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.

A - Z of Poetic Techniques by Gillian Clarke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry also uses half rhyme, and internal rhyme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(‘Overheard in County Sligo’. GC)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(see also article on iambic pentameter)

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Woods writes about ALL of Heaney's Poems

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

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

STORM ON THE ISLAND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The houses have to be

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

PERCH (Electric Light 2001)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(lines 8-9)

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

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

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

(line 7).

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

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

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

BLACKBERRY PICKING

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

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

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

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

DEATH OF A NATURALIST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(lines 13-15)

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

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

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

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

DIGGING

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

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

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

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

(lines 1-2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Preoccupations p.41)

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

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

(Preoccupations p.42)

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

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

(Preoccupations p.42)

He went on to remark in a self deprecating way:

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

(Preoccupations p.43)

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

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

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

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

MID-TERM BREAK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Next morning I went up into the room.”

(line 16)

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

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

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

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

FOLLOWER

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

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

“The horses strained at his clicking tongue”

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

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

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

(lines 8-10)

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

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

(lines 10-12)

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

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

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

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

AT A POTATO DIGGING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Woods writes about Mother Any Distance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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