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
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