything about it. Whether “Inside” or “Outside”, the predicament is the same, “We can say nothing.” (line 15)

The tercets that make up the first five stanzas of this poem and that presents the reader with the experience of death, modulates into a couplet at its conclusion. For all of us it will one day “be time” but before it is we must make the most of the time we do have left and to recognise that there are bright times as well as dark ones:

Sometimes the sun spangles and we feel alive.
One thing we have to get, John, out of this life.

This closing couplet emphatically affirms life at the ends of both of its lines, “alive” and “life” remind John that life must go on. There is a sense that buried in the line is the idea that we need to make sure that we get something out of this life before we are forced to get out of it.

Michael Woods writes about Kid

2009-03-15T01:57:00.000-07:00

This poem, a dramatic monologue, is written on the voice of Robin, or “The Boy Wonder” as Commissioner Gordon of Gotham City used to call him in the cult 1960s serialisation of Batman starring Burt Ward as Robin and Adam West as Batman. He is clearly felling bitter about having been separated from Batman against his will. It reads like an expose by one half of a famous duo about the other, attempting to ‘set the record straight’, something with which we are very familiar in the newspapers. The nature of Robin’s ‘revelations’ draw attention to what he claims were Batman’s neglect of him.

Robin clearly feels bitter and resentful at having been forced into the “gutter” (line 5) but proud of himself for managing to “turn the corner” after having lived through the trauma he goes on to allude to in the remainder of the poem. Robin claims he has “scotched that ‘he was like a father / to me’ rumour” (lines 6-7) as well as “blown the cover / on that ‘he was an elder brother’ / story” (lines 7-9), making it clear that Batman was neglectful towards him and that Robin felt rejected as his partner, far from being a bastion of moral virtue was a womaniser who embezzled money to fuel his lifestyle. Line 12 and 13 are written as tabloid newspaper headlines that also have the air of the cartoon about it:

“Holy robin-redbreast-nest-egg-shocker!
Holy roll-me-over-in-the-clover.” (lines 12-13)

This alerts the reader to the idea of tawdry revelation typical of such journals but is also a comic presentation of Robin’s favourite adjective. He would frequently prefix his statements with “holy”. The sexual indiscretion of batman is a comic idea in itself when one imagines him in his outfit. He would hardly be inconspicuous unless, of course, he was meeting someone in his guise of Bruce Wayne. There is a song called “Roll Me Over in the Clover” which is an invitation to engage in intimate activity.

Robin asserts his new-found independence by asserting that he is “not playing ball any longer”, a colloquialism meaning he will not collude in keeping Batman’s good reputation intact. This involves rejecting the requirement to dress effeminately in “that off-the-shoulder / Sherwood-Forest-green and scarlet number” (lines 15-16) in favour of “jeans” and “jumper” (line 17). He has grown “taller, harder, stronger, older” (line 18). The preponderance of feminine rhyme in the poem may be a joke made by Armitage at the expense of Robin who is clearly keen to prove his masculine credentials.

Robin concludes by gleefully imagine Batman in decline “without a shadow” in a flat with bare cupboards and little to eat. Robins’s trademark mannerism of “punching the palm” of his hand as he worked out some clue associated wit the villainy of the various criminals he and Batman faced, will be done by Batman instead of him “all winter”, not to indicate the sudden solving of a clue, but to keep warm. Robin finishes by asserting his importance, using his old tag of “boy wonder” as a sign of superiority in contrast to his previously subordinate role.

There is no doubting the fact that Batman was what we now call a very “camp” programme. Batman and Robin were dressed in tights with briefs outside them. Some people “read” this story of an aristocrat (albeit American) and a young man taken in as his “ward” as being rather suspect. This interpretation may, of course, be incorrect.

Although this poem is ostensibly about Robin and his relationship with Batman, we know that both are fictional characters so obviously need to recognise that Armitage is reflecting upon rivalry in the general sense and the acrimony that can exist between partnerships in the public eye that only comes out long after they have professionally parted. It also reminds us that anyone can feel forced to be the “kid”, subordinate to an older sibling.

Michael Woods writes about Those Bastards in Their Mansions

2009-03-15T01:55:00.000-07:00

This poem is a sonnet written as a dramatic monologue in the voice of a man who would be considered a subversive in the context of a stratified, class based society. There is a clear political message informing the poem and the final line makes it quite clear that when someone is intent on righting what he or she believes to be injustice, they are unlikely to be overt in their methods and neither will they necessarily rely on purely political processes but will use force if they feel no other means will be effective.

The persona presented in the poem clearly holds the aristocracy in contempt. The opening nine lines form a single sentence that reads as a ranting invective against everything he loathes about the upper class. His assessment of these people as “Those bastards in their mansions” is uncompromisingly direct. The fact that they “shriek” tunes the reader’s ear into what he speaker clearly thinks is class hysteria. In his tirade he refers to all the aspects of the aristocratic lifestyle he seems to despise, ranging from “dogs” to “ditches” and “lawns”. The speaker thinks that the people he dislikes are paranoiac in their belief that he is intent on infiltrating their lives. He presents himself as being innocuous by saying that he could pose no threat in “stockinged feet and threadbare britches” (line 4). The word “britches” sets the poem in the historical past. The speaker clearly resents his “threadbare life” as is sardonic in his attack that sneers at the upper class for underestimating him, caricaturing their fear that he might steal “the gift of fire from their burning torches” (line 6). They are right about one thing, though. He would like to distribute the basic right to “heat and light” to ordinary people. He goes on to say that the way the rich behave towards him suggests that they suspect him of telling their inferiors how to escape iron handcuffs and ankle irons and how to turn these badges of enslavement into weapons of revolt. It is the opposite idea of the biblical “turning swords into ploughshares”. The persona in the poem clearly feels threatened and avoids being “sniffed out” by hunting dogs or “picked at by their eagles”. He decides to take the guerrilla approach and bide his time until he will be able to do something decisive: “me, I stick to the shadows, carry a gun” (line 14). Armitage chooses to conclude the sonnet, not with a traditional rhyming couplet but with a half line for the thirteenth and then a separate single line for the conclusion, delaying the volta a line later than is usual in, for example, a Shakespearian sonnet. The physical distance between lines 13 and 14 on the page is indicative of the gulf between the classes of people presented in the poem.

Although Armitage uses language associated with the class structure of a time well before the time of the poem’s writing, it is important to remember that there is still an aristocracy in Britain that some people think is as reprehensible in its wallowing in inherited privilege as it always has been. Those who grow used to their positions of privilege should not persist in complacency because one day they may be given a very nasty surprise by someone who may “stick to the shadows, carry a gun” (line 14)

Michael Woods writes about I've Made Out a Will

2009-03-15T01:54:00.000-07:00

In another sonnet taken from Book of Matches, Armitage writes in the voice of someone who has resolved, by making a will, to donate all his organs, save his heart to the National Health Service. Since this is legally binding, he is clearly in earnest.

Body parts are humorously described interchangeably with engine parts, foods and clock mechanisms. The brain is self deprecatingly “a loaf”. We are familiar with the heart as a “ticker” and we are presented with a welter of other body parts compared to other things. The blood is “a gallon of bilberry soup”, the skeleton a “chassis or cage or cathedral of bone” (lines 6-7)

The persona’s repeated insistence that his heart should be left alone “but not the heart” (line 8) and “but not the pendulum” (line 13) is emphatic. It seems that he may see the heart in a traditional way as the repository of feeling. Alternatively, it may just be an act to deliberately withhold the most sought after organ for transplant. So, in seeming to be entirely magnanimous, the speaker may not be rather curmudgeonly in life and one suspects that he will be so in a posthumous sense, too.

Michael Woods writes about Hitcher

2009-03-15T01:53:00.000-07:00

This blackly comic poem captures beautifully the way in which someone who feels they might have lived their life in a way that is not constrained by the conventional demands of work and “getting and spending” (as Wordsworth put it) takes revenge on a hitchhiker who has managed just that by attacking him and throwing him out of his car whilst it is moving quickly enough for him to be in “third gear”.

The choice of a dramatic monologue helps Armitage to articulate the imagined thoughts of the man who feels he has missed out on the free lifestyle that only requires “just a toothbrush and the good earth for a bed” (line 8).

Another way of reading the poem is in strictly metaphorical terms wherein the hitcher may well be the speaker himself remembering himself as a before he was enslaved a conventional working life. He may be denying that another side of him actually existed by saying that he and the hitcher are not exactly the same age.

The speaker in the poem is clearly worried about being given the sack from work when he hears an uncompromising message on his telephone answering machine and this is the italicised line 3. He “thumbed a lift” to where his car was parked. This is puzzling because it suggests that he, too, may be seen as a hitcher.

He then described picking up a hitcher in Leeds, a man who was “following the sun from west to east” (line 7), suggesting that his life is dictated by natural rhythms, no the mechanical interruptions of an answering machine or the demands of work. The hitcher quotes the 1960s radical folk singer, Bob Dylan by saying that the truth is “blowin’ in the wind”, / or round the next bend.” (lines 8-9). This incenses the speaker as he resents being reminded of the fact that he is not as free as this man and neither does he seem to have the courage to be like him.

In a shocking display of violence he says, “I let him have it”, going on to detail attacking the hitcher with a “krooklok”, something designed to secure a car’s steering wheel and never intended for use as a weapon. In saying that he “let him out” (line 17) we understand that he means that he pushed him out deliberately. This is an appalling act on top of the head butt and six blows to the face with the krooklok mentioned earlier.

The remainder of the incident is reported as a reflection in the speaker’s rear view mirror. He is described as “bouncing off the kerb” (line 18). The speaker seems utterly unconcerned by this and casually reports, “We were the same age, give or take a week.” His brutality is contrasted with the gentleness of the hitcher who “liked the breeze / to run its fingers / through his hair” (lines 20-22). The speaker then fixes the time of the incident precisely by relaying the weather forecast to which he has clearly been listening on his car radio. This compounds his appalling lack of concerns and the fact that he can be so self absorbed as to observe, “The outlook for the day was moderate to fair” (line 23). This is dreadfully shocking as it uses the language of the shipping forecast to make clear that the death of the hitcher has not spoiled the day; quite the opposite in fact – things could get better.

The concluding statement leaves the reader in no doubt that the speaker is utterly amoral: “Stitch that, I remember thinking, / you can walk from there.” (lines 24-5). The implication is that the hitcher will never be walking anywhere again, even though we are certain that he has died. As mentioned earlier in this commentary, it could be that the speaker has to leave his former self behind and has described this in terms of a murder to draw attention to the effects of a conventional life on the average working person. This may not be acceptable as an interpretation so it is important to arrive at your own conclusion.

Grace Nichols writes about Hurricane Hits England

2009-03-15T01:52:00.000-07:00

The poem, Hurricane Hits England, came about as a result of an actual hurricane or great storm, as some people liked to call it, that did hit England back in 1987. Millions of trees came down across England, especially on the South coast where I live. I remember walking around the parks the day after the hurricane and feeling very moved by the sight of all those uprooted trees. They seemed like beached whales to me, huge murdered creatures.

Because I’d never associated hurricanes with England (a regular Caribbean phenomenon) the manifestation of one in England took on a deep significance for me. It was as if some invisible but potent connection had taken place between the two landscapes. As if the voices of the old gods from Africa and the Caribbean were in the winds of the hurricane as it raged around Sussex.

The gods mentioned in the poem are all associated with storm-weather. Huracan, for example, is the Carib god of Hurricane, and the Caribbean gets its name from the native Carib Indians. Shango is the Yoruba god of thunder and lightning; Oya, the Yoruba goddess of the winds represents sweeping change; Hattie, is the name of a hurricane that caused great damage and loss of life in the Caribbean and central America in 1961.

Of course you don’t know how a poem is going to turn out until you’ve written it. You might have a rhythmical notion in mind and images such as ‘whales’ or ‘crusted roots’ but in the actual act of writing, a lot of different things are happening; sub-conscious connections are being made; metaphors formed such as - the howling ship of the wind. The poem seems to have a mind of its own and also becomes a process of discovery or surprise for the poet.

Now that I’ve written Hurricane Hits England, I can see for example that it has an incantatory trance-like quality about it, as if the woman seems possessed by the winds and by the gods she calls on. Although the opening stanza of the poem is in the third person -

took a hurricane to bring her closer to the landscape

- in the rest of the poem she speaks in the first person –

come to break the frozen lake in me

- as if the hurricane has broken down all barriers between her and the English landscape.

In some mysterious way, it seems as if the old gods have not deserted her completely, connecting her both to the Caribbean and to England which is now her home. Indeed to the wider planet as she asserts –

the earth is the earth is the earth.

Imtiaz Dharker - Blessing

2009-03-15T01:51:00.000-07:00

I was working on a project, filming for Unicef in Dharavi, a huge colony of migrants in Mumbai, India. These migrants come from villages all over India, hoping to make a better life in the city. The city is unable or unwilling to cope with their needs, but they make the most of whatever little they have. Working with the people who lived there, especially the children, I often felt I saw more goodness and human kindness in the slum than I had found in temples, mosques and churches.

One day in May, one of the hottest, driest months, the mains water pipe burst. It was a moment of pure joy for the people in the slum, because it gave them access to water that was normally rationed or controlled. The water was like an unexpected gift.

What I try to do in the poem is suggest first of all how dry it is, using hard sounds and short factual sentences like, ‘The skin cracks like a pod’. The people living in the slum can only ‘imagine the drip of (water)’ as if it were ‘the voice of a kindly god.’ The god here is deliberately written with a small ‘g’ because the kindly god could be from any religion. People in need don’t ask where kindness comes from.

‘The municipal pipe bursts’. I use the word ‘municipal’ to signal the bureaucracy that rations water to migrants. In contrast to this, when the pipe bursts, they are all united by the blessing of water, as if the slum has become a holy place. The imagined ‘small splash echo in a tin mug’ becomes a rush of fortune. The people rushing out of the huts become ‘a congregation’.

There is another layer of imagery, ‘silver crashes to the ground’ because the water arriving is like currency to them, and also because that is how water looks in the sunlight.

There are different income levels even in a slum, suggested by ‘pots, brass, copper, aluminium, plastic buckets, frantic hands’ but here they come together democratically, united by their urgency.

In Indian villages there is often a caste distinction where some people are not allowed to use the same well as others because they are supposedly ‘lower caste’. In the city these distinctions can be forgotten, especially in a joyful moment like this.

Most of all, the blessing is for the children. The water turns to ‘liquid sun’, the light catches the sharp angles of their bodies, ‘their highlights polished to perfection’. The sound changes through the poem from hard to liquid to suggest the rush of water. The lines become longer and more breathless, then slow down at the end, almost as if a piece of film has gone into slow-motion to let the children play and scream for joy in the water a little longer.

At the end I wanted to suggest the tenderness of the ‘kindly god’ towards the children, ‘the blessing sings’, but there is also the awareness of how fragile these human beings are, with ‘their small bones’. The poem describes a happy uplifting moment, but there are some indications that this ‘blessing’ is temporary.

Imtiaz Dharker talks about This Room

2009-03-15T01:47:00.000-07:00

In the poem ‘This room’ I wanted to suggest first of all that some kind of constriction is suddenly falling away. The walls of the room could mean different things to different people, and I hope when you read the poem you will find something in it that you can relate to your own life. Very often people try to trap us inside the box of a word, a label, a definition or an expectation. The box could even be self-imposed, our own limited idea of ourselves, the structures we build up around ourselves to keep ourselves ‘safe’ – nationality, religion, social barriers that keep others out.

The poem is about a moment when the structure falls away. The room is personified. It breaks out of itself, out of something suffocating. The image of ‘cracking through its own walls’ could suggest an egg and something about to be born into the light. The lines are short and broken, the sounds sharp.

Instead of falling, the everyday objects in the room take flight to unknown possibilities. ‘No-one is looking for the door’ because doors have become irrelevant. There is no need for one conventional exit when so many openings have appeared.

Perhaps I was working towards the idea that a person or a whole culture actually becomes stronger by opening up to the outside instead of closing inward.

The poem ends with a feeling of amused dislocation and a final moment of celebration in the last lines

‘In all this excitement, I’m wondering where
I’ve left my feet, and why
my hands are outside, clapping.’

(Just an extra note: I started writing this poem when a ceiling in my house in Bombay actually fell down. I should have felt terrible about it but I didn’t. Afterwards I gave away all the things I owned in the room and that gave me a great feeling of freedom).

You could also see this as a poem about writing a poem, when the writer steps away from an experience and looks at it from the outside, from an odd angle. This is the moment of celebration.

As often happens at one of the Poetry Live! days, a student added something else to the poem. She said the words ‘this room’ could apply to the room of the title and also to the ‘room’, the space, at the end of the poem.

That’s an example of how important you are as the reader and how a poem can grow in your reading of it.

Moniza Alvi: Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan

2009-02-09T01:13:00.000-08:00

This poem can be compared usefully with the extracts from Search for My Tongue and from Unrelated Incidents, as well as with Half-Caste - all of which look at ideas of race and identity. Where Sujatta Bhatt, Tom Leonard and John Agard find this in language, Moniza Alvi associates it with material things. The poem is written in the first person, and is obviously autobiographical - the speaking voice here is really that of the poet.
Moniza Alvi contrasts the exotic garments and furnishings sent to her by her aunts with what she saw around her in her school, and with the things they asked for in return. Moniza Alvi also shows a paradox, as she admired the presents, but felt they were too exquisite for her, and lacked street credibility. Finally, the presents form a link to an alternative way of life (remote in place and time) which Ms. Alvi does not much approve: her aunts “screened from male visitors” and the “beggars” and “sweeper-girls” in 1950s Lahore.
The bright colours of the salwar kameez suggest the familiar notion of exotic clothes worn by Asian women, but the glass bangle which snaps and draws blood is almost a symbol of how her tradition harms the poet - it is not practical for the active life of a young woman in the west.
In a striking simile the writer suggests that the clothes showed her own lack of beauty: “I could never be as lovely/as those clothes”. The bright colours suggest the clothes are burning: “I was aflame/I couldn't rise up out of its fire”, a powerful metaphor for the discomfort felt by the poet, who “longed/for denim and corduroy”, plainer but comfortable and inconspicuous. Also she notes that where her Pakistani Aunt Jamila can “rise up out of its fire” - that is, “look lovely” in the bright clothes - she (the poet) felt unable to do so, because she was “half-English”. This may be meant literally (she has an English grandmother) or metaphorically, because she is educated in England. This sense of being between two cultures is shown when the “schoolfriend” asks to see Moniza Alvi's “weekend clothes” and is not impressed. The schoolfriend's reaction also suggests that she has little idea of what Moniza - as a young Pakistani woman - is, and is not, allowed to do at weekends, despite living in Britain.
The idea of living in two cultures is seen in the voyage, from Pakistan to England, which the poet made as a child and which she dimly recalls. This is often a symbol of moving from one kind of life to another.
• How well does this poem present the idea of living in (or between) two cultures? Do British Asians suffer from a loss of identity or get the best of both worlds?
• How does the poet use metaphors of clothes and jewellery to explain differences in culture?
• This poem brings together the salwar kameez and Marks & Spencer cardigans - what is the effect of this on the reader? In the 21st century can we say that one of these is any more British than the other?
• How does Moniza Alvi make use of colour and light in the poem?
• How far does our identity come from the things we own - presents and possessions? How far does it come from the way we have to live?
• What does Moniza Alvi think of the way of life she has left behind in Lahore - both that of her relations (well-off but confined to their house and “screened from male visitors”) and that of the poor beggar and sweeper girls?
• How does the poem's last line suggest the idea that Moniza Alvi did not belong in Pakistan?

From Universal Teacher

Imtiaz Dharker: This Room

2009-02-09T01:12:00.000-08:00

This is a quite puzzling poem, if we try to find an explicit and exact interpretation - but its general meaning is clear enough: Imtiaz Dharker sees rooms and furniture as possibly limiting or imprisoning one, but when change comes, it as if the room “is breaking out of itself”. She presents this rather literally, with a bizarre or surreal vision of room, bed and chairs breaking out of the house and rising up - the chairs “crashing through clouds”. The crockery, meanwhile, crashes together noisily “in celebration”. And why is no one “looking for the door”? Presumably, because there are now so many different ways of leaving the room, without using the conventional route.
One's sense of self is also confused - we say sometimes that we are all over the place, and Ms. Dharker depicts this literally, as well - she cannot find her feet (a common metaphor for gaining a sense of purpose or certainty) and realizes that her hands are not even in the same room - and have taken on a life of their own, applauding from somewhere else.
We do not know the cause of this joyful explosion, but it seems to be bound up with personal happiness and fulfilment - it might be romantic love, but it could be other things: maternity, a new job, artistic achievement, almost anything that is genuinely and profoundly life-changing.
The central idea in this poem is like that in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar of “a tide...that taken at its flood leads on to greatness” - that is, that opportunities come our way, and we need to recognize them and react in the right way, “when the...furniture of our lives/stirs” and “the improbable arrives”.
The poem works very much like an animated film - the excited “pots and pans” suggest the episode in Disney's Fantasia of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. It is a succession of vivid and exuberant images, full of joy and excitement. (Even if one does not enjoy the poem, the reader might like to know what made the poet feel like this - and perhaps give it a try.)
In the poem our homes and possessions symbolize our lives and ambitions in a limiting sense, while change and new opportunities are likened to space, light and “empty air”, where there is an opportunity to move and grow. Like Walcott's Love After Love it is about change and personal growth - but at an earlier point, or perhaps at repeated points in one's life.
• What do you think the poet means by imagining a room breaking out of itself?
• How does the poet suggest ideas of change and opportunity?
• This is a very happy poem - how does Imtiaz Dharker suggest her joy in it?
• Does the poem give us any clues as to why this upheaval is going on, or is the cause unimportant? What do you think might have caused it?
• What is the effect of the images in the poem - of rooms, furniture and crockery bursting into life?

- From Universal Teacher

Sujata Bhatt: from Search for My Tongue

2009-02-09T01:11:00.000-08:00

This poem (or rather extract from a long poem) explores a familiar ambiguity in English - “tongue” refers both to the physical organ we use for speech, and the language we speak with it. (Saying “tongue” for “speech” is an example of metonymy). In the poem Sujata Bhatt writes about the “tongue” in both ways at once. To lose your tongue normally means not knowing what to say, but Ms. Bhatt suggests that one can lose one's tongue in another sense. The speaker in this poem is obviously the poet herself, but she speaks for many who fear they may have lost their ability to speak for themselves and their culture.
She explains this with the image of two tongues - a mother tongue (one's first language) and a second tongue (the language of the place where you live). She argues that you cannot use both together. She suggests, further, that if you live in a place where you must “speak a foreign tongue” then the mother tongue will “rot and die in your mouth”.
As if to demonstrate how this works, Ms. Bhatt rewrites lines 15 and 16 in Gujarati, followed by more Gujarati lines, which are given in English as the final section of the poem. For readers who do not know the Gujarati script, there is also a phonetic transcript using approximate English spelling to indicate the sounds.
The final section of the poem is the writer's dream - in which her mother tongue grows back and “pushes the other tongue aside”. She ends triumphantly asserting that “Everytime I think I've forgotten,/I think I've lost the mother tongue,/it blossoms out of my mouth.”
Clearly this poem is about personal and cultural identity. The familiar metaphor of the tongue is used in a novel way to show that losing one's language (and culture) is like losing part of one's body. The poet's dream may be something she has really dreamt “overnight” but is clearly also a “dream” in the sense of something she wants to happen - in dreams, if not in reality, it is possible for the body to regenerate. For this reason the poem's ending is ambiguous - perhaps it is only in her dream that the poet can find her “mother tongue”. On the other hand, she may be arguing that even when she thinks she has lost it, it can be found again. At the end of the poem there is a striking extended metaphor in which the regenerating tongue is likened to a plant cut back to a stump, which grows and eventually buds, to become the flower which “blossoms out of” the poet's mouth. It is as if her mother tongue is exotic, spectacular or fragrant, as a flower might be.
The poem's form is well suited to its subject. The flower is a metaphor for the tongue, which itself has earlier been used as a (conventional) metaphor, for speech. The poet demonstrates her problem by showing both “mother tongue” (Gujarati) and “foreign tongue” (English), knowing that for most readers these will be the other way around, while some, like her, will understand both.
The poem will speak differently to different generations - for parents, Gujarati may also be the “mother tongue”, while their children, born in the UK, may speak English as their first language. The poem is written both for the page, where we see the (possibly exotic) effect of the Gujarati text and for reading aloud, as we have a guide for speaking the Gujarati lines.

• What is the effect of using Gujarati script and an English transliteration in the poem?
• Does the way you read this depend on whether or not you know Gujarati as well as English?
• Many writers of classic English poetry often quote in Latin, French or other languages - is this a modern equivalent, or is Sujata Bhatt doing something different?
• How does the poem present the argument that our speech and ourselves are intimately connected? Do people not have to search for their own tongue - or authentic voice - even if they have not had to move from one language to another?
• What does the last sentence of the poem mean?

From - Universal Teacher