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.
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 island-dweller. 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 fighterbomber) “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”.
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”.
Death of a Naturalist
In this poem 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. 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 or Steve Irwin. 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” 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”, “pulsed like snails” (this works only
for the reader who dislikes snails, but many people do), “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.
Notes on the poem
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”!
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.
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.
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
food - “new potatoes”, and
fuel - “the good turf”.
Again there are
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.
Mid-Term Break
The poem is about the death of Heaney's infant brother
(Christopher) and how people (including himself) reacted to this.
The poem's title suggests a holiday but this “break” does not
happen for pleasant reasons. For most of the poem Heaney writes
of people's unnatural reactions, but at the end he is able to
grieve honestly.
The boredom of waiting appears in the counting of bells but
“knelling” suggests a funeral bell, rather than a bell for lessons.
The modern reader may be struck by the neighbours' driving the
young Seamus home - his parents may not have a car (quite usual
then - Heaney was born in 1939, and is here at boarding school,
so this is the 1950s) or, more likely, were too busy at home, and
relied on their neighbours to help.
The father, apparently always strong at other funerals, is
distraught (very upset) by his child's death, while the mother is
too angry to cry. “Big Jim” (apparently a family friend) makes an
unfortunate pun - he means to speak of a metaphorical “blow”,
of course. The young Seamus is made uneasy by the baby's
happiness on seeing him, by hand shaking and euphemisms
(evasions, like “Sorry for my trouble”), and by whispers about
him. When late at night the child's body is returned Heaney sees
this as “the corpse” (not a person).
This contrasts wonderfully with the final section of the poem,
where he is alone with his brother. Note the personal pronouns
“him”, “his”, “he” - as opposed to “the corpse”. The calm mood
is beautifully shown in the transferred epithet (“Snowdrops/And
candles soothed the bedside” - literally they soothed the young
Heaney). The flowers are a symbol in the poem, but also in
reality for the family (a symbol of new life, after death). The
bruise is seen as not really part of the boy - he is “wearing” it (a
metaphor), as if it could come off. Heaney likens the bruise to
the poppy, a flower linked with death and soothing of pain
(opiates come from poppies). The child appears as if sleeping (a
simile). We contrast the ugly “corpse, stanched and bandaged”,
which becomes a sleeping child with “no gaudy scars” - dead,
but, ironically, not disfigured. The last line of the poem is most
poignant and skilful - the size of the coffin is the measure of the
child's life. We barely notice that Heaney has twice referred to a
“box”, almost a jokey name for a coffin.
Overall, we note the contrast between the embarrassing scenes
earlier and the final section where, alone with his brother,
Heaney can be natural.
The poem has a clear formal structure, in three line stanzas with
a loose iambic metre. There are occasional rhymes but the
poem's last two lines form a rhyming couplet, and emphasise the
brevity of the child's life. Many of the lines run on - they are end
stopped only in the last line of a stanza, and in three cases the
lines run on from one stanza to the next. As in much of Heaney's
poetry, there is no special vocabulary - mostly this is the common
register of spoken English.
Follower
The title of this poem is ambiguous - it shows how the young
Heaney followed his father literally and metaphorically.
The child sees farming as simply imitating his father's actions
(“close one eye, stiffen my arm”), but later learns how skilled
the work is. He recalls his admiration of his father then; but now
his father walks behind (this metaphor runs through the poem).
Effectively their positions are reversed. His father is not literally
behind him, but the poet is troubled by his memory: perhaps he
feels guilt at not carrying on the tradition of farming, or feels he
cannot live up to father's example.
The poem has several developed metaphors, such as the child's
following in his father's footsteps and wanting to be like him. The
father is sturdy while the child falls - his feet are not big enough
for him to be steady on the uneven land.
There are many nautical references:
The father's shoulders are like the billowing sail of a ship.
The “sod” rolls over “without breaking” (like a wave).
The child stumbles “in his wake” and dips and rises on his father's
back.
“Mapping the furrow” is like navigating a ship.
In these images the farmer is not shown as simple but highly
skilled.
Heaney uses specialized terms (a special lexicon or register) from
ploughing - terms such as “wing”, “sock” and “headrig”. There
are many active verbs - “rolled”, “stumbled”, “tripping”,
“falling” and “yapping”. There are lots of monosyllables and
colloquial vocabulary, frequently as the rhyme word at the end
of line. Some of these terms sound like their meaning
(onomatopoeia), like “clicking”, “pluck” and “yapping”.
The metre of the poems is more or less iambic (in tetrameters four poetic feet/eight syllables to each line) and rhymed in
quatrains (stanzas of four lines). We see a phrase without a verb
written as sentence: “An expert”. The poet uses contrast - apart
from the general contrast of past and present we note how: the
father's control is effortless (“clicking tongue” or “single
pluck/Of reins”) while the powerful horses (“sweating team”)
strain, and how the young Seamus “wanted to grow up and
plough.” but all he “ever did was follow”.
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 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.
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:
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?
Are they digging up their past, a folk memory or a grievance that
will never be put right?
Notes on the poem
“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.
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.
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 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.
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?
Babysitting
Here Gillian Clarke contrasts the natural and instinctive love of a
mother for her own child with the anxiety she feels for another's
child, whom she does not know. Rather ironically this absence of
emotion causes her to express an intelligent sympathy for the
other child. Because the baby is too young to understand such
things, being faced with a strange babysitter may seem worse,
the poem suggests, than the more serious losses that adult
women may suffer.
The opening of the poem gives a simple statement of the
situation - except that the reader at first wonders how a baby
can be "wrong" - not really a fault in this baby, merely its not
being the babysitter's own - which is the "right" baby, by
implication. The child is depicted very much as the ideal pretty
infant - "roseate" and "bubbling" in her sleep, and "fair". But this
is contradicted by the cold understatement of "a perfectly
acceptable child". Worse, the babysitter is afraid of the child - of
her waking and hating her, and of the angry crying that will
follow. She thinks of how the baby's running nose will disgust her.
The statement about the "perfume" of breath is really a comment
on her own children, whose breath does "enchant" the mother in
an instinctive way. Ms. Clarke explains:
"In her cot at home is the baby-sitter's baby. In the cot in this
strange house is someone else's baby. The baby and the babysitter have never met. They are strangers. The baby-sitter is
nervous, looks at the baby, sees a lovely child, but fears the child
will wake. There'll be no chemistry or familiarity between them
if the baby wakes."
The second stanza dwells on the idea of abandonment. Of
course, the child is not abandoned, and we can suppose that her
mother trusts the poet as a responsible carer. But Ms. Clarke
suggests that this "abandonment" is worse than that of the lover
"cold in lonely/sheets" or the woman leaving a beloved partner,
dead or dying, in the "terminal ward". It will be worse for the
baby, because she has not yet learned how to cope - and there is
a hint that, in time, she will perhaps face these same kinds of
suffering, too. The child will expect "milk-familiar comforting".
She will find that, between her and the carer, "it will not come.
This ending is ambiguous - it suggests literally milk that will not
come to the breast, but is a metaphor for the comfort this
brings, which also cannot come from her to the child.
The poem moves from the immediate situation to a more general
look at life - seeing the parents' absence as anticipating other
hardships that the future will bring.
The poem has short lines - there is no set metrical form, but
most lines have four stresses, and many naturally fall into two
halves. There are few metaphors but some interesting effects,
like the transferred epithets of "snuffly/Roseate, bubbling sleep"
(the adjectives should really describe the child, not sleep). The
poem also appeals to the reader's senses of hearing (shouting and
sobbing) and of smell ("perfume" of breath).
While the poem comes from a specific event, the child is not
named and could be anyone - she is identified throughout by the
pronouns and possessives "she" and "her". The poem explores the
difference between a thoughtful concern for others and feeling
this in some powerful and instinctive way.
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 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.
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.
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
hay-cutting 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?"
On the Train
This poem appears for the first time in print in the Anthology,
though it was not written directly for it. Several things are
happening here. On the surface, we have the poet's thoughts of
another person ("you") as she sits on a train, far from home.
Behind this we glimpse another story, of a disaster, a news report
to which the poet is listening on a radio. There is no specific
reference in the poem to the particular event which the poet
recalls, but she has said (on her Web site) that it was the
Paddington Rail crash, which happened in October of 1999. At
the time she was travelling home from Manchester to Wales, not
(as she would often do) from Paddington - she wants to share
with the "you" the feeling one has on hearing bad news in the
media (the poem may be autobiographical, and the second
person pronoun appears to refer to her husband - but because
this is not specified it has a wider relevance to the reader). She
imagines that this person will wake alone and think of her,
perhaps with alarm at the news of the rail crash - but it is "too
soon to phone".
Commenting on the poem's being more than merely topical, the
poet adds:
"I've thought about adding Paddington, but there's Hatfield, and
so on, and all that matters is that it's a train crash. It is my 11th
of September poem - disasters which unite us emotionally
because of the difference the media has made to our
consciousness of what's happening in the world."
The poet imagines the activity of a new day: radios playing,
children being dropped off "at school gates", doors closing "as
locks click", footprints on the frost (the first steps on it since it
has formed), and trains "in the dawn" taking people "dreaming" to
work - perhaps unaware that they are heading towards the
blazing coach. The poet makes a call but the (mobile) phone she
is ringing is turned off. She is advised to call later. She imagines
how, later, other people will make calls to phones that will ring
but not be answered - suggesting the disaster that has struck
their owners. She phones again and again there is no answer. The
poem ends with a plea "pick up the phone" and an admission that
today the poet is "tolerant of mobiles". She knows it is a cliché,
but today it is the best thing to say, as it will bring reassurance:
"Darling, I'm on the train."
The poem is in six-line stanzas. The lines vary in length but are in
the iambic metre - we have lines of five (pentameter), four or
three feet (like the final line). The poet drops the metre at one
point, as she quotes the message from the mobile phone
company.
The account of the disaster is suggested by a series of images:
the "black box",
the "blazing boneship",
"rubble" and
"wolves".
Here the "black box" refers literally to the Walkman but hints
indirectly at the device that records the activity of an airliner,
and which investigators use, after a crash, to discover what
happened. A rail crash may literally destroy houses but always
breaks up homes in a metaphorical sense, so that the kitchen
(often the heart of the modern home) is like "rubble". The
howling of wolves may be a metaphor for some other noise, or
hyperbole (an overstatement) - suggesting a breakdown in normal
civilized life. Readers may not at first realize that the Walkman
in the poem is a radio (often on a train we notice that someone
has a Walkman playing CDs, mini-discs or cassettes), but this
appears later, as it "speaks in the suburbs", and we understand
that the poet is listening to the news. Gillian Clarke writes on her
Web site that she was listening to BBC Radio 4's Today
programme.
The central image in the poem, potentially the most puzzling,
but the one that reveals the poet's own imagining of the disaster,
is "the blazing boneship" - the burning rail coach in which an
unknown number of passengers died. Gillian Clarke says that she
was thinking of the funeral ships which the Celts once would push
out to sea, bearing the bodies of their heroes. Her wish was, she
says, to suggest something "noble, heroic, tragic" because the
real people grieving deserved "the dignity of the noblest image"
she could conjure.
Of the mobile phone she notes that it is
"the modern messenger of love and tragedy as well as chat"
At the time of the events in the poem, she adds, the cliché, "I'm
on the train", became "the most important message in the world".
This could of course be not only the poet's message but that of
other passengers - and there will be other unanswered phones in
the rubble.
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.
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").
PRE 1914 POETRY
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 chief suspect.) 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. Here we can be sure that Jonson is
speaking for and as himself.
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) 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 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.
William Butler Yeats: ‘The Song of the Old
Mother’
About the Poet
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist, as well
as being very active in politics and culture, and a student of
magic and mythology. He founded Dublin's Abbey Theatre and
became a senator of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928. In
1923, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. His poetry
explores Irish mythology and history, classical civilization and
modern culture and politics from both public and personal
viewpoints.
About the Poem
The Song of the Old Mother comes from The Wind among the
Reeds, published in 1899. The date of its composition is
unknown, but those in the collection for which we have dates all
come from the period 1892-95. It is among the very simplest of
all Yeats' poems, and quite easy to understand. Yeats himself (in
Autobiographies) describes it as "an old woman complaining of
the idleness of the young".
The poem is a simple monologue in rhyme - an old woman
describes her daily routine and contrasts it with the easy time
that young people have. She gets up at dawn to light the fire,
wash, prepare food and sweep up. Meanwhile the young people
sleep on and pass their day "in idleness". More than a century
later, few old people in the west will live quite such hard lives but the poem is still an accurate portrait of the lives of poor old
people in much of the world.
The poem starts with the old mother's telling how she starts her
day at dawn - her first job is to light the fire (necessary, even in
summer, for the rest of her jobs). She kneels down and blows to
get it started - in 19th century Ireland this would probably be a
slow-burning peat fire. The next three jobs are scrubbing (using
water heated over the fire, perhaps), baking (making the staple
food, bread) and then sweeping up. (Can you see why the four
tasks should be in this order?) By the time the work is done, the
stars are coming out again - "beginning to blink and peep".
The young people meanwhile are able to "lie long", dreaming of
"matching" ribbons on their clothes and in their hair. Not only are
they lazy, but they get upset if the wind disturbs their hair
slightly. The poem ends with the image of the fire's going cold.
This may be a metaphor for the loss of energy that comes with
old age. It is certainly a reminder of how the next day will start and every other day.
Like many of the poems in this collection, The Song of the Old
Mother is in rhyming pairs of lines. The metre here is of the kind
called anapaestic (two unstressed syllables, followed by a
stressed one). Yeats does not end every line with a full anapaest,
but sometimes uses an iambic foot - this give one less unstressed
syllable but the last syllable is still stressed.
The Old Mother uses a simple and familiar vocabulary, naming
common household chores. This is not a specific and named or
unique individual. Rather she may represent, in some way, all old
women in all times and places.
The last but one (penultimate) line contains what is almost a
proverb - at the least it is presented as a general or universal
truth:
"I must work because I am old"
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 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.
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.
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". The modern reader may
find that the style is still quite literary - Wordsworth does not use
dialect words or abbreviations. 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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"?
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
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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.
Among the other technical effects Whitman uses are:
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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 ("midnight"), and
sometimes a different form of the same root word
("beachy" and "beach").
Alfred Tennyson: ‘The Eagle’
About the Poem
The Eagle was published in 1851. Tennyson subtitles it as a
Fragment - at a mere six lines, it is certainly a very short poem.
In it the poet depicts the eagle in extreme terms as a powerful
force of nature. Modern readers, used to air travel or to seeing
images and films recorded at altitude, may find the viewpoint
almost familiar - but Tennyson, who lived before the age of the
aeroplane, imagines this vividly, without ever having seen it. He
must surely, however, have visited some area with very high
mountains, in order to know things like the way the sea appears
to move slowly when seen from a great height.
The poem tells us of a series of things the eagle does. We see
him clinging to the mountain crag, high up near the sun and
surrounded by the blue sky. He looks down on the sea, moving
slowly below him, still watches, then - which is perhaps the point
of the poem - falls like lightning on his unspecified prey.
The poem, though short, is on a grand scale in its vocabulary - in
six lines, Tennyson mentions the sun, the azure world
(presumably the eagle's blue domain of the sky), the sea, a crag
and a mountain - finally likening the eagle to the lightning (the
thunderbolt - the bolt, that is, that comes with the thunder).
The bird of prey is presented anthropomorphically (in human
terms) - never "it" or "the eagle" (outside the title) but always
"he", and the talons are "crooked hands", rather than claws.
The poem is made up of a series of verbs or verb phrases that
depict the eagle's action - "he clasps the crag...he stands...he
watches...he falls".
The poem is written in iambic metre but with four feet in each
line (tetrameter) - and there are only two rhymes, one for all
three line-endings in each of the two stanzas. In a longer poem,
this might be irritating, but in such a short piece it is not too
obvious to the reader.
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, 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. 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. 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 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 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):
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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
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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.)
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").
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.