This class video is a presentation of the poem. The post-its reflect on why it might be difficult to write a poem about people, an idea tackled directly in the final stanza of the poem.
The images, which begin a few seconds in, aim to convey the strongly visual qualities of the poem, one of the senses the poet uses to express the qualities of people. The voice-over is our attempt to capture the richness of its sound. These sensual aspects of the poem disappear in the final stanza, where the halting rhythms, enjambment and absence of physical things give a strong sense of the poet’s difficulties in writing a poem about people. Paradoxically, by this point, of course, she’s done just that.
I wish I could remember that first day - Christina Rossetti
As the sonnet progresses, the speaker’s intensity of feeling increases. She starts by wishing she could remember that first ‘day’, but within the space of a line, it has narrowed to an ‘hour’ and then a ‘moment’; she cannot be content with anything less than the precise instant that this life-changing meeting happened. But the problem is that, at the time, it was insignificant; only in retrospect can she understand how important it was. This sense of something slipping quietly away, unnoticed, is stated quite literally in the octave (‘so unrecorded did it slip away’), but then returned to much more figuratively in the sestet, in the beautiful simile ‘as traceless as a thaw of bygone snow’. She declares quite matter-of-factly that she doesn’t even know whether it was summer or winter when it happened, but then starts to beat herself up about it - she was ‘so blind’ and ‘so dull’ (dull in this context means slow on the uptake).
The speaker uses the metaphor of a flowering tree to convey the slow but strong growth of her love. She regrets that she missed its ‘budding’, and it took ‘many a May’ for it to ‘blossom’ in its full glory. Having blossomed, she wants more than anything to recall the budding, and this prompts some extremely precise, yet rather mind-boggling, to-ing and fro-ing in Time - ‘it seemed to mean so little, meant so much’; ‘blind to see and to foresee’. The emotional result of all this can be summed up by the phrase ‘if only’, which she uses twice in the sestet, and this is where her emotions reach their highest pitch - there are two exclamations. While everything is contained within the rigid rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet, the lines spill over (enjambment) and break in the middle (caesurae) as her feelings tumble out. Although this love seems deep and pure, she does by the end refer not to sight but to ‘touch’ as the sense to define this lost moment - and the repetition of ‘touch’ in the space of three words in the closing lines works like a little electric current, before she ends on the slightly distancing, formal ‘did one but know!’
The opening stanza sets the scene of steam and heat - but this isn’t sexy steam, this is water running-down-windows, can’t-see-across- the-room-for-clouds-of-vapour steam. The word ‘nebulous’ means cloud-like, unclear or hazy, which describes the way the people in the laundrette are only semi-visible; they are blurry in the moist air. In a similar way, outside the scene is a ‘hinterland’ of bedsits, converted out of larger, grand houses, and occupying that indeterminate region between the city and the country. Both people and place are blurred and indefinite, but the speaker gives us the first if a series of colloquial expressions that keep the poem grounded firmly in everyday life and language - these apartments are ‘not a patch on what they were before’, a bold opinion, given in a proverbial, slangy expression, which even references clothing! There are many words in the poem that are colloquial, even dialect, like ‘fankle’ (Scots, twisted up), ‘duds’ (clothes) and ‘rickle’ (great word- broken down, rickety).
If a strong sense of spoken-ness characterises the poem, it also vividly portrays individual people - the newly-wed bride, washing her wedding present sheets for the first time - we feel her anxiety with the question ‘Are the dyes fast?’ - while the ‘deadpan’ mother, hardened with experience, has ‘a weather eye for what will run or fade.’ Perhaps the most striking thing about the poem, though, Is the way it reproduces the sounds and movements of the huge machines themselves. The stop-start effect of the rhymed quatrains, the mid- line breaks (caesurae) and the enjambment all combine to create a restless tossing and turning motion, which is heightened by the onomatopoeic and almost-human sounds of the machines’ ‘sob’. They are not the only inanimate things to be personified here; the darkness outside is said to ‘shove’ a man inside, much as you might shove your laundry in a washing machine, and he is not just a random guy, but compared to a Wandering Jew - an archetype of a lonely figure on the face of the earth. This laundrette starts almost to feel like a microcosm (mini version) of the world and the people in it.
There is a little compressed story going on in this poem - there's been an accident of some sort, the speaker was injured. They've been patched up in hospital, sent home a bit of a mess. But the focus of the poem is not on the accident itself, or even particularly what it's done to the speaker, but rather on a precious and tender moment between the speaker and their sixteen -year-old son. This is the 'gift' of the title, something that is both painful and tender and, for the speaker, so deeply moving that they want to 'give thanks' for it. if it weren't for the accident, they imply, it might never have happened.
I'm going to stop referring to 'the speaker' now, and use 'she' instead because, for me, this is a mother speaking. It could, I know, be a father, but there is something about the role reversal implied in that image of 'like the broad wing/of a mother bird guarding its young' that suggests a mother who has nurtured her child from birth, and now she is the one in need of protection and care. The poet, Chris Banks, is male, by the way - another reminder that we shouldn't assume that poets always write as themselves.
In many ways it's a simple poem: its three stanzas (two stanzas and a single line, to be strictly accurate) deal with, in turn, the gory details of her bloody, swollen lips, her son's kiss on 'the top of my head' and his folding her in his arm; a more general contemplation on the connection between pain and tenderness; and, finally, giving thanks for the 'gift.' So it moves from the personal to the philosophical and back to the personal at the close. All this happens in a very spontaneous-seeming way - there's no obvious rhythm to dictate the flow; it seems to follow the movement of her thoughts. We don't get the feeling she's talking to anyone in particular, but rather to herself - look at the way she refers to 'the accident' so casually, without any details of what actually happened. The poet has her be quite graphic about her lip 'pumped up like a tyre', 'black stitches tracking the wound', 'the red slit signalling/ the broken place.' Exactly halfway through that first stanza - mid-line, new sentence - she shifts from these injuries (which are, we can assume, tender in the sense of painful) to 'my son/my tall, cool son of sixteen' and a very different kind of tenderness, that between mother and son. He expresses his care through the kiss and his arm; she expresses hers through the repetition 'my son' and the admiring 'tall, cool' - that 'cool' perhaps suggesting both that he's pretty darn cool, and that he's not much of a one for these kind of spontaneous displays of affection to his mum, these days.
The second stanza is much more of an appeal to 'anyone who has known tenderness/Thrown like a lifeline into the heart of pain.' This metaphor conveys to us just how much that moment meant, and how pain and tenderness are connected. She feels a little foolish for being grateful for the accident, but her pain was the trigger for her son's tenderness. The poet has her express this through two hypothetical statements: 'And if I am a fool..'; 'and even if, as some would say/ there are no accidents...' which build to the quiet climax of the final line, placed significantly on its own: 'Still, I am grateful for the gift'.
The word 'still' is one of my favourite words in poetry. It almost always has more going on than you'd notice straightaway. Here, you might say, it's almost throwaway - a sort of 'anyway, whatever, I'm glad.' But if 'still' is in the sense of time, then suddenly this accident and this moment zoom backwards into the past, and she is, even now, remembering that moment and thankful for it.
Thoughts about Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee…?”
In this sonnet, Shakespeare compares somebody to a summer’s day, a simile often used in sonnets to show the beauty and loveliness of the person they are writing about. However, Shakespeare is questioning this comparison – he thinks that his subject is too good to be a summer’s day, which are so impermanent and even uncomfortable, since the subject’s beauty is going to be remembered by generations to come through his sonnet. This is a theme which has continued to be relevant to poets, artists and songwriters even until today (in fact Bastille’s Poet is inspired by this sonnet).
He sticks to the traditional sonnet rhyme and rhythm scheme, with alternate lines rhyming and then finishing in a couplet that acts like a ‘conclusion’ to what he’s saying, but this is done almost with irony, since he’s questioning the accuracy of the traditional summer’s day metaphor. The subject of the sonnet is “more lovely and more temperate” than summer, which Shakespeare goes on to say is “too hot”, “too short” and occasionally having “rough winds”. In fact, they are the one exception (according to Shakespeare) to the rule that “Every fair from fair sometime declines, /By chance, or Nature’s changing course, untrimm’d”.
The sonnet is basically in two sections, the first describing all the bad things about summer and the second saying how the subject is different – for example while “summer’s lease hath all too short a date”, “thy eternal summer shall not fade” and in fact in a way the subject will never die, because Shakespeare has immortalised them on paper. Death will never “brag (they) wander’st in his shade, /when in eternal lines to time thou growest”. Death is personified as ‘bragging’ if he should ever manage to capture the subject of the sonnet, which tells us again how beautiful they must be if even Death would want them.
Marriage involves the union of two people - they become 'one flesh', physically and spiritually. This idea is in the Bible: first in Genesis 2.24, and repeated by Jesus in the gospel of Matthew 19.4-6.
In this poem, Elizabeth Jennings takes this Biblical idea of marriage and uses it to reflect on the relationship of a married couple in the later years of their lives. And it's a very particular couple too - her own parents. Or, at least, the parents of the speaker Jennings uses in her poem, because the 'I', or voice, of a poem isn't necessarily the poet - and that makes a difference.
The judgment the speaker of the poem makes is that her parents no longer have a physical relationship, that the passion('fire') they once felt in conceiving her 'has now grown cold.' What does she base this on? Well, it's mainly through watching them, or at least imagining them, in their now 'separate bed[s]', doing their different things - he's keeping the light on, holding a book he's not actually reading; she's looking at the shadows on the ceiling, dreaming of her childhood. They seem apart in their minds, as well as physically. The fact 'they hardly ever touch', makes the speaker compare them to 'flotsam' - the bits and pieces washed up on a beach after a storm - in this case the wildness of their 'former passion.'
How far do we accept this reading of her parents' relationship?
For all its decisiveness, there are notes of uncertainty here. Look at the way she grasps after comparisons to explain what she means- 'it is as if they wait' and 'it is like...'. When she asks the question 'Do they know they're old?' we get the sense she doesn't really understand what it's like to be them at all, that she has failed simply to understand what it is like to be older, or what love is like without sex, and may even be wrong in thinking they they don't. All this arises because she's writing about something intimate from the outside, something basically unknowable, and the fact she's the daughter means that she's in a sense too close, too involved, to make sense of the signs she sees. Even she acknowledges that her parents' touching is 'like a confession/Of having little feeling - or too much,' and that they are 'strangely apart, yet strangely close together.' She simply doesn't know, and can't.
There are a couple of lines in the poem that I want to mention in particular because they sum up for me what the whole piece is about, and they are:
Chastity faces them, a destination
For which their whole lives were a preparation.
Wow. Chastity, a life without sex. Usually we think of this as the time before sexual experience, or a lifestyle choice, perhaps for religious reasons. We're not used to thinking of it as the time after a sex life, but that's what it's used as here. More than that, it's seen as the 'destination' the end of the journey, the thing their whole lives was leading up to. Look at that rhyme - being on 2 syllables (what's called a feminine rhyme: one syllable rhymes are masculine because they're - er- simple) you really notice it. A rhyme like that could so easily be comically clunky (Byron in Don Juan brilliantly rhymed 'intellectual' with 'hen-pecked you all'), but here it is deeply solemn. For me, it is the speaker looking at what her parents' lives have become, and recognising that this is what hers will be too, and fearing it. It is a recognition of mortality - what can that 'new event' they are apparently waiting for be, if not death? If this strikes you as too grim, then take comfort (as the speaker seems to), from the image of time as 'a feather/Touching them gently' - which is why I chose the pic of the beach flotsam with the feather in it, above, in case you were wondering.
You have used the poem toolkit so you have a checklist of things you've noticed about the poem you're going to write about. Now to use those notes to help you write a really good response to the poem in an essay in an exam, or for coursework - or for this blog!
1 - Read over your checklist notes. Some of the categories will have quite a few bits and pieces, others will have very little. If there's one you really have nothing to say about, just cross it out for this poem. No point in saying 'there's nothing much to say about X'.
2 - What's left is the raw material for your answer. Looking at each one in turn, ask yourself what effect each one has in the poem and jot that down eg For FORM, you may decide that the regular and maybe playful rhythm helps to make a happy poem happier. Or, if the poem is about something sad, a similar rhythm will have a much more disconcerting effect. (Think about Pharrell Williams' Happy - a lot of the happy feeling comes from the rhythm rather than the lyrics...).
4 - Use the points from your plan to write your introduction. Think of the introduction as a kind of miniature version of your essay. It should answer the question, but briefly. Try not to get tangled up - and the best way not to is to keep it brief.
5 - Now take each point in turn to write a paragraph of your answer. Start with your first point, and continue it by explaining more about what you mean, and building in quotation. Use your toolkit checklist to build in comment about how the poet expresses these feelings and ideas. Aim to use almost all of your checklist notes over the course of your essay, so cross them out as you go.
6 - You can finish with a brief conclusion that perhaps gives your personal response to the poem or adds in a little extra point - it's a nice moment to be a little bit quirky here. Conclusions should never be boring (eg In conclusion, the poet has lots of different ways of making love striking in this poem. EWW. AVOID). If you can't think of anything to say in your conclusion, just do without one. Make your last sentence sound like an ending instead.
Some poems tell stories; others express feeling or ideas; some do both. Whatever they do, the effect of a poem, particularly a good one, is not only in WHAT it says, but HOW it says it.
When you're asked to write about a poem, you're often asked to 'explore' it. This means that you are giving your reading of the poem, by explaining what is happening in the poem, what you think it's about, and what you notice about the way it puts these things across. It should never be a dull trudge through features of the poem ('this poem rhymes ABAB and there is some alliteration in line 3); think of it as a way of opening up the poem that helps you, and your reader, appreciate some of the things that it's saying, and the special and distinctive things about the way it's saying them.
It helps to have a strategy. Cue - THE POEM TOOLKIT
This is a checklist of things to look at in a poem. It will help get you over that 'OK I've read the poem and I think it's saying this. Er - so what next?' moment that can be all too familiar when it comes to writing about a poem.
This is the list. The order doesn't matter - just look at the poem and think about these aspects one by one. It may help to jot down some brief notes.
MOOD - What would you say is the mood of this poem? (eg happy, sad, romantic........the possibilities are endless)
SPEAKER (or VOICE) - Do you get a sense of someone speaking this poem? Who are they?
TONE - Thinking of this speaker, what tone of voice are they using?
FORM - What do you notice about the way the poem is laid out? Is it arranged in stanzas (verses) or is it continuous? Is it a sonnet? Is it regular, or very free? Think of the form as a vase into which the poem has been poured. What is the vase like?
STRUCTURE - What do you notice about the order of what's said in the poem?
DICTION - What do you notice about the words the poet has chosen? Are they ordinary, plain, everyday (even slang) words, or are they very poetic? Which particular words stand out?
IMAGERY - What do you see in the poem? Are they real things (eg The tree outside the window) or are they comparisons (similes and metaphors) which aren't literally true, but make us visualise what the poet is expressing (eg The trees like torches blazed with light).
SOUND - What do you hear in the poem? Poetry can use all kinds of sound effects - listen to them. Are the sounds of words gentle and soft, or harsh, or hissing? Does it use rhyme and, if so, is it really thumpingly obvious, or much more subtle? Is there a clear rhythm? Do some words sound like what they mean (onomatopoeia) or are there patterns of sound, such as alliteration or repetition? Are the vowel sounds long and slow, or short and quick?
So you can see there are lots of things to explore.
For advice on how to use your toolkit list to write an essay on a poem or poems, read the post on WRITING ABOUT POETRY.
Many poems are about love, but this one is about first love, the kind of feeling that comes out of nowhere and just knocks you completely sideways. The speaker recalls a particular moment from his past, 'that hour', when he was 'struck' with love for a girl. We don't know much about her, except that she must have been pretty - he celebrates the loveliness of her face by saying it 'bloomed like a sweet flower', but she certainly had a huge effect on him. She seems to have changed his life completely in that single moment when he first laid eyes on her so that, even much later - he doesn't tell us how long ago it was, but we sense it's a good long time - he is still completely transformed by it. The poem puts this in a very specific way - he says that his heart 'has left its dwelling-place/ And can return no more.' So, we might speak of losing our heart over something or someone; in this poem, John Clare convinces us that this has happened to him, pretty much literally.
One of the things I really like about this poem is that quite a lot of it uses ideas that could easily be thought of as clichés, but in the poem they do work in surprising, non-cliched ways. Look at the way he plays with the idea of 'love is blind', for example. The speaker of the poem speaks of being blinded by love - it 'took my eyesight clean away,' and he's left in the dark: 'seemed midnight at noonday.' 'Losing your heart' is another idea that is so familiar we don't even notice that it's a metaphor - we don't literally lose them after all, (though I did read a story recently about a woman who left hers on a tube train), but the speaker here really does speak as if his has gone for good, it's out there with her, wherever she is now. And we don't know where that is, and neither does he, and we and he don't know if she ever thinks of him either. Why would she, after all, given that he didn't even speak to her?
If you've lost your heart, then you are pretty much done for physically, and certainly that's what happens to our speaker here. Look at all the phrases which show he couldn't move at all - he's frozen to the spot, his legs don't work, 'my life and all seemed turned to clay.' But in contrast with this lack of movement on the outside, on the inside it's a completely different story. Everything is on the move, everything is rushing around in turmoil - 'blood burned about my heart'. Well, blood is probably moving in other parts as well, but he doesn't mention that because although he's experiencing this first love through physical sensations, it's a very sincere, deep feeling: it's not really about sex.
Time is mentioned quite a bit in the poem- we get the seasons, and the sense of what happened at thus one moment ('that hour') when he was 'struck' by love. Clocks strike the hours, of course, and 'struck' also suggests bring hit: hit by love unexpectedly as she just crosses his path. But there's more, too. Given that this moment seems to have cancelled out everything else in his life, returning him to 'clay', something mouldable and primeval, even perhaps the raw material of the Creation (not thinking about evolution here, more about Genesis), then this moment seems to be the one that starts his life again, in a new way, the completely-and-unalterably-in-love-with-her-way. And in this new life, it seems to be pretty cold: he asks 'is love's bed always snow?' This seems to me a really puzzling bit of the poem, and although I'm tempted just to answer 'Er...no', and move on, I think what he's asking is whether there will ever be an end to his longing and waiting. His winter is never ending.
The poem makes me think of lots of situations of love at first sight - Romeo and Juliet, for one, or Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest, who at first sight have 'changed eyes' - fallen in love by gazing through these little eye-shaped soul windows. But the difference there is that the love is returned, whereas this seems to be unrequited. At the moment it happened, though, he felt convinced that she understood - he spoke to her, but not with his voice, with his eyes: 'words from my eyes did start'. That is pretty surreal stuff, when you think about it, and he's sure she heard it too: 'she seemed to hear my silent voice'. Well, that's an impossibility, but we know what he means: and the fact that he's convinced she understood makes all the lonely time after it perhaps even harder to bear.
There's a long poem by T S Eliot that everyone should read called The Waste Land, and it seems to me to sum up the speaker's situation here pretty much exactly:
— when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing
What things does ‘First Love’ remind you of?
How might the girl have felt? I'd love to read some of your poems that show her perspective.
This is an exam-style question on the poem:
What do you find striking about the way the poet portrays the experience of love at first sight in 'First love'?
