Gillian Clarke writes about ALL her exam poems

HOW TO READ A POEM: TIP FOR GCSE STUDENTS
Do think of a poem as a little story. Read it out loud in your head. Work it out for yourself. Every word counts. The whole meaning lies in the words. Sometimes layers of meaning come through slowly. No one, not even the poet, sees every possible meaning in a word or phrase all at once. Bring your own experience and response to understanding a poem.

Don’t invent what you can’t prove by quoting the poem. Don’t jump to conclusions before you’ve read every word and worked it out. Don’t assume the poem is the poet’s own life story. Poems are made from experience, imagination, a love of language, and a lot of creative energy.



A Difficult Birth Easter 1998
Q What’s the poem about?
A There are 3 stories tangled up here, and you need to know them:

1) 2000 years ago, the story goes, on the Friday before the day now known as Easter Sunday, Jesus was crucified, and his body placed in a tomb with a stone blocking the entrance. The story tells that later, when people went to look, the stone had been rolled away, and the body was gone. Christians believe he had risen from the dead.

2) The second story happened on Good Friday 1998. After 30 years of violence involving the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland, with the British Army as ‘piggy in the middle’, something called ‘the peace process’ was about to be agreed in Belfast. All sides had to sign it. And they did.

3) Story number three stars a five year old ewe (female sheep) who’d never had a lamb. She was due to lamb at any moment. She was 5, which is old for a first time lambing, so we were warned she might have trouble, and we might have to call the vet. The lambs were born safely, without the vet.

So what’s the poem about? Difficulties overcome.

Q Why is she ‘hoofing the straw’?
A She is making a nest. You can tell the ewe is in labour when she scrapes the ground with her hoof and turns round and round to make herself a bed.

Q Who are the whitecoats?
A Doctors, or those doctors who think they know more about birth than mothers do, and the ‘whitecoats’ symbolise know-alls who think they know better than nature does. The statement is slightly ironic, a note of caution rather than a serious condemnation of surgical intervention in birth. It is a gentle rebuke, not a condemnation of doctors, vets, or science.

Q What do you mean by her ‘opened door’?
A The ‘opened door’ is the exit from the womb after the first lamb was born. The second twin just slipped into the straw without a hitch.

Q What does ‘the stone rolled away’ mean?
A In a way there’s a word missing in the last line of the poem. I could have written, ‘the stone having rolled away’. Sometimes I read it like that, to make the meaning quite clear, but I don’t like the sound of it, and it’s not strictly needed. You should read the line slowly, with the last 3 words stressed: ‘the stone rolled away’. The image connects the empty tomb on Good Friday 2000 years ago, the womb of the ewe once the first lamb is born, and the prospect of peace at last in Northern Ireland. In all three cases, life wins.



Baby-Sitting
Q My teacher and some of my class think the poem is about post-natal depression. I think it's about baby-sitting. Who is right?
A You are right. You've listened carefully to the language of the poem, and trusted the poet. The evidence is on your side. Start with the title: 'Baby-Sitting'. This is a deliberate choice, and intended to guide the reader. In line 1 and line 2 there are two important words: 'strange' to describe the room, and 'wrong' to describe the baby. I, the baby-sitter, am telling you, the reader, that I am sitting in an unfamiliar room, not in my own house. Then I tell you that I am listening for 'the wrong baby', that is, not my baby. Later, I emphasise this: 'I don't love this baby.' Look at the last two lines of the first verse: that this baby's breath 'fails to enchant me' implies that I understand the experience of being enchanted by a baby's breath. I use the word 'perfume' - something joyfully experienced as a mother.

The second verse is all about the baby's feeling in the company of a stranger. It describes the baby's fear and loneliness. Further proof that the baby-sitter is not sorry for herself, but sorry for the baby.

Readers who think about post natal depression must say that it is THEIR thought, and must first take note of the clear intention of the poet before they add their own thoughts

Q What is 'the monstrous land'?
A The baby's bad dream. Maybe what woke the baby was a dream about monsters.

Q Why have you used the words 'snuffly, roseate, bubbling sleep.'?
A The words describe a baby sleeping, snuffly, with rosy cheeks and a bubbly nose.

Q Why have you used capital letters at the start of each line even when it's not a new sentence?
A I wrote the poem a long time ago. Poems used to be printed with capital letters at the start of the line. I don't do it now. I think it looks old fashioned.

Q What do you mean by ‘the wrong baby’?
A From its birth a baby knows its own mother, and a mother knows her baby. There is, usually, a powerful bond from the start. There has to be for us human beings to survive. If you watch a flock of sheep you’ll see how the lambs, which all look the same to us, run crying to find their mothers. The ‘wrong baby’ is the wrong lamb. There is no bond between the baby sitter and the baby, so they are wrong for each other.

Q Why are you afraid of the baby?
A The baby sitter is scared that the baby will wake, and she won’t be able to comfort her.

Q What is ‘the bleached bone in the terminal ward’?
A I imagine a man dying in a hospital ward, the curtains drawn about his bed, his wife watching. His body is a bony shape under the white sheet, like, I thought, a ‘bleached bone’ on a beach. Surely a baby crying for its mother feels as abandoned as that woman seeing her husband die. I am still surprised that such a bleak image came to me as I wrote about such an ordinary activity as baby sitting. I was trying to look at loss from a baby’s point of view.



Blodeuwedd
(‘blodau’: flowers: Welsh)

Blodeuwedd is a character from the British (Welsh) mythology called The Mabinogion. Lleu needed a wife, and Blodeuwedd was created for him out of flowers by a wizard called Gwydion. According to the myth the flowers were yellow broom, meadow sweet and oak blossom. After a period of contentment Blodeuwedd fell in love with another man. They plotted to kill Lleu. Gwydion punished her by turning her into an owl, condemned to the night without human company or the company of birds.

Hendre is a farmhouse in mountains close to the sea in Gwynedd, North Wales, where I was staying with two woman friends. A colony of barn owls lived in an old building close to the farm. We couldn’t help thinking about Blodeuwedd as we heard the owls calling.



Buzzard
This poem considers, observes and describes with great care a simple and beautiful thing - the skull of a buzzard. In the last three verses the bird is imagined alive and hunting, falling from the sky in one swift stoop on a mouse moving in a barley field.



Cardiff Elms
Since the arrival of Dutch Elm Disease in Britain in the 1970s, almost all the elm trees in our landscape have disappeared. Cardiff City Centre had a magnificent avenue of elm trees, flanking a wide, rose-red road, running between fine, white stone buildings. I loved them since my university days, when every day I walked in their shade on my way to lectures. This poem is about their loss.



Catrin
Q What's the poem about?
A Why did my beautiful baby have to become a teenager! At least, I think that's what it's about.

Q What is 'the tight red rope of love'?
A The umbilical cord.

Q So what's 'that old rope'
A The invisible umbilical cord that ties parents and children even when children grow up. I was also thinking of the image of a boat tied to a harbour wall. The rope is hidden. The boat looks as if it's free, but it isn't.

Q Couldn't it be the tug of war between teenager and parent?
A Brilliant! I hadn't thought of that. It proves that if you bring your personal experience to a poem you find ever deeper layers of meaning in the words.

Q Or about letting your child go?
A Even more brilliant.

Q In the last lines is an image of the daughter asking to 'skate in the dark for one more hour'. Isn't that the baby in the womb wanting to 'skate in the dark' one more hour before being born?
A A beautiful, amazing question! You've seen something I didn't see when I wrote the poem. It proves that poems are not carved in stone. Interpretations change as the world changes. When Catrin was born they didn't scan babies in the womb. Now we all know what a baby in the womb looks like, so your question gives the words new meaning. Nobody can stop you reading a poem in your own way, thank goodness.

Q So what did you mean by skating in the dark?
A Just that! Children asking if they could stay out in the street skating as darkness fell. I chose the request as an example of the sort of thing children want to do that mothers refuse. I chose it because it was a romantic, poetic request, and I wanted something that showed it is beautiful and dangerous to be young.

Q Doesn't 'in the dark' mean the mother and daughter have yet to explore their relationship?
A Another one I hadn't thought of. Of course you're right. The language proves it - 'in the dark' means not knowing something.

Q What is 'the glass tank'?
A The hospital.

Q Do the changing traffic lights symbolise the progress of labour and changing relationships?
A Another clever idea I hadn't thought of. I thought I was describing ordinary life going on in the city while inside the hospital momentous events were happening in people's lives.

Q What do you think about students analysing your poems and finding meanings you didn't intend?
A I'm grateful to you for reading them and for revealing to me what you find. Poets write instinctively, and don't always see every possible meaning in the words they choose. If you find something, and prove it with quotations, then it's there, and you're right, and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise.

Q Could 'that old rope' suggest the chains of DNA handed down from mother to daughter?
A It certainly could. When the poem was written the genetic map had not yet been written, nor had the method of identifying people from their DNA been used. This proves that poetry and language move on, and new meanings can be found.



Cold Knap Lake
Q Is it a real lake? If so, where is it?
A Yes, it is real. It is a large artificial lake in a park in Barry in South Wales. The name is haunting, because of the word ‘cold’. That’s one reason I remember the lake. I have written several poems about it.

Q Is it a true story?
A Yes, as true as I and my memory can make it. It happened when I was a young child, about 6.

Q Does it rhyme? Or is it just at the end?
A I use half rhyme, except for the last two lines which use full rhyme. Examples of half rhymes are ‘crowd’ and ‘dead’, ‘lake’ and silk’, where just the last letters rhyme. You will find rhyme in every verse, if you look and listen for it.

Q Why do you describe your mother’s dress as ‘her wartime cotton frock’?
A During the second World War, when I was a baby, and for several years afterwards, you couldn’t buy nice clothes. My mother, who was very young and pretty at the time, made all her own clothes, and mine and my sister’s too. The fashions were dull, and cut from the least possible cloth. Old photographs will show you what I mean. I deliberately use the old word ‘frock’, to conjure the period of the War.

Q What’s the ‘water’s long green silk’?
A Water weed, and streams of water falling from the child’s clothes.

Q Why did the family beat the child?
A I suppose because they were so upset that they’d nearly lost her.

Q What was the ‘poor house’?
A Just a shabby place. They were a poor family.

Q What does the 4th verse mean?
A When you recapture a memory from early childhood, you’re sometimes not sure if you were really there, if someone told you about it, or if you read it in a story. The lake was not deep, but deep enough to drown in. I’d read fairy stories and legends about people drowning in mysterious lakes. I’d seen a famous painting of a drowned girl floating in a brook. Lake stories often have swans in them. Swans can be fierce, and pretty scary to a child who thinks they are beautiful beings out of legend. The little girl nearly drowned. Did the swans try to take her to their kingdom under the water? That’s the kind of story that haunted me when I was a child. The rhyme at the end connects the real event with a fairy story, I think.



Death of a Cat
When he was a child, my son Dylan had a bad dream. He woke up to hear cats wailing outside. One of our cats had been run over by a car the day before, and we’d buried it in the garden. Dylan went to the window to see what was going on. It was dawn. He saw our other two cats sitting on the compost heap close to the grave, howling. It seemed as if they were grieving, holding a wake for their lost one.



East Moors
East Moors steelworks in Cardiff was closed about 30 years ago, leaving many people out of work. It was shut on the first of May, a cold wet May Day. Penylan is a comfortable suburb of Cardiff, Roath and Rumney are less affluent suburbs closer to the steelworks. The ‘two blue islands’ are Flatholm and Steepholm, landmarks in the Bristol Channel, visible from the hills on which Cardiff is built. I was born and brought up in Cardiff, and lived in an old family house. The poem tells a true story, the details accurately noted.



Friesian Bull
The Friesian bull, like the male of most breeds of dairy cattle, is a dangerous animal, and must be kept confined in a strong pen. The bull was on my uncle’s farm on the banks of the River Dee in North Wales. The bull could always be heard crashing about in his stall, knocking the steel bars, kicking and bellowing. The heifer (young female) could only be brought to him for fertilisation by confining her in a narrow passage, too narrow for the bull, and then raising the iron gate between the bull and the heifer. It seemed to me a sad and savage procedure. Yet he had been a calf once, in a field under the sky. His ancestors roamed freely in herds. Do the scents on the wind remind him of these things?



Heron at Port Talbot
Port Talbot, in South Wales, has a famous steel works which dominates the town, but which has been declining for many years. The town, flanked by the motorway (M4), lies between the sea and the mountains, and would be beautiful were it not for the industrial sprawl of the works. In the incident I describe, I was driving in a snow storm, when a heron flew off the waters of a lake on the sea side of the M4, heading inland for the mountains. It flew right across my windscreen, close enough to see his eye. It was a moment of danger, but also of intimacy with the creature. Both of us were scared. Both ‘braked’. Both, I guess, continued our journey with faster beating hearts.



Jac Codi Baw
‘Jac Codi Baw’ is the Welsh child’s name for a J.C.B digger machine, and it translates literally as Jack Dig Dirt. The poem tells what happened. In the two hours it took to do some shopping, a fine old warehouse was reduced to a pile of rubble. The street looked completely unfamiliar. Everything was covered with dust. The familiar city skyline was suddenly strange.



Kingfishers at Condat
This is one of three poems from a journal written on a holiday in France. It’s an account of an incident on a hot September afternoon at Condat, a small town in the Dordogne. The rivers Coly and Vezere meet in a confluence near Condat, where we swam and watched kingfishers flashing over the water. Later, into the peaceful scene where we sit thinking about our happy day, a gang of bikers roar in to the square, as bright as kingfishers, but loud, intrusive. The kingfishers’ electric blue flashed secretly, silently, like private joy.



Lament
‘Lament’ is an elegy, an expression of grief. It can be a sad, military tune played on a bugle. The poem uses the title as the start of a list of lamented people, events, creatures and other things hurt in the war, so after the word ‘lament’, every verse, and 11 lines, begin with ‘for’.

The poem is about the Gulf War, which happened in 1991 when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the United States, with Britain’s help, bombed Iraq. This war has never really stopped. As we begin a new school year, it still threatens the world.

War can’t be waged without grave damage to every aspect of life. All the details in the poem came from reports in the media. There were newspaper photographs of cormorants covered with oil - ‘in his funeral silk’. ‘The veil of iridescence on the sand’ and ‘the shadow on the sea’ show the spreading stain of oil from bombed oil wells. The burning oil seemed to put the sun out, and poisoned the land and the sea. The ‘boy fusilier who joined for the company,’ and ‘the farmer’s sons, in it for the music’, came from hearing radio interviews with their mothers. The creatures were listed by Friends of the Earth as being at risk of destruction by oil pollution, and ‘the soldier in his uniform of fire’ was a horrific photograph of a soldier burnt when his tank was bombed. The ashes of language are the death of truth during war



Last Rites
Q Is the story true?
A Yes. If a poem uses the poet’s own voice, and tells a story from his or her own viewpoint, it is true. The point of view, the personal voice, the place names, the reference to an inquest, the precise description, all tell you it is fact. Sometimes a poet takes the viewpoint of a character, not his or her self. Then the poet uses imagination.

Q What happened?
A It’s all in the poem. On a beautiful morning in the longest, hottest summer I ever remember, a 20 year old motor cyclist was killed in a collision with a milk tanker. His fiancee was saved. It happened 50 metres from my house, in the quiet countryside.

Q What does ‘stigmata’ mean?
A It’s the wound made by nails in the hands and feet of Jesus when he was crucified.

Q Why do you say the road ‘has kept its stigmata of dust and barley seed’?
A It was the ‘summer of the long drought, 1976 - there was no significant rain for about 9 months, from January to September - so there was not a stream, pond or puddle for the policeman to get water to wash the blood and oil from the road. He gathered handfuls of barley and earth from the field, and threw it onto the mess on the road. There was no rain for several more months, so the stain remained on the road, like the scar of the stigmata that won’t heal.

Q Does ‘a mains hum only, no message coning through’ refer to an emergency phone call?
A If you put the three lines together, you will notice that the image connects the pulse with the radio message. ‘His pulse dangerous in my hands/ A mains hum only, no message/ Coming through’. I was thinking of the mains hum on a radio after the station has closed down. His pulse is beating still, but his brain is dead. However, I can see it might also make you think of a phone call, so that’s a good idea too.

Q Why do you call it ‘Last Rites’?
A The image is a priest giving the last rites of the church to a dying person. All I could do was cover him with a blanket, and wait by his side until the emergency services arrived.

Q Who is ‘his cariad’?
A His fiancee. It’s a Welsh word for a person you love.

Q Does ‘his blood on my hands’ mean you felt guilty?
A Yes. His real blood was on my hands, but we all feel guilty at being alive when someone else dies in tragic circumstances.



Les Grottes
This two-part poem (one of three in the collection) from the French journal refers to two of the famous caves (les grottes: the caves) of the Dordogne. They are magnificent, cathedral-like places, their walls painted and carved with images of animals by the people who lived in them and used them thousands of years ago. They were originally hollowed from the limestone millions of years ago by the force of rivers.

1. Rouffinac
The contrast between the summer heat above ground and the icy cold of the underground caves is striking. In the first poem, the mammoth look as innocent as a ‘nursery frieze’, the parade of animals on a child’s bedroom wall, or in a circus. But the place is haunted with thoughts of the tribes who carved these images, the savage lives they lived, and, even longer ago, before mankind lived on earth, the long millennia when the rivers were cutting the caves out of ancient rock:

‘The Vezere is a ghost,/ its footprints everywhere./ Even the kitchen taps// run cloudy into the palms/ of our hands, fill our mouths/ with chalk.’

You can see and taste the chalk in water that flows out of limestone.

2. Font de Gaume
In this poem I am struck by human creativity, the one characteristic which distinguishes human from other animals. I am inspired to write a poem. 14,000 years ago early human beings were inspired to carve images. Imagination cries for symbols, for the means to create, for tools, a pen, a chisel, to rejoice, celebrate, lament, praise, remember, or to please the gods. Suddenly that artist from so long ago seems to be, not a savage, but my brother or my sister.



Letters from Bosnia
In the closing decade of the 20th century, all the small countries that formed the former Yugoslavia declared their wish to be free. Croatia, Serbia, and other smaller countries, had been rolled into one, big country, Yugoslavia, which had been ruled for most of the 20th century as a single, atheist, communist state, although many of its people were Muslim and many were Christian. When the Bosnian people wanted their freedom, the Serbian army used brutal force in an effort to suppress them. It was a terrible war. Many innocent people died. People were murdered for their religion or their ethnic identity. Christians and Muslims who had been good neighbours became suspicious of each other. Peaceful communities were destroyed. Friends became enemies.

As in many towns in Britain, the people in the small mid-Wales town of Llanidloes collected money, food, clothes and blankets and sent them to Bosnia. The children in the primary school sent letters to children in Vites, and pen friendships were formed. One April day just before Easter I was writing poetry with the children when the post arrived from Bosnia. One letter was from Misha to Ben. There were Easter cards made by the Bosnian children, and a photograph of the class in Vites. They looked exactly like Welsh children, smiling in the sunshine in their tee shirts and trainers, some signalling, thumbs up, for the camera. Behind them was a shabby wall, marked by what looked like bullet holes.

All this is in the poem. Read it, and find the facts, all set out in as few words as possible. In a poem every word counts. One word often serves two purposes. The children in Llanidloes are also the children in Vites. The European spring is happening is in Wales and Bosnia. We share Easter. We are all Europeans. ‘April is all indecision’, just as Europe is. The cherry blossom is beautiful, but it is torn by sharp April rain, just as the beautiful children are torn by sudden war. The ‘bullet holes’ in the final line is intended to be shocking, and a warning. What if it happened here?



Llŷr
Llŷr, a British King whose story is told in the Mabinogion (British/Welsh mythology), is the source of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The poem was commissioned by the late Sam Wanamaker for an anthology called ‘Poems for Shakespeare’.

The idea for my poem arose while I was staying in a house in the Llyn peninsula in North Wales, close to the then home of the great Welsh poet R.S.Thomas, who was often to be seen striding the cliffs of Llyn. (He appears in the poem in verse 2, line 9). The two settings of the poem are the mountain-seascape where it was written, and the remembered experience of seeing my first Shakespeare play, ‘King Lear’, at Stratford on Avon when I was 10 years old. ‘River’ in Welsh is ‘afon’, the ‘f’ pronounced ‘v’. It’s the origin of the name of the River Avon.

The poem was at first written as three sonnets, but I abandoned the formal rhyme scheme in favour of a more natural use of echoes and half-rhymes while using iambic pentameter, until the final rhyming verse, and the closing couplet. There are several references and quotations from King Lear in the poem. ‘Nothing’, for example, is all Cordelia had to say when her father, Lear, demanded a public declaration of love from her.



Login
Login is a small village in Carmarthenshire. The title and first three lines of description set the scene for the story of how a return visit to the village results in a surprising and romantic discovery. The words portray a pretty village deep in a valley at the foot of a steep, wooded hill. The day is hot. It is summer. All this is sketched in the first 3 lines.

The story is told from the point of view of the poet, the ‘I’ in lines 4 and 5. Then verse 2, line 2, introduces a second person, a woman who opens her cottage door to the poet’s knock. They don’t know each other, but the poet hopes that the woman will remember her father. The place is connected with her father’s youth. The poem suggests that her father is dead.

Although the poem does not say so, you can infer from verses 2 and 3 that the woman who opens the door and lets the strangers in does indeed remember him. His name is enough for the poet and her young son to ‘gain entry’. The welcome is warm. The woman brings tea, spreads a lace cloth - a special cloth for important visitors - on the table. She ‘ruffles my son’s brown hair’, an intimate action which suggests that she sees in the boy someone she once loved. The fact that past love is hinted at but not spoken of lies in the atmosphere, the language chosen, the mood of the poem. There are hints in those ‘glances converging’ that ‘could not span such giddy water’. Love lies in language like ‘headlong fall’, ‘fast water’, ‘the bridge burns’, ‘brilliance’. The landscape is described in a passionate language.

In the final verse the boy runs down the lane to the bridge while the two women linger, saying goodbye. The poet imagines her son, many years later, looking back on this day and remembering how he saw his mother and the woman standing in the sun. He might think of it like an old photograph, just as his mother thinks of the past love between her father and this elderly woman as being like a faded sepia photograph from another age.

I am fascinated by the way the past, present and future can converge in one place. This poem has something in common with ‘Siege’, where I make connections between the past and the present as well between the ‘here’ of the poem and something happening at that moment far away.



Mali
Q Why did you write the poem?
A ‘Mali’ celebrates the birth of a first granddaughter. The first 3 verses recall a beautiful September day when a young woman went into labour 3 weeks early at her mother’s house by the sea. They drove to the nearest hospital where the baby was born quickly and easily. Next day the family took the new baby to the beach. Verse four, exactly three years later, describes the child’s third birthday celebration at the same house by the sea.

Q What are the ‘three drops of last blood?
A The birth of a baby involves great commitment. It’s a ‘life sentence’. The ‘blood’ in the poem is the blood of belonging, tribal, genetic, as well as the blood of fertility, birth, menstruation. Last blood is the very last drop of menstrual blood in a woman’s life. No woman ever knows at the time when last blood has been shed. One generation’s fertility ends in blood, and the next generation arrives in blood.

Q What’s the poem about?
A The poem is about babies, generations, and time. The body has an internal clock. Planet Earth too has a clock that makes night and day, and the seasons of the year. Shakespeare said: “Ripeness is all.” There are words and phrases in the poem connecting the ripeness of the body with the ripeness of the season. The tides of the sea are pulled by the moon’s gravitational force. The moon has the same 28 day rhythm as an average woman has. There’s a symbolic connection between the moon and the sea, and the moon and women. In the last verse it is September again, three years later, time for a party, a cake, balloons, candles. So, as well as being a poem about babies, I suppose it’s about Life, the Universe, and Everything.

PS: Teachers may like to know that ‘Mali’ is fifth in a sequence of 7 poems under the general title, ‘Blood’. The sequence is published in my collection, The King of Britain’s Daughter. (Carcanet Press). There are clues in other poems in the sequence that cast light on ‘Mali’, phrases such as ‘brim of blood’, ‘dish of seed’, ‘the silted well’, ‘a taste of salt’, ‘month of the high tides’, and words like newborn, afterbirth, quicken, sea and moon.



Marged
Marged - Welsh for Margaret - killed herself in 1930, in the house where I now live. She died as a result of poverty. In ‘Letter from a Far Country' I imagine that tragic day,

'Middle-aged, poor, isolated,
she could not recover
from mourning an old parent's death.
Influenza brought an hour
too black, too narrow to escape.'

In the same long poem I describe the little house as I found it, and bought it, 40 years after her death, a neglected ruin.

'In that innocent smallholding
where the swallows live and field mice
winter and the sheep barge in
under the browbone, the windows
are blind, are doors for owls,
bolt—holes for dreams. The thoughts have flown.
The last death was a suicide.'

'Marged' is a sonnet. It has 14 lines, each with 5 strong beats, and a rhyme scheme that goes like this:

a,b,a,b/c,d,d,c/e,f,e,f/ g,g.

The form came naturally, following the tune of the first two lines. I used the pattern of the sonnet to tell a simple story, enjoying the contrast between form and content. The rhyme too seemed to fall into place.

'Parlwr' is Welsh - Marged's language - the word for one of two main rooms in her simple, traditional longhouse. A longhouse is a two roomed croft, with sleeping space in the roof, a barn, cowshed and dairy all under one roof.

In 1984, I moved from Cardiff to the countryside, to live alone, by choice, for one winter in Blaen Cwrt. The cottage was romantically primitive, with oil lamps, a wood-burning stove and spring water. It was far from romantic for Marged half a century earlier. The poem is prompted by my guilt about Marged's life and death, my gratitude for our life today in her house, my sympathy for her, as a woman, the things we had in common, the differences between us, between women's lives then and now. These differences lie in the poem's language: contrast the pleasures of

'Lighting the lamps, November afternoons,
a reading book, whisky gold in my glass.'

with Marged's isolation and poverty,

'the old dark parlwr where she died
alone in winter, ill and penniless'



Miracle on St David’s Day
Q Why did you write the poem?
A Because it happened. It’s a true story. I was invited to read poetry to patients in the Occupational Therapy Department of a mental hospital in South Wales. The reading was organised to celebrate St Davids Day - March 1st.

Q What are the links between your poem and Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’?
A The man who could not speak suddenly stood up and recited Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’, word for word, just as he had learned it when he was a child at school. I suppose the sight of the daffodils never left the mind of Wordsworth, and came to him whenever he was in a ‘pensive mood’, and the poem never left the mind of the man in the hospital. In both cases the sight of ten thousand daffodils set memory going, and fired the mind.

Q Why couldn’t he speak?
A He was what is called an elected mute. That is, he was dumb because of his mental illness, not from any physical cause. He was suffering from long-term depression.

Q What made him recite the poem?
A I think two things set the poem going in his mind. One was the daffodils in the room and in the grass outside. The other was that I was reading poetry. The rhythm of the poems and the sight of the daffodils reminded him that he had loved poetry once, and the moment set him free from dumbness.

Q What do you mean by the image of the woman ‘in a cage of first March sun’?
A The sun casts the shadows of window bars into the room. A woman sits in the sunlight and the shadows as if she is in a cage. She is also in the cage of her depression.

Q In verse 6, using words like ‘frozen’ and ‘still as wax’, you suggest an unlit candle. In the last line of the poem you light the candle. Is this a symbol of hope?
A A wonderful question. I hadn’t noticed the connection between ‘wax’ and the ‘flame’ at the end. But you are right. The words prove it. The way it works is that one image suggests another in the poet’s mind.

Q Why does the thrush sing?
A Because it did. We listened to the man reciting the poem, and when we fell silent for a moment before applauding him, a thrush began to sing just outside the window. It is surprising how often I have read this poem on the 1st March, and heard either a blackbird or a thrush sing outside an open window.



My Box
Q Why did you write the poem?
A I asked primary school children to write a poem called ‘My Box’. They had to think of a container - the sea, an acorn, anything that contained something - and write 3 verses, the first beginning, ‘My box is made of...’, verse 2 beginning, ‘In my box...’. The final verse must describe what you do with your box. We all wrote together in the classroom.

Q What inspired you?
A An oak box my husband made for my birthday. I keep my journals in it. I’ve kept a diary since I was 14. In the box are my journals. In the journals is my life.

Q Why do you say you found heartsease? Were you thinking of love?
A Because we found that flower, though I’m aware of the resonance in the name.

Q The poem doesn’t rhyme.
A Yes it does! The poem rhymes all the way through. The rhyme was made like music, by listening, not by following rules. The rhyme is clearly heard, less easily seen. It does not always occur at line endings. Sometimes it is half rhyme. Sometimes it is internal rhyme. The snag about conventional rhyme is that it can be predictable, and create a dum-de-dum poetry. I’m trying for something more subtle. I use repetition, chiming, half rhyme, and a few end rhymes.

Verse 1: ‘oak’ half rhymes with ‘lock’, ‘me’ with ‘key’, linking with ‘he’ on the next line. ‘Nights’ chimes with ‘bright’ (line 4), and if you read the last 2 lines without stopping till you get to the comma, you hear ‘brass’ repeated, and pick up the main rhyming ‘e’ sound in the words ‘a golden tree.’ The rhymes slow the poem, the details set the scene.

Verse 2: This verse breaks away from traditional rhyme and it’s all one sentence. But in line 1, ‘box’ rhymes with ‘books’. Lines 2 and 3 are linked by ‘down’ and ‘how’, lines 3 and 4 by ‘planed’ with ‘planted’, and so on to the refrain, ‘and planted a golden tree’.

Verse 3: This verse end-rhymes throughout, using just 3 rhyme sounds: ‘box’, ‘lock’, and ‘box’ again; ‘read’, ‘dead’, and ‘made’; ‘me’ and ‘tree’. The whole poem is held together by the repeating final line.

Q What rhythm did you choose?
A Verse 1 goes 4,3,4,3,4,3,4,3. Verse 2 is again the odd one out, to be read like a headlong list, and it goes 4,3,4,4,4,4,4,3. Verse 3 is back to the pattern of 4,3,4,3,4,3,4,3.

Q Did you use the building of a wall to symbolise building a marriage, and digging a well to symbolise making a relationship deeper?
A No, but that doesn’t mean you’re wrong. A poet selects details and facts to tell the story. I made it sound like a nursery rhyme with phrases like the golden oak, the bright key, the 12 black books, etc. But these are all real, and the wall and the well are real. We restored a derelict, 200 year old longhouse, made a garden, and drilled a 54 foot deep well, or borehole, to find a water supply. However, there are layers of meaning in language, so the symbolism is for you to find.

The trick is to write about it knowing the fact and symbolism. Accept the facts the poet presents you with - a box, a partner, books, a tree, birds, flowers, walls, a garden, and a well. These things set the scene and tell the story. Then you add your own interpretation, proving your point by quoting from the poem.



October
Q Who’s the poem about?
A A friend who was a poet and an actress. Her name was Frances Horovitz. When someone the same age as you dies, it is shocking. She was too young to die.

Q Why did you call it October?
A She died in October. It can be a sad month. Summer is over, as her life was. The weather was wet and stormy, reflecting our emotions.

Q Where are you in the first verse? Is it a different place from where the funeral took place?
A Yes, two different places. The first verse describes the scene in the garden on the October day when the poem was written. Summer’s finished, the flowers are dead. Wind has broken a branch in one of five poplar trees. The tree itself, and the other trees, are healthy and sound, their leaves turning gold - just as I and most of my friends and family were alive and well. There is a parallel between the trees and the friends, the living and the dead. I wrote the poem while remembering the funeral, a few days earlier, where rain and tears mixed on people’s faces.

Q Did you write the poem as therapy? If not, why did you write it?
A I make poems about everything because I am a poet, never for therapy, though poetry does help you to think about difficult things, like death.

Q What are the wind’s white steps? Why does the pen run?
A When wind blows over long grass, green turns silver. The death of a friend makes you determined to waste no time and to make the most of your life. So ‘I must write like the wind’. The wind over the grass turns into an image for the feeling of panic to see, experience, record everything.

Q Why does health feel like pain?
A When someone your age dies you feel guilty about being alive and well.

Q What is the death-day?
A We are all born. We all die. We know our birthday, but not our death day. I was suddenly aware that I pass that date every year without knowing it, ‘winning ground’.



On the Train
Q Which train crash was it?
A The Paddington train crash of October 1999

Q Did you write it at the time of the crash?
A My poems try to be truthful as well as accurately factual. I find the best way to make the poem live is to begin with the here and now. The poem was written, as you see from the details, on a train at about 8 in the morning as the crash was being reported on Radio 4’s Today programme. I was travelling from Manchester to Wales, not, as I often do, from Paddington.

Q What is ‘the blazing bone-ship’?
A The coach which was on fire, containing an unknown number of passengers.

Q Was it an image for a place of death? The station, maybe? A charnel house?
A I wasn’t thinking of a charnel house, though I agree the words suggest it as a possible image. I was thinking of the burning funeral ships the Celts used to push out to sea, containing the bodies of their heroes. I wanted to suggest something noble, tragic, heroic, because real people would be grieving, and deserved no less than the dignity of the noblest image I could conjure.

Q Why do you mention mobile phones? They’re not very poetic.
A I hope I’ve made them poetic. It’s a poet’s job to use real things and make it into poetry. The mobile phone is the modern messenger of love and tragedy as well as chat. They featured too in the tragic events in New York on September 11th. At the time of the train crash the mobile phone’s favourite cliché, ‘I’m on the train’, was suddenly the most important message in the world.



Peregrine Falcon
Q Who is the person speaking in the poem?
A 'I' in verse two, and 'we' in verse 5, tell you that the viewpoint is the poet's, that the poet is not alone to witness the peregrine killing and butchering the pigeon.

Q What is the scullery?
A It’s a special room next to a kitchen in an old house, and it’s where the washing up was done. I chose it for its old associations, and its sound. I like the way the word echoes ‘skull’, a place of skulls, the peregrine’s kitchen and killing place. Note the word ‘table’ in verse 3.

Q Why is her house air?
A Because birds live in the air. The air is their staircase.

Q What do you mean by : ‘I touch the raw wire/ of vertigo/ feet from the edge'?
A Vertigo is a fear of heights. It's like an electric shock, like touching a raw wire.

Q What is ‘the edge’?
A Since vertigo is fear of heights, 'the edge' must be the edge of a cliff or quarry. Peregrine falcons nest on cliffs. The peregrine in the poem killed her prey on the cliff before taking it back to her nest half way down the cliff face. The meaning is in the language. The language suggests height, flight, descent, falling, the sky, the earth.

Q What does 'The pigeon bursts like a city' mean?.
A This is my personal favourite image. Have you seen news footage of aerial bombing? I imply the bursting of intricate, perfect complexity, heart, arteries, lungs, feathers, bones, like streets, centres of government, galleries, cathedrals, etc.



Plums
This is a love poem, but it is also about a year when our plum trees produced a particularly abundant crop of fruit, as happens every few years. The poem celebrates the moment lived fully, and the final line recognises that the joy and the beautiful summer won’t last forever.



Ram
The skeleton of the ram lay on a mountain called the Fan, (pronounced Van) in the Brecon Beacons in South Wales. It is a meditation on the life, death and disintegration of the ram, while taking a close look at the skull, a beautiful object picked clean, washed and bleached by sun and rain. The poem links the skull of the ram with the mountain landscape where it lies. It ends with images of life and fruitfulness, and suggests, and rejects, a new use for the skull.



Scything
I am often asked if a poem is personal. I reply, not personal, but true. All writers use personal experience, even those who seem to be making things up. All poets , all fiction writers, use a mixture of experience and imaginative invention.

‘Scything’ is about a mother and her 11 year old son clearing long grass and brambles from a country garden. They are using a scythe. They are sad about something, working quietly. Silence is mentioned twice in the poem. They accidentally destroy a willow warbler’s nest. This event is the catalyst that breaks the silence. They are so upset that for a moment they blame each other, the way people do in any family at a high emotional moment. Restraint is gone. They first shout, then weep, then feel guilty and sad. All of a beautiful May day the little bird reminds them of their hurt, their regret, their guilt, as she searches for her lost nest of eggs. The song of the willow warbler is one the loveliest songs of the spring garden. The mother bird searched in silence, and the potential birdsong of a nest of fledglings was lost too.

A mother always feels guilty when she shouts at her child. I have not revealed in the poem what the cause of their sorrow was. In a way it is not important to know the cause. However, in the context of the collection in Six Women Poets students might like to know that the poem was written at the same time as ‘White Roses’, and that the death of the young boy in that poem is what weighs on the minds of mother and son in ‘Scything’. The boys were best friends. For some reason grief is always associated with guilt. When we grieve for someone we also feel glad and guilty to be alive and healthy. We wish we had done more for the dying, or dead person.

The scythe is a real tool, and we were using it to cut the grass. I never tell lies in a poem. If I say I am using a scythe, it is true. But the scythe is also often seen as a symbol of death, and death often portrayed as a reaper carrying a scythe. Thus Death is the harvester, taking life when its time has come. In Welsh we talk of ‘killing’ the corn. Yet how can we say that a twelve year old boy’s time has come? It was no more time for a 12 year old to die than for the hatching eggs of a willow warbler to be destroyed. The scythe was a ‘scalpel’, the shell the bones of babies.

In the last line I recall the heat of birth, of the sudden breaking of birth waters, the waters of life. I intend the poem to end with life, not death, and of course the mother and son are soon sorry for shouting, talking about their grief at last, and able to comfort each other.



Seamstress at St Leon
This is the second of three poems here included taken from a journal from France. It’s an attempt to capture the atmosphere of an afternoon using the details of what we saw, heard and sensed. We stopped to look at the river, and noticed a house where a seamstress lived. She was absent, but the signs of her recent presence and of her needlework were everywhere: her tea, her cloth, silks, sewing machines. Even her garden looked as though she had embroidered it. Flowers and greenery covered her little house. The Singers are her old, treadle sewing machines.



Shadows in Llanbadarn
This is a poem of observation. It’s about watching, from an upstairs window, a kitten playing on a ladder leaning on a wall, and ‘you’ (my husband) working in the garden, while the sun slowly sank in the sky leaving the garden in shadow. It’s autumn. The days are shortening. Then ‘you’ disappear into the house. ‘Your shadow turns.’ I see only his shadow, then hear him climbing the stairs.

I’m enjoying the game of rhyme, the parallel themes of a scene and a day and a season ending. Even such a simple scene is to be relished while it lasts.



Sheila na Gig at Kilpeck
The ‘Sheila na Gig’ is a Celtic fertility figure carved, in this case, as a corbel stone which is part of a frieze of beautiful carved figures running round the eaves of Kilpeck Church, on the Welsh Borders of Herefordshire. I take a personal, female view of the figure, and consider the bodily upheavals of the birthing mother. In her case, of course, she is a fertility goddess and therefore responsible for all fruitfulness. Inside every woman there is a ‘clock’ regulating menstruation, pregnancy, menopause. I imagine it as a little golden clock, a miraculous mechanism made of perfectly turning gold cogs. There are many symbols of sexuality and birth in the poem.



Siege
We live in a world where what is happening on the other side of the world often seems as close as what is happening in our own homes. This affects us, and makes us conscious of things never known to poets who wrote before radio, television, e-mail, the internet, the mobile phone. A poet writing now cannot leave out of her work what she knows is happening in the wider world.

The siege happened at the Iranian embassy in London, in the 1980s. Nine people, (I think) were shot dead when the police stormed the building, and it happened live on radio and television. It was one of the first occasions that people died as we watched or listened to a live broadcast, and it was very shocking - as shocking then as the twin towers was in 2001.

There are shifts both of place and of time in the poem - I am interested in these shifts, and have tried to write about them more than once. The scene shifts between the garden outside the kitchen window of the family house where I was born and lived until 1984, and the Iranian embassy in London. Time shifts between the summer day in the ‘80s when the siege happened, the photographs were sorted, and the poem was written, to the past when I was a baby, or even before I was born. The scenes of the past are conjured by the pile of old photographs on the kitchen table. The events of the poem’s present are shown in ordinary type. The events in the photographs are shown in italicised, indented verses.

What am I trying to do in this poem? To make the writer’s mind the stage on which all the drama happens. To show that, in one garden, on one summer day, an embassy is stormed, 9 people die while a yellow butterfly is crossing a lawn, blossoms open while blood flows, I write a poem, and sort photographs. Outside the window in the garden my father holds me in his arms 40 years earlier; my mother, even earlier, poses for a picture holding the bridle of a horse. In verse 3, lines 7-10, is a memory of riding over the field and down the lane on the top of a load of hay, when I was a child on my grandmother’s farm.

In the last verse, the wren sings - our smallest bird produces more young than any other - thus ‘that song of lust and burgeoning’. My parents’ images from the photographs stand in the garden, ‘never clearer’, the butterfly has almost reached the other side of the garden, and 9 people are dead in London. These things crossed the barriers of space and time. They happened in the poem’s now, in the poet’s consciousness, and it was all over in a few minutes.



Suicide on Pentwyn Bridge
This story is true, half heard from people talking about it, half learned from the local newspaper. Pentwyn Bridge carries a road over a dual carriageway in Cardiff. A man told his terrified wife he was going out to kill himself. He jumped from the bridge and was severely injured. He died many months later, never having left hospital.



Sunday
This poem is a detailed description of the pleasures of getting up early on a spring Sunday morning in Cyncoed, a leafy suburb of Cardiff, of enjoying the sunshine and silence before the family wake up. Then I turn to the newspapers, and the world’s news of war, famine, cruelty, terrorism, bring the shadow of a warning to spoil the morning’s simple joy.



Swimming with Seals
Q Did you really swim with seals?
A Yes. It’s quite common in west Wales to find seals or dolphins swimming in the sea quite close to people.

Q Why are there two horizons?
A One is the real one, where the sea meets the sky. The other is the one you see when you’re swimming, where the surface of the sea meets the submarine world. If you duck your head you see that other world.

Q What are the stars and shoals?
A Starfish, little shoals of fish and seaweed, like a garden.

Q Why do you say the elderly bask at the edge of what they’ve lost?
A People who never get out of their cars, but just look at the sea through the car windscreen, or binoculars, have forgotten what they’re missing.

Q When you say ‘she’s gone’, who are you talking about?
A The seal.

Q Why do you say ‘all earth’s weight’ is beneath the old?
A Gravity, the pull of the earth. Children seem light footed, denying gravity, but old people seem to be pulled down towards the earth.

Q What do you mean by ‘rolling in amnion’?
A Amnion is the amniotic fluid, or waters of the womb. The seals is pregnant. Her calf, or pup, will be born in autumn. We are swimming, diving under the water to look at the submarine world. We are swimming underwater like the seal pup in the womb.



Taid’s Funeral
Taid is a Welsh word for Grandfather. My Taid died when I was about 2 years old. One day when I was about 18, searching for something in a drawer, I found a scrap of the dress I had worn as a two-year old child on that long ago day. Suddenly, in a flash, I remembered the funeral. In the poem I struggle to remember more details from that day and to understand what I remembered. Yet the images remain a puzzle, and the child’s eye view of them renders them merely mysterious to the adult mind.



The Field Mouse
Q Why is the long grass a ‘snare drum’?
A The insects in the grass make the field sound like a snare drum.

Q What does ‘the air hums with jets’ mean?
A The jets are military aircraft, practising low flying over hill country. When war threatens somewhere in the world, and Britain is involved, the activity increases. The noise is sometimes a terrifyingly sudden scream, and sometimes a continuous roar, like deep humming.

Q What is the ‘terrible news’ on the radio?
A It was the war in Bosnia, in the former Yugoslavia.

Q What is lime?
A This lime comes from limestone, and is naturally present in alkaline soil. In acid soil lime is deficient, and farmers add it to help the crops to grow. It sweetens the soil, so I describe the cloud drifting onto our land as ‘a chance gift of sweetness’.

Q Why do you talk about Summer in Europe’?
A British people and Bosnian people are both Europeans. We are alike. Summer, whether in the countryside in Wales (where I am) or in Bosnia, is hay making time. Farmers cut long grass, dry it, and store it to feed their animals in the winter. They wait for a good weather forecast before cutting the hay, as it needs to dry in the sun for a few days before it is baled and stored. All children love playing in the hay. It is a sunny, happy, busy time.

Q So why do ‘the fields hurt’?
A Small animals get killed in the long grass during hay making. Think also of the word ‘battlefield’. Here, little creatures were killed. In Bosnia men, women and children were killed. We call hay making cutting the hay, but the Welsh equivalent translates as ‘killing the hay’.

Q Who are the children and what are they staring at?
A There are two countries, Wales and Bosnia, and two groups of children, here, and there. The children here are sad to see small animals injured. In Bosnia the children see people die. I’m also thinking of the children of the world watching adults wreck our planet. They stare at what we, the adults, have crushed.

Q What do you mean by ‘the wrong that woke from a rumour of pain’?
A The rumour of pain, the world’s pain, comes from the media, wars and rumours of wars. I am reminded of the world’s troubles by the sight of the injured field mouse brought to me by a four year old boy. We try to save the mouse. It is tiny, but its agony is as big as if it were a man. It has been hurt by accident, but it reminds me of the war I’ve been trying to forget about all day, I’ve been trying to enjoy a happy day in the sunshine, picnicking with the children in the hayfield. The death of one small mouse brings the pain close.

Q What do the last lines of the poem mean?
A It’s a nightmare, a bad dream about the children being as frail and vulnerable as field mice, and there’s gunfire in the air. The poem asks what if this were Bosnia, and my neighbour hated me just because we had different religions and different ethnic backgrounds? What if instead of a cloud of lime he threw stones at me?



The Sundial
The poem is about a child who makes a sundial out of 12 stones and a broken bean stick. It is also about time, about light and shade, about a child’s nightmare, stone circles, lions in the night and the lion-sun burning down on a garden next day.

Owain is a six year old boy who wakes at night from a bad dream, shouting to his mother that there is a lion in his bedroom. The poem is written next day, a hot summer day which mother and child spend in the garden. After a sleepless night the child is quiet, ‘dry and pale’, ‘intelligently adult’. The fever has made him still, able to concentrate on his task. The mother is tired, sleepily watching as the child works out where to place the stones. He checks the time on his watch, and places a stone where the shadow cast by the stick falls on the circle of paper. This is ‘the mathematics of sunshine’. Primitive people used the ‘mathematics of sunshine’ when they raised stone circles such as Stonehenge, calculating from sunlight and shadows the hours of the day and the seasons of the year.

The sun is the lion of the child’s frightening dream. In children’s books, illustrations of a lion’s face or the face of the sun look similar. Time is a circle. The clock face is a circle. At the end of the poem the lion-sun becomes the lion trainer, takes up the whip and points it at mother and child. We are ‘caged’. We can’t escape time.

Why does the mother think about time as she watches her child, recovering from a fever? Does the language and imagery of the poem suggest anxiety? If, in the early hours of the morning, a child wakes screaming, hot and frightened, would any parent fear the worst?



The Vet
Q Is it a true story?
A As true as I can remember it.

Q Who’s speaking in the first two lines?
A The vet. It was my grandmother’s farm. The cow was about to calve. I’d never seen a calf born and I wanted to be there. I wanted to be a vet when I grew up. The cow was in trouble and the vet thought I was too young to watch, in case it turned out badly.

Q How old were you?
A I don’t know. 8. 10. Something like that.

Q Why did you say you were stuck with it?
A When you’ve whinged and wined for something, it’s hard to admit you’ve changed your mind. I was a bit scared by what the vet said, but I stayed anyway, ‘brazening out the cowshed and the chance of horror’.

Q Why do you use a word like brazening and what does it mean?
A Adults used to say someone was ‘brazen’, or ‘bold as brass’, cheeky, never admitting you’re wrong. I use brazening as a verb. If you use a good verb you never need an adverb. I chose all the verbs carefully: ‘brazening’, ‘gloved’, ‘wrenched’, ‘hung’, ‘swam’, ‘furled’. I think they make a difference. What if, instead, I’d used something like ‘was’, ‘went’, ‘came’, or ‘did’ instead of some of those words?

Q Why do you say the cow’s belly is a cathedral?
A I’ve often thought that walking in a cathedral is like being inside the rib cage of a giant animal. A baby is small, curled inside the bag of water in the mother’s body. Her heart beats like a bell in the ears of the baby. Bells tell us the time. It was time for the calf to be born.

Q What is the horror?
A Well, it might have turned out badly. The cow had been calling for ages. You only send for the vet in an emergency. The calf might have died. I was scared.

Q What is the pool?
A The pool is the amniotic fluid in which the calf ‘swims’ before birth. When the vet broke the waters, it became ‘a rope of water’. The rope hints that you ring a church bell with a rope. In the last verse the calf is a salmon, and the waters are a waterfall.

Q Why do you say ‘his brimming mother’?
A The cow brims with milk, like a full vessel.

Q It has a happy ending, but why did you put in horror words like knife and butchery?
A I wanted a contrast between the worst that might have happened, and the beautiful moment when the calf was born, wet and shining, ready to be licked clean and fed by his mother. Magic!



The Water Diviner
In 1976, a hot dry year in Britain, the well ran dry at our little farmhouse in Ceredigion, used then as a retreat from the city, but where I now live. We called in a water diviner. Using a divining rod, holding it over the ground and walking slowly, he felt a tremor, then a strong pull, in the rod. He thus found a strong source of water under our garden. The bore hole was drilled, and water found 54 feet down.

Although divining is a respectable way of discovering underground water or minerals, the science is not understood. The procedure seemed almost like magic to me. The echo through the hose dipped into the deep borehole, as we waited for the water to rise and fill the pipe, really did sound like ‘dwr’, which is the Welsh word for water. Welsh is Britain’s first language, and was once spoken throughout Western Britain as far as central Scotland. That day, out of the deep and ancient earth, even the water spoke Welsh. A ‘thorough bass’ is a musical term.



White Rose
Q Is the poem true?
A If you read a prose story that begins:

‘Outside the green velvet sitting room white roses bloom after rain’,

you assume it is fiction, that the writer knows such a room and is using it to set the scene for an imagined story. If you read a poem that begins:

‘Outside the green velvet sitting room
white roses bloom after rain’

you know it’s a poem and assume it is a real place. You’d be right. Both poet and novelist use real places, one to serve invention, the other to serve truth.

Q What is the meaning of the poem?
A Do not trouble yourself with ‘meaning’. The poet doesn’t. Just read the poem and figure it out first as a narrative. I am telling you about something that happened.

First, picture the scene, meet the characters, take in the facts, follow the events. Once that is clear, you might notice the tricks language is playing on your imagination, the effects it is having on your own response. Then you’ll bring your mind, heart, experience to the language of the poem, and you will respond. You may find in your mind ideas that were not consciously recognised by the poet. That’s fine. That’s why poetry has such a power to work on us long after the poet has disappeared.

First the scene: a room, green velvet, white roses outside the window, sunlit but wet with recent rain. Roses: it must be summer. Velvet and roses: a suburb, maybe. You assume the poet is a neighbour or friend of the boy’s family.

Next, meet two people in the room: a sleeping boy, a person (the poet) watching over the boy. Note ‘cold bloom’, (the white rose of a tumour), ‘terrible speed’, ( a deadly missile), the ‘splinter of ice’ in his blood, (like the boy in the fairy story with the Ice Queen’s splinter moving towards his heart). The boy is very ill, so ill that he will die before the rose outside his window. He wakes and smiles bravely at his minder. He moves and the pain wakes and makes him grit his teeth. In the last line of verse 3, pain is a ‘red blaze’, a fire, and it burns him. He feels for a moment like Guy Fawkes on a bonfire, his bones are spars and bed-springs, like burning furniture. Even his beloved cat hurts him. The poet watches, terrified to see him suffer, hoping he will sleep again until his mother returns.

In the last verse he has died. Life is careless of the dead - the cat still tracks the thrush, the thrush hunts for a worm, the sun shines, and the rose lives a few more days before its petals fall. This shows the indifference of nature and the triumph of life over death. In the end these natural things live, and can console us, help us to grieve and be healed. So life wins, always.