Close analysis of the poems, focusing on techniques
Work in progress - thanks for all your contributions. My comments are in italics at the end of each poem paragraph.
The poem begins by talking about how the night is taking he place of day, but there is more to it than meets the eye. The first line of the poem is “dusk unwinds its spool”, at first glance the meaning of this is simple – dusk is taking over the sky as it becomes night time, it is being personified. However, if you read more into it, you can so much more out of it. A spool is related to knitting, and when you knit you may use yarn and it is sometimes said that if you are spinning a yarn, you are telling a story so perhaps dusk is telling a story. Later in the stanza is says that dusk is a “subliminal messenger”, which only adds to the theory that dusk is trying to tell us something. Maybe it’s telling us to go to sleep or maybe it’s telling the bats to wake up. It also says “night-glance”, indicating that dusk is a night-glance, which in some ways is true as it is a window to night time.
The 'subliminal messenger' perhaps also suggests the feeling of foreboding created by the bat – as though it's a reminder of the unknowability of the future, and of mortality. The phrase for this is memento mori.
Polishing brass in this poem is actually a metaphor for their friendship and how it has had its ups and downs. It’s not unobvious that the poem may have a deeper meaning about friendship, Clarke does reference it on a few occasions; “it was as if we burnished our friendship”. One of the most interesting things Clarke writes is “Patterns of incredible honesty/Delicately grew, revealed”. I read this as them rubbing away the false exterior of their relationship and getting down to the raw, honest part of it so they can see what they really are and if there is any friendship left. Later on in the poem Clarke also says, “feeling its illusory heat” again indicating that perhaps their relationship is not what it seems, or that it seems to be something that it’s not. It could even be feeling something that isn’t there, like they’re working towards something but there’s nothing to work towards. Another indication that their friendship is failing is the use of pronouns. At the beginning Clarke uses pronouns such as “our” and “we” but at the end of the poem she uses pronouns like “my” and “I”, which could suggest that she knows their relationship may be over.
Yes. Maybe the metaphor of 'burnished' the friendship suggests its being 'polished up' and refined in some way?
In Journey, Clarke uses first person to describe her experience of going on a journey at night, making the poem more personal to her, and giving readers a vivid insight into a moment in her life. For example, in the line “As far as I am concerned/We are driving into oblivion.” The reader is immediately pulled into the ambiguity and mystery this poem holds, and the reader gets a sense of how black the night is, given that Clarke describes it as “oblivion”. The reader is also given the view from the passenger’s seat of this journey, and is provided with this almost scary image of driving into nothingness, not sure if you’ll drive onto road or into some sort of abyss.
The fact it’s in present tense also adds to the sense of immediacy, I think. The first line seems almost casual and indirect and then the second is almost melodramatic - it’s more than a car journey and maybe suggests the ultimate destination of death itself? Cheerful..
Clarke uses many short lines and enjambment in Still Life to create a sense of ambiguity between said lines. For example, after reading the line, “It was as if we’d burnished”, the reader is lead to believe Clarke is going to describe the polished brass, however the next line is “Our friendship, polished it”, drawing a connection between the brass itself and the relationship between the poet-persona and the person they were polishing brass with. Another example of this is the line “Tarnish of deceit”, which is very negative and leads the reader to expect something bad for the next line. However, the reader is pleasantly surprised as the next line is “Were stroked away”, giving hope for the relationship in the poem.
Yes, the polishing of the brass becomes a kind of extended metaphor for their friendship.
My Box has a very clear rhythm that runs throughout the poem. In some ways, this makes it sound quite juvenile, especially in the first stanza where some of the lines also rhyme. The first stanza also has more of a classic, less personal feel and sounds quite familiar, and could describe many relationships if the descriptions were to be accepted as metaphors. However, in the second stanza, many more details are added, such as
‘seen jays and goldcrests, rare red kites,
found the wild heartsease, drilled a well,’ etc.
It feels almost like the first stanza was a basic outline, but the second stanza was the writer colouring it in, filling it with her personal experiences. In the first stanza, it still describes the actions of both the writer and her lover, but separately. This contrasts to how in the second stanza, she first uses the ‘we’ pronoun and talks of the actions they completed together. I found that the combination of them working as a joint unit being introduced at the same time as the poem becoming more detailed and personal gave the effect of his presence somewhat enriching her life, making her who she is now and filling her once blank days with memories.
Your response is lovely and personal, I think.You could mention the listing she uses as the conventional things suddenly turn into ones that are more rich and personal.
In the poem ‘Clocks,’ the great love between the writer and her son and how content they are in each others presence is striking. The mother doesn’t dismiss her sons ‘ffwff’ noises as nonsense exclamations, but spells them out and says that they’re ‘the name he gives to all flowers’. For her, her son is not idiotic nor mistaken, but simply giving his alternative name for them. In the poem, she does not correct him, and instead says that he ‘learns the power of naming.’ She teaches him to tell the time by dandelion yet she doesn’t correct him on how to say flowers. He doesn’t seem to care that his version of the name is different, and neither does she; both are happy just the way it is. Once taught about telling the time by blowing dandelions, ‘he blows [her] a field of gold from the palm of his hand.’ She does not mention whether this revealed the correct time, it’s very unlikely that it did, yet again this was irrelevant to her. He gave her as much as he could and although it was only dandelion seeds, she describes them as gold....
....and that metaphor conveys its value to her as well as evoking the colour of the flowers, perhaps?
Clarke challenges the normal activity of babysitting in this poem giving it another perspective which makes a reader feel uneasy. It starts off early in the poem with the short sentence of ‘I don’t love/ this baby.’ This is a surprising statement as love for babies is seen as a fairly natural emotion and quite integral for the baby’s emotional state but also love is seen as the key reason why parent’s look after children. This surprise is added to by the enjambment when a reader is surprised by the subject of the babysitter’s lack of affection being a baby. However, the fact that a babysitter does not love the baby is not actually that surprising as they share no familial connection and the looking after of the child is driven by monetary incentive. The perception of this is also challenged by how the baby when waking to find the babysitter will see them as ‘absolute/ abandonment’. This is a very severe emotional state for a child which Clarke has not attempted tone down and enjambment again is used to surprise us with the emotion of the baby. The alliteration of the phrase also emphasises the way the emotion is very important and this vein of importance is shown throughout the poem when parallels are drawn with other horrific and defining life experiences. The final line of the poem ‘It will not come. It will not come’ is a deceptively simple phrase repeated for emphasis. It seems to refer to milk which the speaker cannot provide as she is not the mother, but also could be the lack of the babysitter’s ability to nurture the baby as she has little emotional connection to it. This gives an uneasy image of a babysitter who is incapable of providing what a baby needs when it is in this terrible emotional state. It also reminds a reader of the quite paradoxical fact a babysitter is usually a child themselves so cannot provide what it is the child needs.
Yes, I agree. Also that line break between absolute and abandonment is like falling off a cliff - it seems to echo the baby’s devastating shock of loss.
This poem is made very emotive to a reader with the description throughout of a changing relationship which the speaker has. It is said ‘he made it out of winter nights/ sanded and oiled and planed’ which gives an impression of time they spent together with the metaphor of winter nights, implying the box is partially created out of memories and so is important - particularly as this is later emphasised by the contrast with very physical motions. This is also portrayed against later how ‘we have sanded, oiled and planed’ implying that manual tasks they used to perform separately they later do together, with the change of ‘he’ to ‘we’ suggesting an increased closeness in the relationship. It later lists other activities they do together ‘seen jays and goldcrests, rare red kites/found the wild heartsease, drilled a well,’ amongst others. It shows there is an enormous amount that they do together and so how linked their lives are. In particular how they have ‘found the wild heartsease’ which, although it sounds like a natural thing, could also refer to the love and ease they feel together. The list-like sound of this stanza means it loses the almost nursery rhyme-like sound of the first stanza and, with this loss of childlike sound, suggests a loss of triviality in what she is now saying. So this expresses the increasing importance of this relationship and what they do together is to her. This idea is also shown by what used to be in the beginning of the first stanza, clear rhyming at the end of lines with ‘me’ and ‘key’ is now more of half-rhyming with ‘wall’ and ‘well’. Finally there is this repeated image of ‘a golden tree’ which shows that it is obviously important in their relationship as it is repeated and at the end of each stanza. It could refer metaphorically to how natural it is, but also to family trees and how their relationship and love has extended outside of them, possibly even to other generations.
The point about heartsease as both plant and the result of mutual love is a lovely one, I think. The poem seems to express a quiet yet deep happiness - the rhythm is regular, with iambic tetrameter lines alternating with iambic trimeter (4 beats and then 3 beats) and this contributes to the sense of harmony. The rhyme, which seems insistent at the start, all but disappears in the fifth line of the first stanza, only to return in less obvious ways, through half-rhyme and an almost cyclical return to ‘tree’ as the final word of each stanza.
The beginning of the poem is a description of an ancient skull and how it was discovered, and compares the delicacy of the object with the violence and darkness of the death and violating sense of the discovery. The poem starts with the word ‘and’, which gives the sense that the writer is coming in part way through a lecture or zoning back into a tour. We get a basic description of the skull in the first two lines, and then although the next sentence starts in the same way, through the first line it becomes more poetic as a metaphor develops. The use of strong contrasts in this line compares the purity and delicacy of the woman with violent imagery of death, society during her time, and then finally her discovery, such as in the line ‘a white, fine skull, full up with darkness’. Long lines allow these contrasts to be shown directly next to each other, making them stronger. The descriptions of happenings in this first stanza sound violating and intrusive for this woman — for example, the size of the skull is shown to be small as it is said to ‘fit the palm of a man’s hand’, which sounds overpowering and intrusive for her. It is said that ‘some plague or violence/destroyed her’, with the line break emphasising the destruction rather than just death, making it more violent and unpleasant. Finally, after her death it seems that she is safe in ‘a shroud of silence, undisturbed’, until her discovery by a farmer one summer, which is described as he ‘broke open the grave and let a crowd of light stare in at her’, which again is violent and intrusive. The juxtaposition of the violent imagery with stillness, calm and peace exaggerates each of these.
Yes. Is there a sense too of her vulnerability to male violence? Could it be a poem about patriarchy?
The first stanza of this poem describes a car journey in the dark but has a sense of dreaminess and contemplation about the future through metaphors and ambiguity. The first line, ‘as far as I am concerned’, gives a sense of uncertainty on the part of the speaker, suggesting that much of the poem are his or her own thoughts and creating ambiguity. We find out what the speaker is thinking about in the next line — ‘we are driving into oblivion’. This is intended in the sense that they are in the car and it is so dark that the speaker has no idea what is coming next as they drive through the darkness, but also has a more general idea of moving forward into the unknown. Driving refers to the action of driving the car but also a driving force, which relates to the idea which comes later on in the stanza of a miner digging a tunnel in darkness all around. This also could be read as an analogy of not perhaps digging for coal but for a future — there is ambiguity in this metaphor as there is a line break (‘you are a miner digging/for a future’) so it appears at first to be as would be expected — the miner digging for coal or something else — but then the idea is introduced that they are digging for a future — i.e. money to survive and so on. The next phrase is ‘a mineral/relationship in the dark’, so again at first we think that the miner is digging for minerals but ‘mineral’ then turns out to be an adjective rather than a noun, describing the relationships (to do with the future, perhaps). The choice of the word ‘mineral’ adds another layer of ambiguity, in that the word mineral contains the word miner, so perhaps it doesn't mean mineral in the sense of the substance obtained through mining but actually as something related to miners. The sense of surrealism develops when the speaker says ‘I can hear the darkness drip from the other world’. This is an unexpected line because you can't hear darkness, and as darkness is an absence of light, it isn't actually a physical substance which can drip. This description makes the darkness seem thicker, like a treacly substance filling up the surroundings.
The final stanza shows the exposed nature of the skeleton as the speaker wonders what the woman looked like when she was alive, a question which reveals parallels between the dead skeleton and living observer. Clarke refers to the skeleton as, ‘she,’ throughout the poem which makes it easier for the reader to recognise it as a human that once had feelings and therefore empathise with the dead woman. The use of harsh contrasts of colour show the vulnerability of the skeleton as it is described as, ‘stripped white,’ which evokes purity and innocence. This contrasts with, ‘black sky,’ which represents physical darkness and is a metaphor for the immorality of the museum-goers who constantly disregard the woman’s privacy in death. Clarke uses, ‘a tree in winter,’ as a metaphor for the skeleton as the frail white bones resemble empty tree trunks. The poet uses the alliterative phrase, ‘brow, bough,’ as the ‘b’ sounds further reinforce the similarities between the bare tree and exposed skeleton. When the speaker thinks about what the woman would have looked like she pictures the bones at, ‘some other season,’ and likens when trees have leaves to the outer part of a human. In the same way Clarke shows how, without the rest of her body, the woman seems sterile and a, ‘leafless formality.’ At the end of the stanza the speaker recognises that when she dies she may end up as impersonal as the skeleton. Both the speaker and dead body, ‘stare,’ a word which embodies their simultaneous states of life and death. Only something alive can stare, so the skeleton’s personification is unsettling as the reader realises that despite being referred to as, ‘we,’ only one of the two people is living. The word is very blank and unwavering, however, and depicts the way in which the skeleton cannot stop ‘looking’ at the speaker as it is not alive. This mirroring continues when each person is reflected in, ‘the black pools,’ and embodies the discomfort we feel acknowledging that while the skeleton was once alive like the speaker, the speaker will one day die and become the skeleton.
Yes. Fascinating to put your reflections here with the other comments on ‘Lunchtime lecture’ elsewhere in this post.
In the first stanza of My Box Gillian Clarke uses a regular rhythm and rhyme to make the poem resemble a nursey rhyme and emphasise the box’s fantastical elements as well as its importance to its owner. The first four lines have an ABCB rhyme scheme and this makes it sound simple and childish. As the box is described almost out of a fairytale using this rhyme scheme demonstrates the sense of wonder and magic the speaker feels to the reader. Most of the box and its contents are made of precious materials to show its worth. For example, ‘golden oak’ is solid and durable which shows that the box was made to last, but is more special than regular oak as the addition of gold demonstrated value. The box is also described as being made, ‘out of winter nights,’ which could show that the man spent a lot of time crafting it, but also suggests that the box itself is made of, ‘night,’ which is a non-tangible and therefore incredibly rare material. The effort of the speaker’s lover is also demonstrated in the repetition of the three verbs, ‘sanded and oiled and planed,’ as the multiple heavy ‘d’ sounds mirror the hard work. Furthermore, it shows the reader how much the man must love the speaker to put so much effort into crafting both their relationship and the box.
Lovely. The value implied by ‘golden oak’ with its associations of colour and durability is v important, I think.
Although we do encounter familiar imagery often associated with babies and very young children, this poem is more notable for its use of harsh language such as ‘hate’ and ‘wrong’. This is strange as it is unusual to associate babies with anything other than innocence and purity. This choice of language emphasises the distant relationship between the adult and child. The speaker’s disregard for the baby is accentuated as she is there for the ‘wrong baby’ and ‘[she does not] love/This baby’. These phrases amplify the fact that the speaker is a stranger to the child. The atmosphere at the beginning is also quite cold, indicated through the description of the room being ‘strange’. This is interesting as babies are often associated with warmth and happy environments. These words directly contrast against the softer sounding words and phrases in the lines ‘she is sleeping a snuffly/Roseate, bubbling sleep’. The soft sibilance of the ‘s’ sound in the phrase ‘she is sleeping a snuffly’ is suggestive of the tranquillity of the baby sleeping and expresses the breathing sounds of the baby.
Yes. There’s something very tender about that last quotation, despite the lack of feeling the speaker claims. The word’ roseate’ is a striking twist on the cliché of rosy-cheeked babies.
In the final stanza we get a greater understanding of Clarke's close relationship with her partner. Clarke mentions that she leaves the box ‘On an open shelf’. This openness contrasts with the key and lock of the first stanza. It is as if Clarke is sharing and exposing herself, in some ways making her vulnerable. This shows that there are no secrets in their relationship and that everything is there for ‘you’ (ie. the lover) to read. But these intimate books have also been left for ‘them’ to read. We are not sure who the ‘them’ refers to, but it could be their children or future generations. Their unity is accentuated through Clarke’s use of the pronouns. During the poem, there is a shift from singular pronouns such as ‘my lover’s gift to me. /he fitted hinges and a lock’ to plural phrases such as ‘how we have sanded, oiled and planed.’ This shift seems to represent the development of their intimate relationship from two individual people (‘me’ and ‘he’) to a sense of unity. For example, the phrase ‘when we are dead’ suggests that they are so connected that they will live and die together.
So often the case in poetry that little words such as pronouns can be so significant, as here.
“Still Life” is a simple poem about friendship, and Clarke conveys a sense of the relationship possibly faltering over the mundane task of polishing brass through her use of imagery. The “illusory heat” the speaker feels as they polish an Indian goblet could be seen as ambiguous, either reflecting the illusion of heat due to brass’s conductive nature as a metal, or reflecting the illusory heat of the relationship between the two people, perhaps as the speaker realises their intimacy is illusory in itself, or that they have grown apart. The “braille formality of pattern” also seems quite cold and distant, as the word “formality” evokes a distant sense, (unlike words like colloquialism or informality, which evoke more of a sense of intimacy or closeness) and the use of the word “braille” also seems to strengthen this atmosphere, since braille is read by blind people, who can use their sense of touch but not vision, which could be alluding to the possibility that the speaker could not see this decay of their relationship, but only feel it now. This decay could also be represented by the object “[cooling] beneath [the speaker’s] fingers,” as they polish it, since intimate relationships are usually described with words conveying warmth, not cold. The speaker reads in this pattern that “essentially each/ object remains cold,/ separate, only reflecting/ the other’s warmth.” If one interprets the objects in question as the people themselves, this could suggest that, under the seemingly harmonious façade of a still life painting (as the title suggests), or of a friendship, where all the elements of the relationship between the subjects seem to complement each other, they are actually in disarray, and are not actually together, but separate and distant, merely reflecting the warmth of the other, without actually emanating any warmth themselves, seemingly conveying a sense that their relationship has gone stale, and that it is now merely pretense, no longer carrying the meaning it may have had previously.
The title ‘still life’ is perhaps also ambiguous, with the sense of ‘yet living’ underlying the familiar sense of a kind of art.
One can take a strong feminist reading of the first stanza of “Lunchtime Lecture” as Clarke alludes to the violence and injustices women have been facing for centuries at the hands of men, via her precise choice of language. The poem begins with the word “and,” beginning mid-sentence, hinting to the reader that the speaker’s attention has been captured suddenly, during the lecture the title suggests, alerting our attention in the process, and creating a kind of apprehension throughout the poem. The precise, almost medical vocabulary used, such as “female,” “white, fine skull” and “cranium” creates a sense of distance between the woman discovered years ago, from the “second or third millenium B.C.,” and the speaker listening to the lecture thousands of years later, and seems to objectify this woman as merely a skull and not someone once human. The long time-scales mentioned could also be read as representing the the long periods of time over which women have been suffering under structural sexism and injustices. Furthermore, the use of the words “small” and “perfect” also seem to put the woman into conventionally feminine descriptive categories of being smaller and perhaps weaker than men, as well as under the pressure of having to be stereotypically “perfect.” The fact that the “cranium would fit the palm/ of a man’s hand” also conveys this sense of the woman (and her skull) being fragile and delicate, suggesting a sense of subservience to men. The “plague or violence” that destroyed her could be possibly interpreted as rape, since the word “violence” carries the archaic meaning of rape, and this is further strengthened by the word “whiteness,” suggesting that the woman whose cranium is being examined so clinically and calculatingly in a museum millenniums later could have been raped, losing her “whiteness” in the process, “whiteness” as a colour often having associations with purity or virginity. Clarke creates juxtaposition between the violence of the rape or violence and the stillness of the four thousand years that followed, as the woman lay underground, “undisturbed,” waiting to be excavated. The reader once again gets the sense that the woman is helpless and being violated as the tractor “[bites] its way through the longcairn” and “[breaks]” open the grave, both the words “biting” and “breaking” carrying connotations of violence, as the “crowd of light” invades the ground where she lies and “stares” at her. The words “shroud” and “grave” suggest the woman was perhaps killed, since both words are often associated with death, and this juxtaposition between violence and stillness serves to highlight this abuse and violence through contrast with the silence of the years that followed, possibly representing the lack of protest or action to help the woman, a reading which still pervades into our modern times, as women continue to be less equal than men, as represented by the cold, distant and clinical language used by the museum guide, and the conventionally feminine adjectives used to describe her skull, both creating distance between the reader and the “female,” as well as a sense of injustice as nothing is done to help her. As the skull “stares quietly back,” we realise she is helpless.
I like the way you adopt a feminist stance here and sustain it so vigorously without losing sight of the poem.
In the last stanza, Clarke uses the imagery of a tree to describe the dead woman in the museum, saying that she looked different when she was alive, like a tree looks different in various seasons. First, Clarke writes ‘she’s a tree in winter’. This means the tree has no leaves, as it has lost them all, so it has only bare branches. Therefore, the body is compared to this image because only her bones – the bare structure – remain. The harsh white colour of her bones is emphasised by the contrast in the phrase ‘stripped white on a black sky’, showing that all the other parts of her body have been removed, leaving only the pure, white core. In the next line, the use is sound is effective as a tool to compare the tree in winter to the dead woman. The first part of the line is ‘Leafless formality’, and the last part is ‘in fine relief’. The similarity in sound between ‘leaf’ (in ‘leafless’) and ‘relief’ reminds us of re-leaf, so it is as though leaves are being put back into the tree, or life is being put back into the woman – at least, in the speaker’s imagination. This leads to the speaker describing how the tree and woman would look if they were alive. Clarke uses words typically associated with trees to describe the woman, and vice versa. For example, she says that the tree is ‘fleshed’, which we would normally think of as something to do with the human body, so this makes the tree seem alive. She also says that the woman’s blood is ‘rustling’ – something we would associate with the sound of leaves. This intertwines the tree and the dead girl, and shows that their fates may be similar. Perhaps the woman’s death is not so final, since the tree with bare branches will flourish and grow leaves again as the seasons change, so the speaker seems to think there may be hope for the dead woman.
Yes – that sound echo of 'leaf' and 'relief' is a great thing to explore. In terms of the woman's blood 'rustling', for me it seems ominous and unsettling rather than hopeful, as though the woman is being violated in being dug out of her eternal rest and put on public display in the museum.
The opening of the poem focuses on how the speaker polishing brass with her friend has a deeper significance regarding their relationship, and how the simple action has brought them closer together. In the first ten lines of the poem, the pronoun ‘we’ is used frequently, which shows how unified the speaker and her friend are. For example, the line ‘Our hands are slightly gritty’ shows that the two are experiencing the same thing, as Clarke uses ‘our’ to generalise what they are both feeling. Between the sixth and seventh lines, Clarke uses enjambment to show the comparison between polishing brass and polishing friendship. After reading “It was as if we burnished”, we would expect there to be something about brass next, but instead, Clarke writes “Our friendship”, which changes the meaning of the precious line. It no longer signifies polishing brass, but purifying a relationship. The idea of ‘burnishing’ a friendship makes us think of stripping away all the ‘dirt’ – the bad, unhealthy and unwanted parts. This simile is reinforced a few lines later, when Clarke writes ‘all the light-drowning/Tarnish of deceit/Were stroked away’. This phrase repeats the same idea as before, but adds that the burnishing was done by ‘stroking’. This word has positive associations, so it shows that the process of ‘cleaning’ the friendship is a positive one, and is done in a gentle manner. Overall, the first part of the poem talks about the symbolism of the brass-polishing as an act of improving the speaker and her friend’s relationship by taking away all the negative feature – lies, deceit – like removing tarnish from brass.
I agree – would be good now to look at the end of the poem and see whether this is optimism is borne out; it could lead to a nice point about structure and sequencing.
The poem 'Still Life’ by Gillian Clarke seems like it may have a positive message at first glance, but in fact it has a sadder feeling about this relationship. The act of polishing brass involves scrubbing away at impurities and revealing what is underneath the surface, so this could give a nice idea of reaching a goal together as a joint effort, but it also raises the question: Why is there this 'tarnish of deceit' covering the brass and their friendship? The use of pronouns also changes through the poem as at the beginning they are mostly uniting, such as 'we burnished' and 'our hands' but later on, the idea of isolation is introduced with the separate pronouns 'I' and 'you'. Emphasising this idea of confusion and sadness in the relationship is the line 'Feeling its illusory / heat'. This is effective in conveying the coldness in between the two people in the poem as when things are an illusion they are imaginary and not really there in the first place. The enjambment makes this particularly striking as we often think of an illusion as something visual, yet here it is the 'heat', which is surprising and shows us how she feels a lack of warmth between them, a sign that the friendship is not going well.
Yes - I agree with you that this poem prompts many questions. it works through suggestion rather than directness - like a number of her more introspective poems.
In this poem by Gillian Clarke it is surprising how the young man described goes from seeming relatively normal and typical, but then there is a shift as we start to see a deeper, and darker, side of him. From the first line, 'His carpet splattered like a Jackson Pollock', we can assume that this was written by his mother, as it sounds like the way a mother would describe her son’s room, saying it is messy, although the theme of art is already present from the very beginning of the poem. This line itself sounds disjointed and 'splattered', which is effective as we get a strong sense of the boy’s room, and it is quite relatable too. At first, he seems quite stereotypical, as the second line 'with clothes, books, instruments, the NME' is fairly normal, but if we look closer, there is a slightly darker aspect as well as 'the NME' could also be read as 'the enemy', which introduces the concept of him being obsessed with music to the point where it becomes detrimental to his health, which is explored further in the rest of the poem. The way this son is described gets surprisingly more academic and this changes our view of him as 'he strummed all day, read Beethoven sonatas'. The act of being on his guitar all day introduces the idea of him being lost in his own world, which is arguably different from most teenage boys, and furthermore, reading classical music could be considered a strange thing to do, highlighting his passion for music, as he is not simply listening but actually 'reading' the music, and we discover that he was "hear it, he said, 'like words'". This gives the idea of him being able to speak a whole different language, but this isolates him in his intense devotion to music.
Spotting that homophone of NME and ‘enemy’ was one of the epiphany moments of studying Clarke this year!
Clarke portrays the deceased owner of the skull in the poem as innocent and unspoiled using colour and intimate adjectives and the juxtaposition between the skull and the implied brutality of the men in the poem. The skull is described as “whiteness” and, as the colour white is normally associated with being clean and pure, so the reader is caused to envision the skull as unblemished and almost innocent. The poet then goes on to say “the cranium would fit the palm of a man’s hand”, depicting the men in the poem as controlling and dominant over the deceased woman as they are holding her helpless skull, further emphasising her innocence and helplessness. Furthermore, the men are then described as to “broke open the grave and let a crowd of light stare in at her”, which further violates the woman and strengthens the sense of vulnerability as her peace is interrupted and she is helpless to stop them, shown by her reaction of “she stared quietly back”.
That metaphor of a ‘crowd of light’ is extraordinarily invasive, I think. It’s not illuminating, more rubber-necking....
The extreme weather and the obstruction it brings about in this poem could be a metaphor for the increasing distance between a mother and her son. The snow is described as “banked the doors, rose to the sills, silted the attic, drew veils across the windows,” implying that the snow, representing his music, is encasing him and almost trapping him, cutting him off from his mother. The verbs used are active, showing it’s vigorous and as if it’s preventing something, most likely the bond between the mother and son from developing. The mother is also described as “waiting for the thaw”, meaning she is waiting for the snow to melt, which represents her son’s music, so she is hoping that her son will become less of a recluse and their bond will return to being as strong as it was before.
The snow is also beautifully connected with the music in that image of it sliding ‘pianissimo’ from the roof.
Throughout the poem, Clarke describes the aftermath and consequences of the Chernobyl radioactive disaster, frequently describing the unfortunate consequences on the innocent. She open the poem with a 4 line stanza (a repetitive structure in the poem) describing people’s search for the consequences of the incident, studying charts for ‘shouldering isobars’ and watching the sky. Clarke claims that people realised that a disaster had stuck globally as ‘birds were late to pair’. She ends the stanza with a powerful image describing how ‘crows drank from the lamb’s eyes’. Crows are often associated with darkness and death (with the collective noun being a murder) in contrast to lambs, which are associated with innocence and purity. Hence this image uses juxtaposition to show how the Chernobyl incident had negative consequences across innocent figures of society, and indeed the natural world more widely. This idea of the innocent being injured is shown by the description of children being ‘warned’ of the ‘dangerous beauty’ of the infected fjords. In the fourth stanza, we see how the radioactivity has infiltrated innocent activities. Clarke describes how ‘a lamb sips caesium on a Welsh hill’, another example of juxtaposition between ‘sip’ (a common, inconsequential action) and ‘caesium’ (a toxic, radioactive chemical). She ends the stanza with another powerful image of ‘A child, lifting her head to drink the rain/takes into her blood the poisoned arrow’. Once again we see dramatic contrast, emphasised by the enjambment, between a childish activity of drinking rain and the ingestion of harmful chemicals that have penetrated the rain.
But Gillian Clarke doesn’t just focus on the negative consequences; instead the final stanzas explore the good that came from all of this. Clarke begins the sixth stanza with ‘Now we are all neighbourly’, the syntax emphasising that this is the present with ‘Now’ in the opening. She claims ‘each little town in Europe is twinned to Chernobyl’ in their suffering; all sympathising as each heart is ‘with the burnt firemen’ (who were killed trying to end the fire that broke out in Chernobyl) and ‘the child on the Moscow train’ (describing the children that had to evacuate Chernobyl to escape the radioactive waste). She ends with the description of our search for home ‘one bird returning with green in its voice’ (reflecting the bird that returned to Noah in the biblical story of Noah’s Ark with a branch in its mouth, showing land was finally nearby).
You give a really full explication. The use of the Welsh language words at the end also helps enact this enforced neighbourliness created by the spread of toxicity through the mingling of languages.
In ‘Friesian Bull’, Clarke makes the bull both an object or terror and pity. She evokes fear for the bull with her description of their aggressive and unpredictable behaviour. The quotation ‘His stall narrows to rage’ shows the bull’s sharp focus on its anger as the stall turns to anger or ‘rage’ in the bull’s perspective. The threat of the bull continues throughout the poem, but is mixed with empathy and pity for the bull. In the second stanza, we enter the mind of the bull as we see a memory of his now-lost freedom with the ‘remembered summer hay smells’ and the ‘thundering speed’ of his companion bulls. Hence we sympathise with the bull as his freedom has been snatched away from him as he is chained in a stall. Clarke portrays the bull as disgusting and crude with the description of the a piece of hay trapped in its muzzle as ‘froth of slobbered hay drooping from his muzzle’ (the onomatopoeia adding to the sense of disgusting) and a simile of the stall as ‘narrow as a heifers’ haunches’. Hence we also fell a sense of disgust for the beast. But the poem ends with an empathetic view of the bull describing his aggressive behaviour as a defence mechanism for his abuse as a chained animal with ‘his crazy eyes churn with their (the fellow bulls in his memory) vision’.
Babysitting
The first stanza of the poem is quite startling as the speaker describes how much she dislikes the baby she is looking after. At first, the baby is described as ‘sleeping a snuffly/Roseate, bubbling sleep’ which are all words one would accept as being associated with a baby as they are calm and innocent words, but then Clarke uses phrases and words that you would not usually use to describe a baby, such as ‘perfectly acceptable’ and says that the speaker is ‘afraid of her’. This draws the reader in as they want to know why the babysitter has such strong feelings towards the baby and what could possibly be wrong with the baby. Clarke also uses enjambment in the first stanza to emphasise the description of the baby. ‘She will hate me’ and ‘her hot midnight rage’ are both the ends of sentences, but have been written on the next line, which isolates these strong phrases and emphasises them.
Yes, and that emphasis is on making the baby actively malevolent and intimidating.
Miracle on St David’s Day
The first stanza of the poem sets the scene. It describes a beautiful ‘afternoon yellow and open-mouthed with daffodils’ in the gardens of what ‘might be a country house’. There is nothing out of the ordinary in the first stanza; everything seems quite peaceful, with ‘guests strolling’ and ‘rumps of gardeners between nursery shrubs’. However, the first line of the second stanza really comes out of nowhere and shatters the peaceful garden scene described before. The speaker bluntly says that they are ‘reading poetry to the insane’, and this really draws the reader in and makes them want to read on because it’s not really a sentence you hear every day and it makes you want to find out who the ‘insane’ are.
There’s a kind of comedy in the gardeners’ upturned bums, I feel!
‘Friesian Bull’ by Gillian Clarke develops the idea that, although the bull is usually considered a purely violent and intimidating creature, he also should be pitied and better understood. The idea that the bull is possibly only this way because of the poor and brutal way he is made to live is suggested in the phrase ‘His stall narrows to rage.’ The comparison of the stall narrowing to rage shows how this sadistic confinement just worsens things and provokes a rage in the bull, who wishes for freedom and the ability to do as he pleases. The chained bull is said to have ‘crazy eyes’ that ‘churn with their vision’ which makes me think that the confinement is putting so much strain on the bull that he is almost hallucinating of a life of freedom which could compensate for his irrational and dangerous behavior such as his ‘thundering speed.’ Although the poem does continually portray bulls in their usual behavior which needs to be controlled, the idea of dreams and his vision of freedom is repeated as it starts with the idea that ‘he blunders through the last dream’.’ The metaphor used of him blundering through a dream emphasizes the violent natures and end to joy, which he has experienced from freedom as a calf to solitary imprisonment as an adult.
There’s also the ambiguity of whose dream he’s blundering through - the speaker’s, or his own.
Stanzas 3 and 4, which describe the close encounter between the heron and the speaker, show an intimate moment of exchange as they both stop in their tracks. Clarke uses first person, often grouping the heron and herself as ‘we’. For example, the ‘we’ in ‘We might have died / in some terrible conjunction’, creates a shared connection as Clarke acknowledges that the moment would have affected both of them. Furthermore, the intimacy is emphasised by the word ‘conjunction’ as the word represents the two of them literally joining together whilst on their own paths. The speaker and heron ‘both braking flight’ creates a powerful image of them halting abruptly. The car is the one braking and the heron is the one flying, so the ‘braking flight’ connects the separate movements of the car and heron into one action. The metaphor, ‘animal tracks that cross in snow’, shows that the near-collision of the speaker and heron may not have actually resulted in a physical collision, but that their journeys were linked with each other. Through looking at the heron at close proximity, the speaker is also able to step into the its mind, reinforcing their intimate interaction. For example, ‘I see his living eye, his change of mind’, the word ‘living’ is used to emphasise that the heron has a mind of its own and that the human is not the only one capable of having emotions.
Indeed. Lots of good observations here - it would be good to tie the idea of conjunction here with the way the poem widens to that ‘hinterland’ between the industrial and the wild in the final lines.
Following quite a regular rhythm and rhyme pattern in the first stanza, the succeeding stanzas become more erratic as the speaker nostalgically lists what she did with her partner. At the beginning of the list, Clarke’s use of repetition of ‘we have sanded, oiled and planed’ mirrors the making of the box in the first stanza by her partner. However, the speaker changes ‘he’ to ‘we’, signifying that their relationship had developed, as they became closer.
The list of activities (lines 11-16) almost seems like a stream of memories gushing out of the speaker’s mind due to the uneven rhythm and conversational tone. Clarke’s use of zeugma, ‘harvested apples and words and days’, indicates that the box held more than just memories of practical activities, but also meaningful conversations or stories. The verbs in the list are all in past tense, making all the events in retrospect. The speaker seems fond, but nostalgic of the memories. For example, the alliteration in ‘rare red kites’, which draws the reader’s attention, and the use of past tense emphasise that the events are over and have not been replicated. The golden tree is a recurring motif in the last line of each stanza, meaning that it is very important to the speaker and her partner. In the first stanza, the tree was only an engraving, but it had come to life in the second stanza: ‘and planted a golden tree’. The golden tree may be a metaphor of their ever-growing love, at first no more than an intention, then slowly rooting itself and finally becoming stable love at the end of the poem.
I really like your ideas about the ‘golden tree’ metaphor here.
In first stanza of ‘Clocks’, a strong mother-daughter bond is evoked in the intimate way the speaker describes walking with her son. The very first word of the poem, ‘We’, immediately indicates that this is a poem in first person about the speaker and her son together. As the stanza moves on, it becomes clear how much the child means to the speaker through the metaphor ‘He blows me a field of gold/From the palm of his hand’. The description of something as ordinary as dandelion petals as gold shows how something simple becomes something precious in a mother’s eyes. And the fact that her son blows the petals from the palm of his hand suggests that the son means everything to the mother, and that she is essentially ‘in the palm of his hand’.
Yes - it’s a lovely image and conveys so much so succinctly.
Towards the end of ‘My Box’, it is apparent that the poem is addressed to someone (‘I leave it there for you to read/or them when we are dead’), leaving the reader to ponder who ‘you’ or ‘them’ are. It is likely that this person may be the speaker’s partner and ‘them’ their children due to the simple words and short lines used through not only this stanza but also the whole poem and when one writes to a child, one tends to keep the vocabulary short and simple. The rhythm and half-rhymes also reminds me of a nursery rhyme. The regular rhythm of the poem is continued through the final stanza, as is the repetition of ‘a golden tree’ at the end of the stanza, both of which give the sense of time moving on steadily.
Agreed. There’s a deceptive simplicity here, I think. It seems naive in its rhythms and rhyme but the ideas are deeply-felt.
Gillian Clarke makes the reader think carefully about the relationship between humans and their future in the final two stanzas by comparing the physical blindness of a bat with humans’ blindness about their future. Clarke introduces the subject of the final two stanzas using the words “this one” which is deictic and thus helps to narrow down the general happenings to this one specific moment. Clarke adds that the bat is “in a box” which immediately creates the sense that the tiny bat is being constrained. This draws parallels to human experiences of our future as we are constrained by our lack of ability to know the future, although we think ourselves to be superior. The use of the word “sepia” as a metaphor to describe the bat’s wings, which reminds the reader of brownish old photos, is contrasted with the word “foreboding” on the next line, which creates the sense of ominous future. The word “foreboding” mimics the fact that, while bats are blind to the world, humans are blind to their future and evokes a sense of foreboding in the reader. The contrast between the past and future is continued later in the poem as the old “psalms” and “rose I spread once in a book” are used to “read [the] future”. The juxtaposition of past and future creates the sense that the human race believes that we can find out what will happen in the future by looking at the past but, in fact, it is unknowable. The phrase “the psalms of its veins/on bible-paper” is a metaphor for the bat’s veins that can be seen through its thin wing. This use of the word “psalms” creates the sense that, just as we cannot understand psalms but still believe them and try and decipher them, we cannot understand our futures but are enslaved by them. The final simile “like a rose I spread once in a book/till you could read your future/in the fine print” evokes a memory of pressing a rose in a book. The fact that the word “spread” is used rather than “pressed” reminds the reader of when bat wings are spread out and pulled taut. The mention of a “rose” brings the idea of rose-tinted spectacles to mind, suggesting that if we look carefully at the past we could see what would happen if we learnt from our mistakes but that we do not do so. Finally the phrase “read your future/in the fine print” is ambiguous as the reader is unsure as to whether the “fine print” is the text of the book or the print of the flower. However it seems to suggest that, although we think that we can guess what will happen through thin petals of a flower or the small print of a book, it is in reality much more complex.
Polishing brass is a metaphor for a relationship although it is unclear whether this is just a friendship or a sexual relationship. The poem indicates both feelings of positivity and sadder feelings about this relationship. The phrase “it was as if we burnished/our friendship” suggests that the friendship has been polished or refined in some way. As well as this, “patterns of incredible honesty/delicately grew” suggests that they have rubbed away the false exterior of their relationship in order to see what they truly are. However the poem also suggests that the relationship is perhaps not what is seems and even that it has run its course. For example, although the “tarnish of deceit/were stroked away”, the line break means you are more aware of the deceit that that it has gone. The “clocks, candlesticks and kettles” that make up the still life are all items that count down time, which might indicate that the relationship has run its course. The phrase “feeling its illusory/heat” also suggests that the warmth of their relationship has been lost and it is actually just an illusion. This is emphasised by the final two lines “only reflecting/the other’s warmth” which seems to show that there is no longer a strong emotional connection between the two. What’s more, the pronouns are collective at the beginning of the poem but move to “I” and “you” at the end of the poem as if the speaker has realised their separateness and they no longer think as one. Although it is perfectly plausible that the poem is about a friendship, there are a number of phrases which could also suggest that it is a sexual relationship, including “it was good tonight” (where the line break enforces the sexual idea) and “rubbed the full curve/if an Indian goblet.”
