Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
Seamus Heaney
About the poet
Seamus Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, on a farm in Castledawson,
County Derry, Northern Ireland, the eldest of eight children. In 1963, he began
teaching at St. Joseph's College in Belfast. Here he began to write, joining a
poetry workshop with Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and others under the
guidance of Philip Hobsbaum. In 1965 he married Marie Devlin, and in 1966
year he published his first book of poetry, Death of a Naturalist. His other
poetry includes Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), North (1979),
Selected Poems 1965-1975 (1980), Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern
(1987), New Selected Poems 1966-1987 (1990) and Seeing Things (1991). In
1999 he published a new translation of the Old English heroic poem Beowulf.
Seamus Heaney is a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1989 to 1994. In 1995 he
received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Heaney has lived in Dublin since 1976.
Since 1981 he has spent part of each year teaching at Harvard University,
where he is a Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Writing about Heaney in
1968, Jim Hunter, said:
“His own involvement does not exclude us: there are few private references,
and the descriptive clarity of his writing makes it easy to follow...Heaney's
world is a warm, even optimistic one: his tone is that of traditional sanity and
humanity.”
You can see whether, and how far, this is true of all the poems in the
Anthology, some of which were written after these words.
Storm on the Island
The poem considers the ideas of isolation and living so close to nature. But
mainly it depicts the destructive powers of nature, amplified for the islanddweller. Heaney refers to three of the elements - earth, water and air. The
poem challenges the idea that island life is idyllic - the sea is not “company”
but like a cat, seemingly tame, yet apt to turn “savage” and spit. At the end of
the poem comes the irony - we are fearful of “empty air”, or a “huge nothing”.
So the poem appears to question whether our fears are real or imaginary (of
course, physicists and meteorologists know that air is not “a huge nothing”).
Heaney uses a series of military metaphors: the wind (like a fighter-bomber)
“dives and strafes” while space is a “salvo” and air bombards (a metaphor
from artillery or, more aptly here, naval gunnery).
The poem is written in iambic pentameter lines - mostly blank verse, but with
half-rhyming couplets at the beginning and end. The poem opens confidently,
explaining why the island dwellers trust in their preparations - but when the
storm breaks, they can do nothing but “sit tight”.
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
The poem begins by showing how the island dwellers adapt their outlook to
their situation - so the fact that there is no hay becomes an advantage (“no
stacks/Or stooks that can be lost”). But soon the disadvantages appear - the
absence of trees means both that one cannot hear the sound of wind in
“leaves and branches”, nor is there any “natural shelter”. On the other hand,
the violence of nature can exceed what we expect to happen. We might have
a picturesque idea of the sea crashing against the cliffs - spectacular, but not
really threatening. But the wind is so strong that the spray hits “the very
windows” of people's houses. Heaney explains this with the simile of a cat much of the time one expects it to be “company” and “tame” (safe and
predictable). But in the storm it turns “savage” and “spits”.
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How in this poem does Heaney suggest the power of nature?
Does the poem suggest that extreme weather is frightening or enjoyable
for people (or both, perhaps)?
What do you think is the meaning of the last line of the poem?
Death of a Naturalist
This poem is similar to Blackberry-Picking in its subject and structure - here,
too, Heaney explains a change in his attitude to the natural world, in a poem
that falls into two parts, a sort of before and after. But here the experience is
almost like a nightmare, as Heaney witnesses a plague of frogs like
something from the Old Testament. You do not need to know what a flax-dam
is to appreciate the poem, as Heaney describes the features that are relevant
to what happened there - but you will find a note below.
The poem's title is amusingly ironic - by a naturalist, we would normally mean
someone with expert scientific knowledge of living things and ecology (what
we once called natural history), someone like David Attenborough, Diane
Fossey (of Gorillas in the Mist fame) or Steve Irwin (who handles dangerous
snakes). The young Seamus Heaney certainly was beginning to know nature
from direct observation - but this incident cut short the possible scientific
career before it had ever got started. We cannot imagine real naturalists being
so disgusted by a horde of croaking frogs.
The poem has a fairly simple structure. In the first section, Heaney describes
how the frogs would spawn in the lint hole, with a digression into his collecting
the spawn, and how his teacher encouraged his childish interest in the
process. In the second section, Heaney records how one day he heard a
strange noise and went to investigate - and found that the frogs, in huge
numbers, had taken over the flax-dam, gathering for revenge on him (to
punish his theft of the spawn). He has an overwhelming fear that, if he puts
his hand into the spawn again, it will seize him - and who knows what might
happen then?
The poem is set out in two sections of blank verse (unrhymed iambic
pentameter lines). Heaney uses onomatopoeia more lavishly here than in any
poem - and many of the sounds are very indelicate: “gargled”, “slap and plop”
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
and “farting”. The lexicon is full of terms of putrefaction, ordure (excrement or
faeces) and generally unpleasant things - “festered”, “rotted”, “slobber”,
“clotted water”, “rank/With cowdung” and slime kings”.
In the first section, the poet notes the festering in the flax-dam, but can cope
with this familiar scene of things rotting and spawn hatching. Perhaps, as an
inquisitive child he felt some pride in not being squeamish - he thinks of the
bubbles from the process as gargling “delicately”. He is confident in taking the
frogspawn - he does it every year, and watches the “jellied specks” become
“fattening dots” then turn into tadpoles. He has an almost scientific interest in
knowing the proper names (“bullfrog” and “frogspawn”) rather than the
teacher's patronizing talk of “daddy” and “mammy”, and in the idea of
forecasting the weather with the spawn. (Not really very helpful, since you can
see if it is raining or sunny by direct observation - no need to look at the
frogspawn.)
The second section appears like a punishment from offended nature for the
boy's arrogance - when he sees what nature in the raw is really like, he is
terrified. This part of the poem is ambiguous - we see the horror of the plague
of frogs, “obscene” and “gathered...for vengeance”, as it appeared to the
young boy. But we can also see the scene more objectively - as it really was.
If we strip away the effect of imagination, we are left with a swarm of croaking
amphibians. This may bring out a difference between a child in the 1940s and
a child in the west today. The 21st century child knows all about the frogs'
habitat and behaviour from wildlife documentaries, but has never seen so
many frogs at close range in real life. The young Heaney was used to seeing
nature close up, but perhaps never got beyond the very simple account of
“mammy” and “daddy” frogs. The teacher presents the amphibians as if they
were people.
The arrival of the frogs is like a military invasion - they are “angry” and invade
the dam; the boy ducks “through hedges” to hide from the enemy. Like
firearms, they are “cocked”, or they are “poised like mud grenades” (a
grenade is a hand-bomb - the frogs, in colour and shape, resemble the Mills
Hand Bomb, used by British soldiers from the Great War to modern times).
The poem has some echoes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the
Ancient Mariner - in a shorter and more comic version: the would-be naturalist
is, like the mariner, revolted by “slimy things”; the Ancient Mariner learns to
love them as God's creatures. Heaney indulges in a riotous succession of
disgusting descriptions: “gross-bellied”, “slap and plop”, “obscene threats”
(suggesting swear words), “farting” and “slime kings”.
Wordsworth suggests that poets should use everyday language. In this poem,
Heaney uses terms we do not expect to see in poetry, and presents nature as
the very opposite of beautiful.
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
Notes on the poem
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Flax is an annual plant (it grows from seed) some one to two feet high,
with blue flowers. A flax dam (traditionally called a lint hole), in Northern
Ireland is not really a dam, but a pool where bundles (called “beets”) of flax
are placed for about three weeks to soften the stems. The process is
called “retting”. Those who used to do this work report that the smell is
very strong and unpleasant. Heaney describes the flax as held down by
“sods” (large clumps of earth or turf - a favourite word of the poet: count
how often he uses it here and in other pieces). In some dams large stones
would hold down the flax. Fibre from flax was cleaned and spun into yarn,
woven into linen and bleached.
The townland is the smallest administrative area in Northern Ireland. They
range in size from less than an acre to well over 2,000, while the average
is some 300 acres. The boundaries between them are often streams or old
roads.
Be careful how you write naturalist - keep the “al” in it, and don't mix it up
with naturist, which is an old name for someone who takes off his or her
clothes, to live in a “state of nature”!
How would you react (as a young adult or as a child) to the sight of a
horde of frogs invading a familiar place?
How far does this poem tell the truth about frogs and how far does it tell
the reader about the power of imagination?
Is this poem comic, serious or both? How far does the poet invite us to
laugh at him?
Heaney describes the frogs' heads as “farting”. As a boy he might have
said this word to friends, but would not repeat it at home or write it in
school work. How does it work in the poem?
Is it a good idea for teachers of the young to explain how animals live by
describing them in human terms, like “mammy” (mum or mummy) and
“daddy”?
How well does this poem fit in with your ideas of what poetry should
normally be like?
How truthful is the title? Did Heaney really lose his interest in, and love of,
nature. Or does the poem record only a dramatic change of attitude, or
something else? (Note, for example, that the poem called Perch was
published in 2001.)
Does this poem have anything in common with other poems by Heaney?
How far does it fit into a pattern of poems that show him not to be a real
country person (like his father and grandfather) - because he can't dig, he
can't plough, he gets upset when the blackberries start rotting and he is
frightened by a lot of frogs?
Digging
This poem is like Follower, as it shows how the young Heaney looked up to
his elders - in this case both father and grandfather.
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
Seeing his father (now old) “straining” to dig “flowerbeds”, the poet recalls him
in his prime, digging “potato drills”. And even earlier, he remembers his
grandfather, digging peat. He cannot match “men like them” with a spade, but
he sees that the pen is (for him) mightier, and with it he will dig into his past
and celebrate them.
Heaney challenges the stereotype of Paddy with a spade. The stereotype
contains some truth - Irishmen are justifiably well known for digging, but
Heaney shows the skill and dignity in their labour. We see also see their
sense of the work ethic - the father still digs in old age, the grandfather, when
he was working, would barely stop to drink.
Note: the pen is “snug as a gun” because it fits his hand and is powerful.
Heaney is from County Derry (Northern Ireland) but the poem was published
in 1966, before the “troubles”, and this is not a reference to them.
This poem has a looser structure than Follower and looks at two memories the father digging the potato drills, the grandfather digging turf, for which he
was famous as the best digger on the peat bog. The poet celebrates not so
much their strength as their expertise. The digger's technique is exactly
explained (“The coarse boot nestled on the lug...”). Each man dug up what
has real value
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food - “new potatoes”, and
fuel - “the good turf”.
Again there are
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technical terms (“lug”, “shaft”) and
monosyllabic (“bog”, “sods”, “curt cuts”) or
colloquial terms: “By God, the old man could handle a spade.”
The onomatopoeia (where the sound resembles or suggests meaning) is
obvious in “rasping”, “gravelly”, “sloppily”, “squelch” and “slap”.
There is a central extended metaphor of digging and roots, which shows how
the poet, in his writing, is getting back to his own roots (his identity, and where
his family comes from). The poem begins almost as it ends, but only at the
end is the writer's pen seen as a weapon for digging.
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How does the poem explore ideas of heritage and family tradition?
What does the poem suggest about physical labour?
Explain in your own words the image in the last line of the poem.
At a Potato Digging
In this poem Heaney looks at man's relationship with the land - the cultivation
of the potato is a way into Ireland's social history. The first and last of the four
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
sections depict the digging and gathering in of the potato crop today. The
second section looks more closely at the potato, and the third is an account of
the great Potato Famine of 1845-1850. We sometimes associate the
gathering in of food crops with offering thanks to God (as in the Harvest
Festival) but here Heaney suggests that the Irish labourers have a
superstitious or pagan fear of a nature god (the “famine god”) whom they must
appease with their offerings.
Although the farmer uses a mechanical digger to turn up the soil in which the
potatoes lie, the job of gathering in the potatoes still relies on human workers.
The machine turns up the roots and the labourers, in a line, bend down to fill
their wicker creels (baskets). As they fill their baskets, they leave the line to
drop the potatoes into the pit, where they will be stored. Though the work is
hard, and makes the workers' fingers “go dead in the cold”, they work almost
automatically (“mindlessly”) made tough by their “Centuries of/fear and
homage to the famine god”. The folk memory of the great famine makes them
ready for almost any hardship, in pursuit of full stomachs.
The potatoes come in different colours (according to the variety). The second
stanza explains how they sprout and grow in their native soil. Although the
great famine, caused by blight, happened more than 150 years ago, still each
year the potato harvest can be an anxious process, as the workers smell the
potatoes and feel them for firmness - making sure they are free of the blight.
(A fungus-like organism, called Phytophthora infestans, causes the disease.
This organism harms only the potato and, to a lesser extent, the tomato, a
member of the same plant family.) In this account, they come out, exuding
“good smells” and undamaged by the digger - “a clean birth”, to be “piled in
pits”. They resemble skulls, but are alive. They have eyes (sprouting points)
but these are blind - they have not yet sprouted.
In the third stanza, Heaney uses exactly the same phrases - “Live skulls,
blind-eyed” - but this time referring to the people who suffered in the great
famine of 1845. Poor people (that is most people) in Ireland at this time relied
almost wholly on the potato as their staple food. This explains why they would
even eat “the blighted root” - but there was no real crop to speak of, and the
blighted potatoes could not feed the people. The “new potato”, which seemed
“sound as stone”, would rot within a few days of being stored - and “millions
rotted along with it”. The phrase is ambiguous - it means that millions of
potatoes rotted, but makes us think of the people who died. (The population of
Ireland dropped from 8 million before the famine to 5 million afterwards.
Perhaps a million died, while others left for England or the United States of
America.)
Those who survived were famished - Heaney likens this to the sharp beaks of
birds snipping at people's guts. The people are shown as desperate and
demoralized - “hungering from birth” - and cursing the ground, “the bitch earth”.
As this section moves back in time at the start, so it ends by returning to the
present, where the “potato diggers are” and “you still smell the running sore” as if the blight opened a wound that has never healed.
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
In the fourth and final section, the workers take their lunch break - they no
longer depend on the potato for their own food (though they earn their pay by
digging it). Instead they have “brown bread and tea”, and their employer
serves it, while there is no shortage, and they “take their fill”. But they are not
taking any chances - the earth is not to be trusted (“faithless ground”). As they
throw away the dregs of the tea and their breadcrumbs, they make their
offerings - “libations” - to this god whom they fear and must appease.
The poem has a clear formal structure - the four sections go together rather
as the movements in a symphony. In presenting the main subject, the “Potato
Digging” of the title, Heaney makes two excursions - to inspect the marvellous
food plant in close-up, and to recall the terrible history with which it will always
be associated in Irish memory.
The first and last sections have a loose iambic metre (a mix of tetrameters
and pentameters) and a clear ABAB rhyme scheme - which breaks down only
in the poem's final line. (Why might Heaney do this?). The second section has
fewer rhymes in an irregular pattern, so the effect is not very obvious to the
reader. But the third section uses rhyme in pairs: AABB and so on. Here the
rhyme words are emphatic, an effect made stronger by the trochaic metre.
(The stress usually falls on the first syllable of each pair. This metre works
well for bitter political verse - Shelley uses it in his Mask of Anarchy.)
The poem abounds in images. Heaney uses natural metaphors - of rock (“flint”,
“pebbles” and “stone”), of bodies (“skulls” and “blind-eyed”), or of animals
(“bird” and “bitch”) - to describe things. There are many images that suggest
religious belief or ceremony - but no mention of the established Christian faith:
“processional”, “god” (note the small “g”), “homage”, “altar”, “thankfully”, “fasts”
and “libations” (liquid offerings, usually poured onto the ground or an altar, in
many ancient religions). Alliterative effects are everywhere - “grubbing” and
“grafted” or “pits” and “pus”. And the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, which is often
monosyllabic, makes use of technical or dialect words, as well as sound
effects (like onomatopoeia).
Small details are very telling, for example:
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We note how the workers are able to stand upright for a moment, before
stooping again. The image suggests the way in which people with natural
dignity are forced to bow to their toil and humble themselves. The modern
labourers may be free, but they may also still have something of the servile
mentality.
We see, too, that the starving people live in wicker huts - a suitable
material for the strong but light creels, yet somehow not substantial
enough for a comfortable and fireproof home.
As in Digging, the labourers' work is a symbol - but of what?
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Are they digging up their past, a folk memory or a grievance that will never
be put right?
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
Notes on the poem
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“Drill”, in the first line, does not refer to a machine, but the row of
potatoes - called a “drill” because the machine or person that plants the
seed-potatoes (not really seeds, but sprouting tubers) drills a series of
holes into which the seed-potatoes go.
“in 'forty-five” refers to the first year of the Irish Potato Famine - 1845.
The significance of the date may depend on the reader. English
readers may think of 1945 (the end of World War Two) and Scots may
think of 1745 (the Jacobite uprising under Bonnie Prince Charlie). The
omission of the first two digits also suggests the viewpoint of the people
at the time (as we now talk of the Swinging Sixties, rather than the
1960s) who do not need to identify the century. By using the same form,
Heaney suggests the way the memory has been passed on and kept
alive in the oral tradition.
This poem dates from the late 1960s. Perhaps farming methods have
changed in Ireland since, but in most of the world still the work is done by
human labour - and, just as in 19th century Ireland, many people's lives
depend on a single crop.
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How, in this poem, does Heaney connect past and present?
What view does the poem give of man's relationship with the earth?
Does the poet really think (and want the reader to think) of the earth as a
“bitch” and “faithless”?
Modern readers in the west may no longer have a sense of where our food
comes from - does this poem challenge us not to take things for granted?
How does this poem explore ideas of religion, ritual and ceremony?
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
Gillian Clarke
About the poet
Gillian Clarke was born in Cardiff in 1937. Her parents were Welsh speakers
(and "100% Welsh"). She was brought up to speak English, but is a Welsh
speaker, too. As well as writing poetry she is a playwright and translator. In
1990 she co-founded Ty Newydd, the writers' centre in North Wales. She
teaches creative writing to children and adults, and gives readings and
lectures. Gillian Clarke's work has been translated into ten languages. Her
books include: Snow on the Mountain (1971), The Sundial (1978), Letter from
a Far Country (1982), Selected Poems (1985), Letting in the Rumour (1989),
The King of Britain's Daughter (1993), Collected Poems (1997), Five Fields
(1998), Nine Green Gardens (2000) and Owain Glyn Dwr (2000). She
published The Animal Wall, a children's book, in 1999.
Gillian Clarke has a daughter (about whom she writes in Catrin) and two sons.
She lives with her architect husband on a smallholding in Talgarreg, in West
Wales. Here they raise a small flock of sheep, and look after the land on
organic principles.
Gillian Clarke maintains a Web site at
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www.gillianclarke.co.uk
You can find copies of the Anthology poems here, as well as a selection of
other pieces. She welcomes comments on her poems and answers questions
that visitors send in. She says, of those who make suggestions about the
poems: "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."
I would like to thank Ms. Clarke for giving me help with many points of
information about, and interpretation of, the poems in this guide. But she does
not always agree with some parts of my reading (which is by turns overattentive to some details and may miss the intended point of others). This is
most marked in the poems about motherhood. And least so in the case of
October. In answering questions in a GCSE exam, this may be useful to think
about - your examiners will not give you good marks for absolutely anything
you write: it must relate to the text of the poems. But there is no one single
right answer. Many of my comments are expressed here as statements, for
the sake of convenience - but they are all offered tentatively. Very practically,
the poet suggested that some bits of background information about the
subjects had no place here, and they have gone. Gillian Clarke's advice is
always to trust the poems - they mean what they say.
In the Anthology poems, Gillian Clarke writes always from her own viewpoint she does not (in these poems) invent imaginary characters as mouthpieces in
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
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Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
monologues. In this respect, her poems are quite straightforward. She makes
the generous statement that once the poem is published, it is no longer hers and that readers may discover meanings or implications in the text, of which
she was not aware in the writing, or that are accidental.
Catrin
Gillian Clarke says that this poem answers the question: "Why did my
beautiful baby have to become a teenager?" The poem contrasts the baby's
dependency on her mother with the independence and defiance of the
teenager. In a sense, therefore, this poem is for all mothers and all daughters.
Gillian Clarke writes that "It is an absolutely normal relationship of love,
anxiety and exasperation."
The general meaning of the poem is clear though some details may be
ambiguous. At the start of the poem, the mother in the labour ward in a city
hospital, before (when she looks out of the window) and during labour (the
room is "hot" and "white" and "disinfected"). Perhaps it is hot because of the
plate glass, since later it is a "glass tank" - almost like a fishtank, or the
vivarium where one keeps a pet that needs to stay warm. From the first
mother and child seem to have been in a tug of war or a tug of of love, fighting
over the "red rope". Did the poet literally write all over the white hospital walls
- or does she mean that she found herself thinking up (and maybe writing
somewhere) words, like those in the poem? Or maybe she is trying to explain
her reaction to the "disinfected" and "clean" or "blank" environment - without
"paintings and toys" and colouring in the white spaces. She sees this now as
two individuals struggling to become "separate" and shouting "to be two, to be
ourselves".
The second section tells what happened. Neither has "won nor lost the
struggle" but it "has changed us both". The poet is still fighting off her
daughter who can tug at her feelings by pulling "that old rope". The mother
seems very much to want to be able to agree to the request to play out, and it
hurts her to say no - not only because she foresees an argument with a
strong-willed teenager, but also because she very much likes the idea of her
daughter's skating in the dark. But she cannot give in - both because it would
be irresponsible to allow the skating, and because it would be even more
unwise to allow her daughter to think that she was winning the struggle. This
last image, of skating in the dark, may come from a real request but also
suggests an episode that William Wordsworth records in The Prelude, when
he did just this - skating, as a boy, in the dark on a frozen lake, at a time when
children were allowed to take far more risks than is common in the UK today,
but enjoying as a result a freedom to explore and learn from the natural world.
(In Catrin's case, it was roller-skating. Gillian Clarke says that "the request is
half true, half symbolic".)
The poem has some striking images. The "red rope of love" is the umbilical
cord. The image is repeated, as "that old rope". Gillian Clarke explains this as:
"The invisible umbilical cord that ties parents and children even when children
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
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Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
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."
The "glass tank" is the hospital, according to Ms. Clarke. She explains that
skating in the dark is meant literally - as an example of the kind of thing
children ask to do but which mothers refuse because it is too dangerous.
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As you read the poem, do you identify with the mother or the daughter or
do you see things from both viewpoints?
How far do you think this poem depicts the relationship of parents and
children like it is? Is it different for fathers and sons?
Should the mother have let her daughter go skating in the dark? Are
parents too protective? Would you (will you) allow your children to take
more risks?
A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998
This poem comes from Five Fields. The author says: "The five fields of that
book are the five continents of the planet and the oceans. They are a symbol
of those other things and of the way of life lived everywhere."
After three poems in the Anthology about babies - two of them depicting
childbirth - the title here might suggest something similar. But the "difficult
birth" is of a lamb, at Easter. Gillian Clarke gives the reader the date (1998),
as a clue to the symbolism of the title - which refers to the historic Good
Friday agreement, which has gradually brought some kind of peace to
Northern Ireland. The talks that led to this were also having a "difficult birth"
over that Easter time. Gillian Clarke says (on her Web site) that the Easter
setting of this poem also hints at the old story of Jesus's crucifixion and rising
from the dead.
This double meaning appears in the first stanza - where the poet (and
presumably her husband) look forward to good news. That is that something
that has gone on for years seems about to change - "eight decades since
Easter 1916". They have planned to celebrate the good news from the peace
process, but have to put this off to look after the "restless" ewe.
The ewe's waters break, releasing the fluid in the amniotic sac that protects
the unborn lambs, and she has licked this up. But her lamb is stuck. Someone
(we do not know who, but this person is identified as "you") phones for the vet.
The writer seems to rebel against this - men thinking they know best, even
about birth. So she eases her hands in, grips the lamb's head and front
hooves. She pulls hard, and at last the lamb comes out in "a syrupy flood",
which the ewe licks up. The "you" character returns to this scene - "peaceful,
at a cradling that might have been a death". Then the second lamb comes.
The poem presents the poet and the ewe as working with a common purpose
- "we strain together". The poem is set out in stanzas of regular length and a
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A Specialist Science College
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Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
loosely iambic metre. The last line, which shows that the miracle has occurred,
is shorter than the rest.
Gillian Clarke mixes up details of the peace talks and the narrative of the
lambing - "While they slog it out...exhausted, tamed by pain,/she licks my
fingers". We realize that "exhausted, tamed by pain" refers to the sheep, but
could almost equally well apply to the peace negotiators. And there may be a
contrast between the violent history of men working against each other and
the peaceful cooperation of females that can overcome the difference in
species. We might easily miss the point as a "second lamb slips through" the
"opened door" - that the first step towards peace is the hardest.
The poem is resonant with echoes. The ending suggests the miracle of the
first Easter - the stone rolled away from Christ's empty tomb. "Easter 1916"
marks the uprising that would lead to Irish independence and later, indirectly,
to the troubles in Northern Ireland - but it is also memorable as the title of a
poem by W.B. Yeats that records the event as the first part of a heroic
struggle. Yeats writes, in the chorus, that "a terrible beauty is born". And
"peaceful, at a cradling" suggests images of human mothers and children,
perhaps even the nativity at Bethlehem.
In this poem, Gillian Clarke relates two of her greatest concerns - a love of the
natural world around her and the political processes that bring war or peace to
the world.
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How does the difficult birth of the first lamb parallel events in the Irish
peace process?
Is this an optimistic or pessimistic poem in your view?
How far does this poem show that events immediately around us and more
public events are all joined up in the "five fields" of our world?
What do you think of the contrasts the poet makes between people (like
her) and experts (men in white coats)?
What view of nature do you find in this poem?
This poem could be compared to Seamus Heaney's At a Potato Digging. Both
writers depict natural events, familiar to country people or farm workers, and
relate them to history and wider political perspectives - specific to Ireland in
both cases. Seamus Heaney looks at arable farming on a large scale (at one
point discussing the whole Irish potato crop), while Gillian Clarke looks at
pastoral farming on a small scale - one ewe among the little flock she raises
with her husband.
Seamus Heaney admires farmers, and recognizes their abilities - which he
admits he cannot match. But he also sees much of country life as cruel,
arduous and alarming - something he may exaggerate in his poems, to
explain why he is a writer and observer but not a farmer. Gillian Clarke, on the
other hand, evidently enjoys both writing and animal husbandry. Where
Seamus Heaney (admittedly as a boy) runs from the sight and sound of
menacing frogs, Gillian Clarke is quite ready to slip her hands inside a ewe as
it gives birth and help pull the lamb out by the head.
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The Field-Mouse
This piece recalls Robert Burns's famous poem To a Mouse, on turning up her
nest with the plough. In both poems the mouse is powerless against man's
interference. In each poem the mouse is a symbol of weak or vulnerable
people, threatened by forces beyond their control. This is a long and quite
sophisticated poem but the structure is fairly clear. The poet writes of cutting
hay while thinking of events elsewhere in Europe. Her account of the haycutting has three strands or elements - to the straightforward description of the
mowing she adds her observation of aeroplanes with which "the air hums"
("low flying fighter jets, an every day sound in hill country in Britain") and a
short narrative about a mouse, injured by the machinery, which she is unable
to save.
The poet sees how the hay-cutting has results which were not intended.
Animals which have survived the destruction now appear as refugees in "the
dusk garden". Children, who witness the destruction, seem upset by the
brutality of the action.
In the final section of the poem, Ms. Clarke connects what she has witnessed
to the war in Europe - an idea she suggests at the start of the poem in "the
radio's terrible news". She sees children as fragile and vulnerable ("their
bones brittle as mouse-ribs"). The noises of agriculture suggest the sound of
"gunfire". The very last image in the poem refers more explicitly to the civil
conflict of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, where the "neighbour" has
become a "stranger".
In the poem's first stanza, Gillian Clarke suggests that the neighbour, without
any particular feeling of good will, nevertheless sends her family "a chance gift
of sweetness" in the lime that reduces the acidity of the soil - an image that
suggests the stones that later wound the land. She now sees how easily the
neighbour could become hostile and damage her land. "Land" is to be read to
mean both the ground and any nation. The final lines suggest the territorial
nature of the Bosnian war. Making land unfit for farming by spreading stones
around (described in the Old Testament) is similarly a throwback to ancient
times. Ms. Clarke comments: "The poem is asking, 'what if?' What if we,
Europeans too, had to suffer civil war? How would it begin? With stones?
Could we quarrel over race or religion as people have done in Yugoslavia?"
In thinking about the poem, you might like to consider these questions:
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How does the poet show her concern in the poem:
o for the animals threatened or harmed by the mowing?
o for her own children?
o for peace in the wider world?
How well does Gillian Clarke succeed in showing how things around one
and things happening in other places are all parts of a joined-up process in
the world?
Does the poem associate the children's concern for animals with other
themes?
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A Specialist Science College
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Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke

What has this poem, which describes events in the countryside, got to do
with the newspapers? Why can the poet not "face" them?
Cold Knap Lake
This poem is about an incident from the poet's childhood. Cold Knap Lake is
an artificial lake in a town park in Glamorgan, South Wales. A little girl is
drowned in the lake, or so it seems, but the poet's mother gives her the kiss of
life, and her (the poet's) father takes the child home. The girl's parents are
poor and beat her as a punishment. At this point, the poet wonders whether
she, too, "was...there" and saw this (the beating, rather than the rescue) or not.
The poem is inconclusive - the writer sees the incident as one of many things
that are lost "under closing water".
What begins as a reflection on a vivid memory ends by recognizing some of
the diversity and richness of the way we recall the past. Ms. Clarke expands
this:
"It is about the limitless way the mind takes in events and stories, laying down
all that the mind encounters, enriching memory and imagination. It shows the
importance of stories, nursery rhymes, poetry, pictures, alongside real events,
in making us richly human. It is the picture of a human mind as made by the
child in each of us. The lake, and the 'closing water', is memory."
In the opening lines, the poet seizes the reader's attention with the seeming
seriousness of death. This makes the mother's action seem yet more
miraculous. If we assume that the "wartime frock" is being worn during (not
after) the Second World War, then the poet (born in 1937) would have been at
most eight years old - she recalls that she was far younger. The mother is a
"heroine" but her action has nothing to do with the war. The rest of the crowd
either do not know about artificial respiration, or fear to take the initiative. And
they are "silent" perhaps because they do not expect the child to recover. The
poet notes how her mother's concern is selfless - she gives "her breath" to "a
stranger's child". The image also suggests the miracle of creation as related in
Genesis (the first book of the Bible), where God gives Adam life, by breathing
into his nostrils.
The poet does not condemn the child's beating explicitly. But she seems
shocked by the child's being "thrashed for almost drowning". She now recalls
this as a terrifying part of the memory.
In the penultimate stanza, the lake of the title supplies an apt image of
memory. Under the shadow of willow trees, cloudy with "satiny mud", stirred
as the swans fly from the lake - the "troubled surface" hides any exact
information. What really happened lies with many other "lost things" under the
water that closes over them - in the lake, where "the poor man's daughter" lay
drowning.
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Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
The poem has a very clear structure - stanzas of four and six lines, a pattern
that repeats itself. There are loose or half rhymes all the way through to the
final double rhyme couplet (almost in the manner of a Shakespearean sonnet).
Cold Knap Lake is where these things really happened, but its association
with lost history and things being buried and rediscovered later may echo the
ideas in the poem. And there is an allusion to other literary accounts of
drowning - perhaps that of Ophelia. Apart from the extended analogy of the
"troubled surface" (which was literally present but also works metaphorically)
there are very few metaphors in the poem ("long green silk" and "closing
water" - can you find any others?).
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How does Gillian Clarke present memory in this poem?
What do you think of the motif (thematic image) of water in Cold Knap
Lake?
How does the poet use images of things that were literally present and
metaphors (there are very few) in this poem?
In your own words, explain what you think the poet is saying in the last sixline stanza and the rhyming couplet that follows it.
This piece is one of several by Gillian Clarke about personal memories (which
also figure in many of Seamus Heaney's poems). It also presents a happy
outcome from a dangerous situation, like Blake's William Blake: The Little Boy
Found and in contrast to Heaney's Mid-Term Break.
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Pre-1914 Poetry Bank
Ben Jonson: On my first Sonne
About the poet
Ben Jonson (1572-1637) was an actor, playwright and a poet. He wrote his
plays around the same time as Shakespeare, whom he outlived. (According to
an eccentric and almost certainly false theory, someone else wrote
Shakespeare's plays - and Jonson is the one of the chief suspects, along with
Francis Bacon.) In his own time, Jonson was more highly regarded than
Shakespeare. In 1598 he was convicted of murdering a fellow actor, Gabriel
Spencer, but escaped the hangman by claiming benefit of clergy (he proved
he was in holy orders, and so not liable to trial in the ordinary courts). His work
is closer in style to the classical dramatists of the ancient world. He published
two collections of poems and translations.
About the poem
The poem records and laments (expresses sorrow for) the death of the poet's
first son. We call such poems elegies or describe them as elegiac. Jonson
contrasts his feelings of sorrow with what he thinks he ought to feel happiness that his son is in a better place.
The death of a child still has great power to move us - Seamus Heaney
records a similar experience in Mid-Term Break. It would have been a far
more common event in 17th century England, where childhood illnesses were
often fatal. The modern reader should also be aware of Jonson's Christian
faith - he has no doubt that his son is really in a “state" we should envy, in
God's keeping. Sometimes poets write in the first person (writing "I") but take
on the identity of an imagined speaker (as Yeats does in The Song of the Old
Mother and Browning does in My Last Duchess). Here we can be sure that
Jonson is speaking for and as himself.
The poem in detail
Jonson writes as if talking to his son - and as if he assumes that the boy can
hear or read his words. He calls him the child of his "right hand" both to
suggest the boy's great worth and also the fact that he would have been the
writer's heir (the image comes from the Bible - it reflects ancient cultures and
the way Jesus is shown as sitting at God's right hand).
The poet sees the boy's death as caused by his (the father's, not the boy's)
sin - in loving the child too much - an idea that returns at the end of the poem.
He sees the boy's life also in terms of a loan, which he has had to repay, after
seven years, on the day set for this ("the just day"). This extended metaphor
expresses the idea that all people really belong to God and are permitted to
spend time in this world.
Jonson looks at the contradiction (or paradox) that we "lament" (cry over)
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something we should really envy - escaping the hardships of life and the
misery of ageing. The writer suggests that "his best piece of poetry" (the best
thing he has ever made, that is) is his son. Remembering his sin (of loving too
much) he now expresses the hope or wish that from now on, whatever he
loves, he will not love it "too much".
The poet's method
The poem uses the line that Shakespeare, Jonson and others rely on for most
of the dialogue in their plays (the technical name is the iambic pentameter - as
it has five [Latin penta] poetic "feet", each of which has two syllables, of which
the second [usually] is stressed). Jonson arranges the lines in rhyming pairs,
which we call couplets.
The poem is written in the form of an address to the dead child - but really
shows us Jonson's own meditations. The short lyric contains one striking
metaphor - that of the boy's being "lent" for "seven years", and paid back "on
the just day". (When the poet develops an image in this way, we may call it an
extended metaphor.)
The last two lines are memorable - a quite complex idea is packed neatly into
two rhyming lines, an effect we call an epigram. (The couplet is at the same
time both epigram and epitaph!)
A note on the text
Unlike the poems by Blake and Whitman, the text here has not been changed
to modern standard UK English spelling. It also uses some words that are no
longer common - such as "tho" ("=thou") for "you". You might find it helpful to
"translate" or update the poem, so that you understand it more easily.
Responding to the poem
What do we say when sad things happen? Compare this poem to other
poems or songs written to mark the death of some loved person - you could
use Seamus Heaney's Mid-Term Break or examples from outside the
Anthology like Elton John's and Bernie Taupin's song Candle in the Wind (this
exists in two versions - one written in 1973 for Marilyn Monroe, and a more
famous version re-written in 1997 for Princess Diana).
Where do our loved ones go? Despite supposed falling attendance in some
places of worship, most people in the UK, when asked, say that they believe
in some kind of God or spiritual existence. When people die, we often find that
we do believe, or want to believe, that death is not the end. What is your belief
about such things? Say how far you agree with the ideas that Ben Jonson has
about what has happened to his son.
Writing your own elegies
Few of us can write things that are good enough to be published, and that
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Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
express universal or general experiences. But it may be important for our own
private grief to put our feelings down on paper. If you have had a very sad
experience - it may be a loss or separation, the death of a pet or something as
serious as the death of a friend or relative - then you might wish to write your
own elegy in prose or verse. You must decide whether you want to show it to
anyone else. (A teacher who asked students to write in this way would not be
so insensitive as to read out or display the results, unless the writer wanted
this to happen.)
Parents and children
This poem is very much written from the viewpoint of the father. Students in
schools will all be someone's child, but most will not have your own children
yet.
• Does this affect the way we read the poem?
• Do you see it from the poet's point of view, or identify with the child who
has died?
William Wordsworth: The Affliction of Margaret
About the poet
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is arguably the most popular and famous of
all English poets. As a young man, he had quite radical ideas about political
change - and he travelled to see the effects of the revolution in France - of
which he wrote
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive".
With his good friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he published, in 1798, a
collection of poems called Lyrical Ballads (in 1800, they published a second
volume). In some ways, these poems mark the beginning in England of what
we now call the Romantic Movement. The Preface, written by Wordsworth,
has come to be seen as one of the most important explanations of poetry in
English literature. In 1805 Wordsworth published his masterpiece, the long
autobiographical poem, The Prelude, subtitled Growth of a Poet's Mind.
Wordsworth is strongly linked to the Lake District, where he grew up, and later
settled. He helped introduce to Britain a love of the outdoors and of wild
places. Wordsworth writes about man in relation to the natural world, and
about simple or rustic people. He suffers from being strongly linked to gift
shops and the heritage industry - so that his poems appear on tea towels,
biscuit tins and postcards - and from the reputation of one poem (Daffodils)
that begins "I wandered lonely as a cloud..."
About the poem
The Affliction of Margaret was composed some time between 1801 and 1804
(which Wordsworth gives as the date on the manuscript). It was published in
1807. In his own arrangement of his poems, Wordsworth includes it among
"Poems founded on the affections". The poem is similar to a longer piece in
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Volume Two of the Lyrical Ballads, called Michael, and also to the first half of
Jesus's parable of the Prodigal Son. (Luke 15.11-32). In a way, the poem's
subject is one that is still very relevant to parents - it is about a boy who has
left home, but lost contact with his mother. She has not heard from him for
seven years, and worries about what has happened to him - her only child.
She does not say that she is a single parent in so many words, but she never
mentions the boy's father and says finally that she has "no other earthly
friend" - suggesting either that she does not see the father now, or that he is
dead.
The poem in detail
This is a very long poem and there is not space here to look at everything.
The title and the fact that she is a mother make it clear that the speaker in this
poem is not the poet, but an imagined character. She begins by speaking to
the missing son, asking him what he is doing and where he is. Having
mentioned the length of his absence (seven years), she describes what a
model child he was and thinks about how, in the past, she used to worry that
he was neglecting her. Now she thinks either that he has been unsuccessful
and is ashamed to come home or is lost in a prison or far-off desert or
drowned in the "Deep". If the boy is dead, then thinks Margaret, it cannot be
true that ghosts bring back messages to the living, for she would have had
"sight" of him. She ends the poem, as she began it, with a request to the boy
to return - or send some news to set her mind at rest.
Margaret has a first name - but we know no more details of her, nor do we
know the son's name. Neither has any very clear individual qualities - except
that the mother says her son was worthy, good looking, noble and innocent.
(We are not sure if she exaggerates out of pride, but she seems sincere.) She
seems to stand for all mothers everywhere who have lost touch with their
children.
The poet's method
This is quite a long poem with its eleven stanzas - though not by
Wordsworth's standards. Like most of the Lyrical Ballads, it is written in a
regular, but simple metre with a basic rhyme scheme (ABABCCC).
Wordsworth writes in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads that he has tried to
avoid using a special language of poetry (usually called "poetic diction" - for
an example, you could look at Oliver Goldmsith's portrait of The Village
Schoolmaster) and tried to use "the very language of men" - that is, the
vocabulary and style of everyday speech. The modern reader may find that
the style is still quite literary - Wordsworth does not use dialect words or
abbreviations (as Thomas Hardy does in The Man He Killed). But mostly The
Affliction of Margaret is clear and direct. The effect of the basic vocabulary
and the simple rhyme can be almost like a nursery-rhyme - especially in the
last three lines of each verse, where the rhyme sounds are unavoidable.
Wordsworth is not a very economical writer here - in the way that Ben Jonson
is in On My First Sonne. Instead of packing an idea tightly into an
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epigrammatic couplet, he tends to spell things out - so rather than just write
"humbled", Wordsworth explains what this means "poor/Hopeless of honour
and of gain".
In some other poems Wordsworth likes to let the lines run on, but when he
uses simple rhyme schemes, as here, he is more likely to end stop the lines.
Some lines here run on (see if you can find which ones) but most have a
punctuation mark that requires the reader to pause or stop.
Responding to the poem
Another earthly friend
If Margaret did have an "earthly friend", what might this person say to her to
give her comfort or reassurance about her son and her concern for him?
Should she hold out hope after seven years, or accept that the boy is gone for
good?
Sorting out Margaret's hopes and fears
Working through the poem, try to find all the different things that Margaret
says may have happened to her son - you may find that she repeats some. As
you go, note them down. When you have finished, organize them into a list. In
each case,
• write down her hope or fear, as far as possible in your own words;
• state what are her reasons (if she has any), or note that she has no reason
for what she thinks, and finally,
• say how far you think this idea of hers is likely to be true.
The very language of men
Wordsworth has tried to write poetry that resembles the language of everyday
speech - or "the very language of men". Do you think, in The Affliction of
Margaret, that he succeeds? Pick out lines or phrases or even single words
and punctuation marks that make the poem more or less representative of
how people speak today, or how you think they may have spoken some two
hundred years ago, when the poem was written.
Walt Whitman: Patrolling Barnegat
About the poet
Walt Whitman lived from 1819 to 1892. He was one of ten children and was
born on New York's Long Island. He worked as a printer, teacher and property
speculator. In 1855 he published 13 poems in a collection entitled Leaves of
Grass. Over the years, Whitman published fresh editions of this collection, the
last one in 1892, each time adding many more poems - eventually it would
contain hundreds of poems and some 10,500 lines, making Leaves of Grass
the length of a good sized novel.
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Whitman set out in Leaves of Grass to write about himself, giving his purpose
as:
"a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary or poetic
form and uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual
and aesthetic Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit
and facts of its immediate days, and of current America"
During the American Civil War (1861-1865) Whitman served as a nurse in a
military hospital, where he caught an infection that weakened him. In 1873,
Whitman moved to Camden in New Jersey (inland from Barnegat), where he
stayed until his death. Whitman published other books, but his reputation rests
almost wholly on Leaves of Grass.
About the poem
The date in the AQA Anthology is mistaken - this poem (according to the
Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume 16: Early
National Literature) was first published in The American in 1880 and reprinted
in Harper's Monthly in 1881. By this time, Whitman was settled in New Jersey,
where Barnegat lies on the coast in what is today called Ocean County. The
title is also "corrected" to the standard UK form - Whitman writes "Patroling"
with one "l".
This poem comes from a section of Leaves of Grass called Sea Drift containing poems, inspired by the sea, which explore the mysteries of life and
death. It contains two of the most famous of all Whitman's lyrics - Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking and As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life. Barnegat is
on the Atlantic Coast of south New Jersey (between Atlantic City and Jersey
City). The wild sea that Whitman describes now draws sailing enthusiasts to
Ocean County. Barnegat is on the coast - some way inland lies Camden,
where Whitman lived from 1873 until his death. By a curious coincidence,
since 1996, Barnegat Bay has been protected as one of the USA's estuaries
of national importance - having been nominated for this by a state governor
called Whitman.
The poem in detail
We are not told who is "patroling" but assume that it is the poet, late at night.
The poem is almost a list of details, each line ending with a verb. Mostly these
suggest strong physical action or vivid details. It is not clear whether the "dim,
weird forms" are natural features, ships or people - but there is a clear sense
of nature as massively powerful, threatening man's precarious existence.
Whitman suggests the idea of evil spirits by describing the wind as "shouts of
demoniac laughter" and seeing "waves, air, midnight" as a savage "trinity"
(three-in-one) - an image that appears twice. His readers would compare this
to the Holy Trinity of Father (God), Son (Jesus) and Holy Ghost (Spirit).
He shows the reader how the person "patroling" cannot be sure what is
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happening out at sea - by the final reference to "dim, weird forms" and earlier
in the questions about "that in the distance". Is it "a wreck" and "is the red
signal flaring"?
The poet's method
Nearly all of the poems in Leaves of Grass are written in free verse - that is,
without formal patterns of rhyme or metre. Sometimes this gives us little more
than chopped prose - prose broken into lines. This poem has a more clear
structure - like Old English (Anglo-Saxon) verse, and the later poems of
Gerard Manley Hopkins, the lines fall into two halves, each containing two
stressed syllables.
The other formal feature is more obvious - each line finishes with a verb
ending in "-ing". This is the form called the present participle. This means that
the whole poem, set out as a single sentence, does not at any point have a
main finite verb.
(Silly people might say this makes it "ungrammatical" or that Whitman uses
"bad" grammar. And you would not want to risk writing like this in an exam,
unless you could convince the examiners that you had a good reason for
doing it. The first chapter of Dickens' Great Expectations also contains a
"sentence" with no main verb. These are examples of artistic licence - if
people think you know what you are doing, you can break the rules in some
kinds of writing activity.)
Whitman uses effects of sound - particularly
• alliteration (repeating the same initial consonant), and
• onomatopoeia (using words that sound like what they mean).
He combines both of these effects with repeated use of the sibilant "s" sound which may resemble the sound of the surf breaking and falling back. (You
don't need to know these technical names but you should be able to find
examples of them in use and explain how they work in the poem - you should
do this before writing or speaking about the poems for assessed work or an
exam.)
Among the other technical effects Whitman uses are:
• Anthropomorphism or animism - Whitman writes about natural things as if
they are features of a person or intelligent creature - such as "muttering"
and "laughter". He also writes as if the natural world has attitudes or
feelings, with qualifiers (adjectives and adverbs) like "wild", "fitfully", "fierce",
"watchful", "tireless" and "never remitting". (It is not clear whether the
"struggling" and "watching" at the end of the poem are also being done by
natural things or by real people.)
• Images - all of the images are of things that are really (or "literally") there to
be seen. But they may also represent other things. Can you find any vivid
or memorable images?
• Repetition - Whitman writes many things twice, sometimes a whole phrase
("milk-white combs careering", "slush and sand"), sometimes a single word
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
("midnight"), and sometimes a different form of the same root word
("beachy" and "beach").
Ideas for studying the poem
Performing the poem
This is a very suitable text for dramatic performance. It is easy to learn by
heart or to learn for reading from a script. A pair or small group could share
the lines and provide suitable sound FX - using voices only or musical
instruments. In a teaching group, the listeners could provide storm noises. If
your school is near the sea or a river estuary, it might be possible to do this
outdoors - though probably it would not be sensible to do this at midnight in a
real storm. More sensibly, pupils could make an audiotape, CD or digital
recording for a computer to record the performance, or use presentation
graphics software (such as PowerPoint™) to accompany a performance of the
poem.
Using visual input
• Use a highlighter (on printed text or electronic text) to show things like
stress patterns and important images.
• Prepare a storyboard for a short film to illustrate the poem or for which the
spoken text of poem would provide the soundtrack.
• Make a poster to show the important images and scenes presented in the
poem.
Creative writing
Find out about Barnegat by researching Web sites - there are lots, including
sites for New Jersey State or for Ocean County and its sailing clubs. Using the
information that you find, try to write one or more of the following:
• a travel guide to Barnegat Bay
• the script for a 30-second TV or radio advert for Ocean County as a holiday
destination
• a single-page leaflet giving safety advice to schoolchildren visiting
Barnegat
• your own poem about, or prose description of, "Patrolling" some place you
know well, in extreme or unusual weather conditions.
John Clare: Sonnet - "I love to see the summer..."
About the poet
John Clare (1793-1864) was a farm labourer from Northamptonshire. He had
only the most basic formal education, but taught himself by reading everything
he could find. He spent two years (1812-14) in the Northamptonshire Militia,
and worked as a gardener at Burghley House near Stamford, while writing
poems for his first collection. This appeared in 1820, under the title Poems
Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. To promote sales, the title page gave
the author as "John Clare a Northampton Peasant". Like the great Scots poet,
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
Robert Burns, and unlike almost every other published poet of the time, Clare
really knew from experience what it was like to live and work in the country.
Clare published further collections but these did not sell as well, as the novelty
of the author's background was no longer helpful. In 1823, Clare began to
suffer from mental illness. He spent four fairly happy years at Dr. Allen's
asylum in High Beech, Essex, after which he spent half a year at liberty. In
1841 he was placed in the General Lunatic Asylum in Northampton. He
received kind treatment, and continued his writing. Clare is not regarded as a
great poet, but he knows far more about the natural world than more
celebrated writers. He has a positive view of nature, but does not idealize it,
because he knows the reality of the labourer's toil.
About the poem
The poem is delightfully naïve - John Clare writes "I love..." as any primary
school child might say, and lists the things that he loves to see. The poem is
more or less a list of images - things that a country person would see. You
can still see most of them today - but you need to get out of your car. The
view is very much a close-up look at nature. We may not find this in poetry so
much as we once did - but it has a lot in common with natural history
broadcasts for TV, especially those where hidden cameras can record the
things which the countryman used to have to look for patiently.
Clare describes the scene in a pond or small lake, where reeds grow and
waterfowl nest. Where Gerard Manley Hopkins' Inversnaid shows water in a
violent and energetic form, this poem shows still water, teeming with life. It is
wild, in the sense that all sorts of animals and plants live there, but this means
that it can support human life, too - Clare would see the waterfowl as food, the
rushes as building material and the hay grass as food to support animal
husbandry. Hopkins goes to the country, both in Wales and Scotland, as a
very observant tourist - full of wonder at what he sees. Clare lives in the
country and knows it in the way a gardener or natural historian does - and he
knows where to look to see the things he loves.
The poem in detail
The first line of the poem is very simple and unremarkable - almost a general
introduction, before the details appear. The first of these is the likening of the
cloud to the wool sack - when we read this phrase we may at once think of the
very famous Woolsack on which the Lord Chancellor sits, but Clare is thinking
of the untreated wool that fills the sacks in a wool market - a sight you can still
see in his part of the world. The third line is also rather vague, but then we get
examples. These are the golden marsh marigolds, the white water lilies and
the clumps of reed. Clare notes that they "rustle like a wind shook wood" - this
reminds us that the reeds are large and sturdy plants, growing as high as
some trees. ("Wind shook" may also reveal Clare's lack of education - he uses
the non-standard grammar of "shook", as Elvis Presley does in the rock song
All Shook Up, where we would expect the past participle "shaken". )
Clare may disregard standard verb forms but he does know that moorhens
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
make floating nests out of flag irises (a floating nest gives less opportunity to
predators, like rats or foxes, that might eat the eggs or the chicks). He enjoys
the sight of the willow that overhangs the lake - perhaps the species we call
weeping willow. And, looking at the long grass that will be cut for hay, he
notices the insects that fly around it - imagining that they are happy. This
leads him to think of the insects that "play" in the lake.
The poem shows a childlike sense of innocent pleasure in very simple natural
things. Perhaps in the modern world they are too simple for us - after a few
minutes we find them boring. But we may envy those who can find this simple
delight. If you don't know the country, you may find these explanations helpful
(ignore them if you know this stuff already):
• Mare blobs are flowers. The common name is marsh marigold (caltha
palustris is the Latin botanical name) - and older dialect names are mare
blobs, mare blebs and water blobs. (Mare here is presumably the Latin
word for water as in marine or Weston-super-Mare).
• The drain is not a hole in the ground covered with an iron grating. It is a
large drainage ditch or dyke, which would carry water away from the fields
for most of the year, perhaps drying out in late summer, but suitable for
marsh plants like the marigolds.
• The moorhen's flag nest is a floating nest, built out of the stems of the
yellow flag iris - a plant that commonly grows around the edges of ponds.
• Hay grass is allowed to grow to its full height, before it is cut, dried and
stored to provide food for animals in winter when they cannot graze. (Do
not confuse it with straw, the thicker stems of cereal plants. Straw is not
suitable for food, and is used to provide bedding for animals - and for
people in past times and some societies today.)
The poet's method
John Clare is a technically unsophisticated writer. He is able to use the iambic
pentameter line but in a mechanical and repetitive way - so we find the simple
opening used again and again: "I love to see" (twice), "I like", "I love", "And"
(three times) and "Where" (twice). If you read down the opening words, you
can see how he does this. As set out in the AQA Anthology, the poem
appears as one continuous sentence. Dr. John Goodridge has calculated that
192 of Clare's poems begin with "I", 52 with "I love" and 6 with "I loved".
This is not a conventional sonnet of either the type called Petrarchan (after the
Italian writer Francesco Petrarca, 1304-74) which is divided into groups of
eight and six lines (the octave and sestet) or the Shakespearean sonnet, with
its twelve lines, followed by a concluding couplet. Instead the whole poem is a
series of seven couplets. Many critics would insist that there is more to a
sonnet than simply having fourteen lines.
Clare does not imagine animals and plants, but records them as he sees them.
He uses the common country dialect names - sometimes these are still in use
("water lilies") and sometimes the name has passed out of use ("Mare blobs"
or "flag", on its own, where we now say "flag-iris").
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore
Revising the Key Poems – Heaney & Clarke
There are occasional metaphors, but the images come from Clare's own
experience, as when he compares clouds to sacks of wool. And the one simile
likens the rushes to a wood, shaken by wind - so Clare compares like with like.
Some of the images are anthropomorphic (attributing human qualities or
behaviour to non-human things), so the willow leans and stands, the insects
have happy wings and the beetles play in the lake.
Ideas for studying the poem
Natural history in the poem
Using the information in the poem, write a simple description of the natural
environment, the plants and flowers, which Clare depicts in it. Or write your
own poem about the things you "love to see" in summer in an environment
that you know well. Alternatively, write a sequel to Clare's poem, describing
what you would see in the same place at some other time of year.
Nature is boring
Is this poem suitable for young readers? Or is it the case that a close interest
in nature comes, for most of us, only when we are older? How do you feel
about the things that Clare describes?
Respecting nature
Do we value the natural environment properly or do we not care about it?
Look at the following list of statements and decide which ones you most agree
or disagree with:
• the countryside is boring - I much prefer clubs, discos, burger bars and
cinemas;
• the country is a good place to build more houses, shops and car parks;
• it's OK to leave rubbish after a picnic - other people or nature can clean up
after you;
• the best thing to do with wild birds and animals is shoot them and eat them;
• it makes sense to farm with agro-chemicals - you get rid of weeds and
have a bigger crop;
• I don't need to go looking at wild birds and plants when I can watch them
on wildlife broadcasts on TV.
Richard Williams, Royton & Crompton School, 2006
A Specialist Science College
Adapted from materials available at www.eriding.net/amoore