Michael Woods writes about My Father Thought it bloody Queer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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