I stood at the edge of my child’s sleep
hearing her breathe;
although I could not enter there,
I could not leave.

Her sleep was a small wood,
perfumed with flowers;
dark, peaceful, sacred,
acred in hours.

And she was the spirit that lives
in the heart of such woods;
without time, without history,
wordlessly good.

I spoke her name, a pebble dropped
in the still night,
and saw her stir, both open palms
cupping their soft light;

then went to the window. The greater dark
outside the room
gazed back, maternal, wise,
with its face of moon.

A few more days to GCSE English and you may be looking for an easy way TO ANALYSE THE UNSEEN POEM?

…even if you feel very confident about poetry analysis, there is always the sense of the BLIND DATE with the unseen.

So now I will show you an easy tip that works with students very effectively.

(First just mentioning my own enjoyment of this poem. …..as a short digression?)

 

I explored Carol Ann Duffy’s A Child’s Sleep several years ago on this blog and loved its hypnotic, magical language that manages to expand our understanding of a most tender moment.

A moment in time!

Duffy is very fond of this poem and I can see why. It captures a mother’s almost mystical  awareness of the wonder of loving your child.

It takes place on a threshold. in a literal sense we are behind the mother gazing into his child’s room watching the child sleep and imagining the wonderful dreams that the child might be enjoying.

Metaphorically we recognize that the mother as an adult is for ever excluded by her age and experience from childhood’s innocence and the sleep of the child seems a metaphor for this lost magical world.

In a sense the mother is gazing upon her lost self too and that is why the ending of the poem offers relief to the mother as she too is cared for by something much older and wiser than herself: the moon!

How to analyse the Unseen Poem: A Beginning. 

Read the title of the poem and then the first line.  What do you NOTICE?

‘I stood at the edge of my child’s sleep hearing her breathe..’ 

Ask yourself what you are noticing?

Simplicity. Soft sounds. Like sleep? Vowels soft? assonance. Whisper as mother listens? 

Title is clear and the opening line confirms what the title promise. So reader feels the poem is fulfilling its promise straight away.

Yet what word seems to leap out or seem ‘strange‘ in the opening line? 

The word ‘edge’ seems strange. Makes us think about the connotations of the ‘edge of my child’s sleep’ in terms of adulthood/childhood.

Shows respect. Awe at the wonder of being a mother? Threshold between worlds of dream/innocence and daily ordinary world. Maybe the child very active and sleep a rest for all. But told in wondering, awestruck way.

Even magical as mother is transfixed. And this enchantment inspires the poem and makes the poet reflect on the wonder of dreams, and where a child may escape to, and then in gazing out beyond the room’s tranquility and special space  reflects on her own place in the universe and being part of a universal order and scheme of things.

So the gazer becomes the gazed upon and we as readers are gazing upon everyone? 

See how just ONE question leads to a very expansive understanding of the whole poem?

 

A perfect poem. 

 

This was my old reading of the poem ..may be of interest along the way too? 

 

Without sounding trite and then perhaps I do, the poem reminds me of that song by some chap with a difficult name to spell: ‘Where do you go to my lovely..’ with the vaguely Parisian music which was once a massive hit on Radio 1.

Captures the heart stopping wonderment of the mother’s relation to her child. The ‘awayness ‘ of sleep all the more enchanting for its uncomplexity and naturalness than the more ‘thorny’ aspects of adult slumber.

I love the delicacy of this poem: ‘ I stood at the edge of my child’s sleep’..as the adult hangs back from the perfection of this tableau…as if the sleep has become a whole world whose words are so very different from those of the adult. The poet who is also a mother elides the sleep with some Shakeperean Arden where magical things happen and time becoems something fluid, tender, mystical.

Lovely detail with the hands embracing light. Defencless purity of their transcenedent beauty. 

Carole Berry and Janet Lewison Tusitala Conversation (extract) 

Janet

Both poems significantly give representation to  intensely realized  spaces/places where human beings  are imprisoned  or enslaved by nature, society and even or especially the mind. Little wonder that one of Blake’s most famous lines in London refers to ‘mind forg’d manacles‘  ’ These manacles are the effect of social pressures and brought about by oppressive institutions and environments. Such a phrase captures the terrible internal workings and psychology of those people observed by Blake in the poem. Whilst we do not feel the ‘manacles’ are of  the same origin in Spellbound, we do feel that in this poem too, the poet feels that her circumstances have inflicted some unnerving type of control upon her. The poet is bewitched or enslaved by her environment and as in London , whilst the emotions created are difficult, the creative act itself seems inspired. Such is the ambivalence of place in these two poems!

The poems are  both intense, psychological dramas of the mind and senses using ‘place’ as an inspiration or trigger for reflective  thought. We gain insights into the psychological drama of the individual speakers through their readings of place. The extremity of the situations under scrutiny in both poems encourages the speakers to reflect upon their relationship to the spaces they inhabit, however temporarily. The creative act is thus triggered by external ‘prompts’ that become the sources of their writing.

 

I suppose the creative act has to be provoked by something and intense confrontations with a storm or a corrupt city seem very probable sources! We do find a strong sense of emotional turbulence or turmoil in both poems.

I suppose that is why I think the poems are emotionally authentic.
In  Emily Bronte’s poem Spellbound we  find that  the speaker  is in thrall to
nature’s natural predilection  for  violence. By contrast,  in Blake’s
London we find the  poet  is  lucky enough to enjoy the freedom  to ‘wander’  and
that his  living state is very different from  the  terrible  conditions endured  by his
fellow human  beings in this  sprawling,  imprisoning city  where he observes :’in every face I 
meet/Marks of weakness, marks of woe.’    Religion has abandoned  these
people leaving only the  ironic  ‘stigmata’ of  disease, starvation  and
suffering.

No one  except the  observing poet  seems  able to quit this place , and
interestingly  Bronte’s  poem is  preoccupied with not being  able  to
leave; ‘And  I cannot, cannot  go...’ and we puzzle  as to why and  how much choice is
involved and indeed  if the  ‘Spellbound‘  aspect of  the not leaving and
being held in thrall,  inspires  ironic pleasure  too.
What do you feel  about  the representation of place in each  poem Carole?
Where would  you rather  be?

 

Carole

From  an  observational point of view, i would prefer Blake’s London  and
indeed, as  you  point out, the poet is free to wander and  observe and
‘report’  in poetry his  fellow Londoners’  suffering and enslavement., their  lack
of  liberty’ – even  the streets are owned ‘chartered’….this is such an unsettling and revealing word.

 

Janet

Yes, the word ‘chartr’d’ is  very  revealing. It resonates with me as
suggests everything  is owned and  even geography become a commodity.
London  relentless for its  accumulations of horror. Definitely  social  commentary
but as you  say, the poet can turn  around and leave. He is a  missionary?
Anticipating Dickens?  Spellbound seems odd and I am not sure how
pleasurable and  exciting the poet finds the whole business of enslavement.  How  many
songs and poems explore the enchantment of love in  this  way?

 

Carole

Blake as  a missionary highlights the sense of  historical ‘place’, it’s
past but also  it’s possible future if  things don’t change. He hints at
more ‘blood’ and ‘the  marriage  hearse’ (church and state).  ‘ancestral voices
prophesying  war’  – the people of London may rise up against their masters
as  did the people of  Paris! The tone is much more vehement at the end  of the
poem?

 

Janet

Yes it is about the future too and as  you say we can detect Kubla  Khan
too about the poem’s heart. The  ending of London deeply  disturbing. Sex kills
seems to be the  message. Horrible oxymoron ‘marriage  hearse’, worthy of
an arch  pessimist like George Gissing though latter later.
Do you think Bronte  too has a missionary zeal but her zeal is all about
rebellion and  transgression? Bronte invents herself as a poet(not unlike
the  female in Kubla Khan) perhaps in Spellbound through a language  which
unsettles as it won’t rest?

 

 Carole

The spirit won’t be laid to rest in Spellbound. She is both ‘eternal ’like the rocks..’ and eternity herself? She is the place too of course…

Janet

So she is the place. I like that. It resonates somehow. Hence the poem shapes itself around her. The wandering poet is very different in London  as he doesn’t want to absorb the taint of degradation but it haunts his mind, his very sensibility.

Carole

Do think there is an echo of Wuthering Heights  in Spellbound and  yes the to Kubla Khan too. Remember the ‘woman wailing …’. The simplistic verse reveals and recalls so much!
The reader is  also bound by the poem’s spell. Interesting how Kubla Khan is a
tangible  element in both poems. That too, is a poem about enslavement and
powerlessness. Blake’s ‘harlot’ and Coleridge’s cloying ‘woman wailing‘. But
now moving onto different aspects. I have digressed somewhat. Place is the
thing!

 

Janet

But ‘place’ is psychological too and I doubt very much we could pinpoint
where Spellbound takes place? It seems more a mental ‘place’ or ‘space’  at
times? Perhaps that is what unites both poems? The poets move between  inside
states and those places outside…through the triggers of language and  the
resonance of sensory impressions?
It is the very compression of the language in both poems that haunts?  High
degree of selectivity as poems reveal the places where feelings become
paramount?

Carole

In Bronte’s poem it is indeed, a mental place but inspired by a  beloved
physical landscape. Bronte’s is arguablly a landscape of the mind,  from
which, she cannot physically escape, cannot leave ‘still I cannot go‘.

However,interestingly, one also feels that Blake cannot leave the physical  world of
his ‘London‘ and the ‘marks of ‘weakness/marks of woe’ are what he  also
bears in his ‘own mind’ and which profoundly haunts his psyche. The pain  and
suffering he observes in ‘every face he sees’ are a mirror image of his  own
sense of helplessness and loss of hope for the fellow human beings, men,
women and children he encounters.  He is also a ‘marked’ man and their
‘manacles’ are also his own ‘mind-forged‘ – stronger than mere physical
chains….

 

Janet

Really interesting Carole. I think one is a landscape as you say born out of love
and exhilaration at such a passionate eternal connection and the other
reminds  the poet of the terrible compromising degradation of urbanization and
modernization. Humans build their own private and public ‘mind forg’d
manacles’  of hell.’

Both poets seem ghostly presences haunting their chosen ‘places’ and the
simplicity of Bronte perhaps because nature she finds more transparent whilst
the challenge of ‘London’ is the dense complexity of its lexis?

 

 

More to come in full version of this Tusitala Conversation about Blake’s London and Bronte’s Spellbound, both poems of place.   

Do you sometimes find TALKING about texts better than writing about them?

Imagine being able to listen into a lively and original conversation about books or poems you need to write about.

IMAGINE  how easy it would be for you  to find lots of ideas and insights….

Tusitala Conversations will give you the opportunity  to find LOTS of ORIGINAL ideas for your writing so you will gain BETTER grades.

I do enjoy discussing poems and other texts with students, friends and colleagues- it’s one of my favourite ways of finding out how a text works!

Conversations are also more freewheeling than the traditional learning notes and I would like you to imagine these e-books as being like  your own personal tutorials!

At a bargain price!  

Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry deals with many different relationships, events and predicaments  She is a time traveller fond of exploring the lost narratives of the past through a range of speakers and characters. 

If you are working on your revision ideas for GCSE English or perhaps GCE English Literature or even if you are an undergraduate student preparing for your examinations, then these following ideas in the video may help you .

Carol Ann Duffy is fascinated by intimacy in all its challenging manifestations and these 15 ideas may boost your own thoughts about Duffy’s primary creative compulsion!

You are probably in the middle of your English REVISION and are looking for QUICK  and POWERFUL ways to improve the range of ideas you have for your final examinations. 

Do you want a fast and easy way to get better grades? 

Look at this video and see how quickly your ideas can get a FREE BOOST!!! 

AND if you like this boost, then why not buy the ebooks too? 

They are a great way to TURBO charge your examination ideas! 

The last chapter of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men resolves the death of Curley’s wife through George’s humane killing of Lennie.

 George’s action protects Lennie from Curley’s pursuing vengeance-most likely involving torture and leaves George to find a new life without his role as Lennie’s protector and surrogate father.

Steinbeck’s narrative reveals the insensitivity of George’s work mates with the notable exception of Slim. Indeed without Slim’s offer of friendship and his intelligent, yet instinctive understanding  of George’s situation, the novel would close in a very lonely and even despairing way.

Yet Slim’s humanity gives George and the reader hope of a more equal and fertile friendship; a friendship that opens up the ending of the novel to new horizons and possibilities for both Slim and George.

This short video shows how just THREE quotations from the last stages of the novel, can provide you with a very detailed  and helpful analysis of the novel and its searing issues about tolerance, friendship and hope.

For a video about essay writing,please click here.

For  another about  about To Kill a Mocking Bird, please click here and for a video about The Woman In Black click here! 

Here is a short  video analysis of the last chapter of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird where I look closely at THREE quotations,  offering at least FOUR very useful interpretations of the text.

This technique works as it  pays attention to the original text and gives several different possibilities for your analysis and writing. 

Watch the video and see how it can help you to generate ideas very easily and very quickly! 

 

 

“You can pet him, Mr. Arthur, he’s asleep. You couldn’t if he was awake, though, he wouldn’t let you…” I found myself explaining. “Go ahead.”
Boo’s hand hovered over Jem’s head.
“Go on, sir, he’s asleep.”
His hand came down lightly on Jem’s hair.
I was beginning to learn his body English. His hand tightened on mine and he indicated that he wanted to leave.
I led him to the front porch, where his uneasy steps halted. He was still holding my hand and he gave no sign of letting me go.
“Will you take me home?”
He almost whispered it, in the voice of a child afraid of the dark.
I put my foot on the top step and stopped. I would lead him through our house, but I would never lead him home.
“Mr. Arthur, bend your arm down here, like that. That’s right, sir.”
I slipped my hand into the crook of his arm.
He had to stoop a little to accommodate me, but if Miss Stephanie Crawford was watching from her upstairs window, she would see Arthur Radley escorting me down the sidewalk, as any gentleman would do.
We came to the street light on the corner, and I wondered how many times Dill had stood there hugging the fat pole, watching, waiting, hoping. I wondered how many times Jem and I had made this journey, but I entered the Radley front gate for the second time in my life. Boo and I walked up the steps to the porch. His fingers found the front doorknob. He gently released my hand, opened the door, went inside, and shut the door behind him. I never saw him again.
Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad….

 

“Read it out loud, please, Atticus. It’s real scary.”
“No,” he said. “You’ve had enough scaring for a while. This is too—”
“Atticus, I wasn’t scared.”
He raised his eyebrows, and I protested: “Leastways not till I started telling Mr. Tate about it. Jem wasn’t scared. Asked him and he said he wasn’t. Besides, nothin’s real scary except in books.”
Atticus opened his mouth to say something, but shut it again. He took his thumb from the middle of the book and turned back to the first page. I moved over and leaned my head against his knee. “H’rm,” he said. “The Gray Ghost, by Seckatary Hawkins. Chapter One…”
I willed myself to stay awake, but the rain was so soft and the room was so warm and his voice was so deep and his knee was so snug that I slept.
Seconds later, it seemed, his shoe was gently nudging my ribs. He lifted me to my feet and walked me to my room. “Heard every word you said,” I muttered. “…wasn’t sleep at all, ‘s about a ship an’ Three-Fingered Fred ‘n’ Stoner’s Boy….”
He unhooked my overalls, leaned me against him, and pulled them off. He held me up with one hand and reached for my pajamas with the other.
“Yeah, an’ they all thought it was Stoner’s Boy messin’ up their clubhouse an’ throwin’ ink all over it an’…”
He guided me to the bed and sat me down. He lifted my legs and put me under the cover.
“An’ they chased him ‘n’ never could catch him ‘cause they didn’t know what he looked like, an’ Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn’t done any of those things… Atticus, he was real nice….”
His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me.
“Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.”
He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.

THE END

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 English Revision Tutorials offer you a powerful opportunity to tackle those problems in your English Studies that need sorting out. 

Are your essays a little vague or lacking in inspiration?

Do you wish your analyses of poetry were more incisive and clear?

Do you find your Creative Writing rather tired and dull? 

Would you like to have more confidence in your understanding of your set texts? 

If your English Studies need a boost whether you are a GCSE,A level or Undergraduate Student then…

Ring Tusitala English tuition to discuss a Revision tutorial to suit your requirements: 01204-690025/07803033676

And here is a quick Revision session on the creation of suspense in Chapter 28 of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. 

Chapter 28 of To Kill a Mocking Bird raises the temperature of the novel dramatically after we have relaxed into what we probably feel are the final loose ends of the text.  Both children are walking home from the Maycomb Pageant when an anonymous  stalker attacks them only to be thwarted by a mysterious saviour.

We are like the children in our feelings of disorientation and the darkness, ‘It was pitch black…’ seems to cast us into some nightmarish world where things have lost their identity and recognizable shape!

Sensory deprivation renders the walk home disturbingly Gothic  and uncanny. The darkness seems both literal and metaphorical as we recognize the evil that threatens the innocence of the children.‘Hush a minute Scout..‘ We try to listen in with the children to their mounting realisation that they are being followed. Lee makes silence predatory and the echoes of Jem’s challenges into the darkness seem to mock our equilibrium.

Everything is shrouded in this darkness and Scout’s  ‘agricultural ham’ costume inhibits her attempts to run away, escalating the horror of the attack that is communicated through the use of   unnerving sensory details. Being barefooted like Scout, adds to the dramatic tension. She is vulnerable and we know it and so does she.

You may notice that Scout’s  sensory impressions convey a disjointed ‘askew’ sense of reality and that metaphor( where ‘likeness’ is the primary means of understanding and communication) has suddenly shifted into details where the  ‘associations’of metonymy reign. Interestingly we find that ‘synecdoche( a sort of subdivision of metonymy) gives you a disturbing sense of alienation and’ lostness’.

Let me show you here what I mean: ‘Shuffle-foot had not stopped with us this time. His trousers swished softly and steadily.Then they stopped. ‘  The darkness has made the stalker’s identity mysterious. ‘He’ has become his trousers and their strange sounds seem to exist separately from the rest of him. He seems inhuman, a fragmented figure whose body parts and clothing appear to have an existence separate to the human.

If metaphor brings the world together so we can understand our experiences then metonymy or synecdoche emphasize estrangement and alienation.

This technique lingers on in chapter 28 where Ewell is only identified through his body parts, he is not ‘whole’ as he is a degraded human being bent on evil. When Boo Radley intervenes anonymously his powers seem that of an avenging angel as he ‘flung’ Scout’s attacker to the ground.

The disorientation of Scout’s narration starts to recuperate and restabilise as she recognizes that there ‘were now four people under the tree.’ The world’s shape is returning to a more familiar aspect. The nightmare is drawing to a close and once the ‘street light’ is mentioned we feel that sanctuary has been restored.

Even Aunt Alexandra is so pleased to have the children back, that she brings Scout her overalls- a highly symbolic gesture of acceptance!

 

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say “Her mantle laps
Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat”: such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,—good! but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
—E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master’s known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

I have discussed this poem several times on this blog(click here) g but today I wanted to share  something new with you. These new ideas can help you think about the Browning poem slightly differently than perhaps you have before.

So as you read this I would like you to think about the over crowded, ‘wordiness’ of the Duke’s dramatic monologue and imagine him standing right before you talking in this rather peculiar and unsettling way.

Do you find him pompous? Is he too fond of his own voice?

Why does he want to talk? Is he confessing to his crime or celebrating his crime  through reenacting it to his listeners.

Anecdotes are a popular way of communicating and this ‘anecdote’ is ironically surprising in its subject matter and the fact that the Duke’s power makes such an anecdote possible.

For the Duke can swagger through his story, knowing no one has the authority to punish him.

Now imagine this voice, listen to it and decide whether…..

Is he ranting in a peculiarly ’cold’ way? What is the ‘tone’ of his voice?

Could you even describe his verbal performance as being like a cold fever; Oxymoronic I know, but you think about it.

A cold feverishness perhaps to his monologue? He is a self confessed killer after all.

May be you think a  ’fastidious fever‘ perhaps?

So imagine the Duke here, right before you, and imagine the sound of his voice as he intones on and on about his importance, his status -his ability to murder his young wife because he ‘gave commands.’

Imagine….

The Duke is standing before us and the Count’s messenger or ‘emissary’ gesturing towards a portrait of his ‘last’ wife who was painted skilfully and expensively by a famous artist named Fra Pandolf.

We are listening to a verbal portrait which is not unusual in itself until we start to notice how the words only focus on the dead Duchess in a negative manner and strangely seem to read ordinarily positive personal  attributes like smiles and blushes in  very pejorative and damning ways.

The Duke breaks up the Duchess into bits. His voice dismembers her. She is only viewed through certain behaviors or bodily bits. This is called ‘synecdoche’ and always creates a feeling of alienation in a text.

Think about your own experience. Do you dislike others because of their smiles? Because they blush?Surely the opposite is usually true. we like people because they behave in warm and friendly ways. We find this reassuring. 

But the Duke is very different. He is a sadistic megalomaniac who relishes his ability to remove anyone he finds irritating.

Surely this type of dislike suggests something pathological is going on inside the psyche of the duke?

He imprisons the Duchess even in death behind a curtain that he controls; she has become a work of art, a beautiful, yet lifeless object.

You go back to the smiles and the blushes. Surely we do we miss people because their smiles are no longer with us?

The Duke like many Victorian men, sees the friendly, blushing radiance of the Duchess as signs of her dangerous sexuality and attractiveness.  Subsequently she becomes imprisoned within the Duke’s malign net of words.

In a curious way, the cold sterility of the Duke’s vocabulary also seems secretly or covertly paranoid, even insane. The apparent cold,clinical detachment masking an unhealthy obsession with the signs of the Duchesses betrayal.

When anyone is paranoid, all the ‘signs’ they fixate upon, reinforce their version of reality. They read the world ‘otherwise’ in terms of their ‘map of reality’. Everything is seen to justify their belief system, their premise.

The Duke regards women as commodities; he believes they are not trustworthy and likely to betray his 900 year old name. He creates a fiction, believes it and then murderously acts upon it.

Curiously the Duke’s  insanity is every bit as agitated and  brutal as Stanley Kowalski’s violent misogyny  in  Tennessee William’s nightmarish,  brilliant play A Streetcar Named Desire, except Williams’ play is very much Southern Gothic; all heat, sexuality and overwrought tears!

By contrast, the Duke lives in Ferrara, an ostensibly mannered and cultured Italian city during the Renaissance.

Both protagonists are devoid of compassion towards women and purposefully ‘read’ women negatively, even sadistically.

Yet paranoid characters also make compelling viewing, even compelling ‘writers’ within the boundaries of their texts.

You can certainly ‘hear’ the Duke’s mental instability progressively percolating through the poem, just as we hear Kowalski’s brutal undermining analysis of the fragile heroine Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar named Desire.

Both texts reveal the power of verbal brutality and the way in which verbal cruelty can become physical , resulting in the literal murder of the Duchess and the sexual violation and mental ‘murder’ of Blanche Dubois.

Imagine the damaging power of words. Now read the poem again….

 

As part of my annual spring cleaning binge I decided that the living room bookshelves were long overdue a good dusting, and whilst balancing on top of a chair to get to the very top shelves I rediscovered piles of books that had been sitting neglected up there and were well overdue another read. Such wonderful books as The Catcher in The Rye, Cold Comfort Farm, To Kill A Mockingbird, Life of Pi, a couple by PD James, a few more from Agatha Christie (I adore Hercule Poirot!), Howard’s End, Birdsong…the list grew with every dusty book I retrieved!

 

And as I’m writing this now I’m relishing the thought of that traditional (and wonderful) ‘curl up with a good book’ moment. I love reading and will generally give anything a go, even if it’s not in my usual remit of genres. I think that there is little worse in life than limiting yourself and a great novel is one the quickest, easiest and cheapest ways of escaping, inspiring and freeing yourself. Now I’m a re-reader, I can happily read a great book time and time again, but there is also something so wonderful about discovering and loving a new book that it’s almost indescribable.

 So how do you get that feeling? You’ve just finished your last great read and you’re on the lookout for another one, what do you do? Well the main thing to bear in mind is to let your innate curiosity take hold. If you pick up a book, or see a title, or just hear someone talking about one and it sparks even just one of your fantastic little synapses, then just read it. Even if you don’t like it, what have you lost? Just find another one. I’m a big fan of modern literature, so often find that fiction prize shortlists are a good guide to a new great read. But also a good rummage about in charity shops, car boots and second hand book shops can be a goldmine of reading fodder, so just grab a book and give it a read. Don’t limit yourself.

 

Also, there are these wonderful buildings called libraries! I know that loads of people love their e-readers (and as long as you’re reading I really don’t care how you’re doing it!), but I’m still a big fan of a physical book (costs less when you drop them in the bath too!) One of the best books I’ve read for a while I found by running into my local library just before it closed and grabbing a book from the Recently Returned shelf. It was called The Door and was by a Hungarian novelist and playwright called Magda Szabó. I’d never heard of the author or the book, but the title really sparked my curiosity. “The Door? What door? To where? Who’s behind it? What’s going on?” So I checked it out and off I ran. And I loved it! It was a complete delight to read, and whenever I wasn’t reading it, I wished that I was.

In essence, all I’m saying is – let your curiosity rule. Pick up a book, read it and escape.

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Examine the presentation of Susan Hill’s Woman in Black using just THREE quotations. 

This question needs careful organisation around just THREE moments in the text. These moments could be chronologically arranged so that the answer reveals the progressive characterization of the  female figure in terms of her  evolution and possible downfall.

Thus, we can see how the Woman in Black first appears in the novel; how she changes before the eyes of the first person narrator and how we may read her at the end of the text.

I would also like to look at the presentation of the Woman in Black   in terms of just ONE quotation for each different moment, revealing to you how you can make just one quotation go a very very long way!

For if you can make the very most of a quotation then it proves to the examiner that you are possessed of excellent analytical powers!

So let’s start by thinking about the reader’s first meeting with the Woman in Black:

The first person  narrator Arthur Kipps is recounting his attendance at  the funeral of his company’s client  Mrs Drablow in a church set amongst the dismal marshes near Mrs Drablow’s Eel Marsh House, when he notices a mysterious mourner enter the church for the service:

”…hearing some slight rustle behind me, I half turned discreetly and caught a glimpse of another mourner  a woman…She was dressed in deepest black…its blackness a little rusty looking..”

I have used ellipsis here very pointedly as it allows me(and you) to ‘ensnare’ the revealing words with their unsettling and complex connotations.

Here, Arthur is distracted from the melancholy service by the sound of a woman’s skirts! Ironically perhaps her entrance is welcome as it gives him something new and feminine to focus upon. Hence his long winded description shortly after this quotation of her unhealthy appearance ; his desire to help her and go(knight like) to her aid.

 

Notice too the fastidious, self conscious language  Arthur utilizes in order to recreate his  slightly pompous, ‘superior’ younger self, all too keen to reinforce his new role as representative of the legal firm: ‘I half turned discreetly..‘ This seems rather self congratulatory to me and middle aged!  Yet it is Arthur who is recreating his younger self  and the terrible irony that he completely misjudged the situation and the woman in black too.

 

She is a ‘mourner’ of course but not for Mrs Drablow as we subsequently learn along side poor Arthur Kipps. Instead we notice the use of superlative  ‘deepest black’ a detail that reveals far more with hindsight, because the retrospectively constructive narrative cannot help but ‘leak’ knowledge. The Woman in Black’s mourning is in fact so deep that her grief cannot be assuaged  It is labyrinthine and complex, now misdirected relentlessly towards revenge.

 

The Woman in Black’s ‘deepest black’ reveals the dangerous inconsolablility of her grief. Her grief is a pathological need; a predatory need, that veils itself among her ‘rusty’ black. This ‘rusty’ black further intensifies the ambivalence of her grief; a grief that Kipps had no means of knowing at the time yet here seems to intuitively  ’leak’ more than he as yet consciously  realizes.  

 

We feel a disturbing texture of decay about her, exposed as she has been to the damp climate of the marshes where she lies in wait for vengeance.  Her grief seems repulsive, yet we are thwarted as to why, shielded as we are behind the initial  courtly concern of Arthur Kipps towards this damaged woman whom he wrongly describes in quaint rather than macabre terms.

Second Sighting. 

When Arthur Kipps seees the woman in black again, her face is more clearly revealed. Yet what is revealed is a Miss Havisham  like Gothic trope(device) that the gazer is actually not in control of this encounter  at all, rather that the observer is actually being observed. Even devoured! (See Chapter 8 Great Expectations)

‘…as I stared at her, stared until my eyes ached in their sockets…I saw that her face did wear an expression…a desperate and yearning malevolence..’ 

The woman in Black bewitches Arthur; she ensnares her through her mesmerizing gaze of  evil. (Think of Medusa!)  Look at the repetition of ‘stared’. He cannot help himself; he has to look on the lonely, predatory figure because he has no choice. She makes him and she holds him in thrall to her power.

The juxtaposition of ‘yearning’ with ‘malevolence‘ works brilliantly as it is not an oxymoron. Yet we almost feel that it is. Why do we feel this? I think it is because the combination of words remind us that desire can take many forms and that goodness is precariously set against evil, here hijacked through the abject destructiveness of grief and transformed into insatiability originating out of an overwhelming feeling of being hurt.

The woman in black’s loss of a child has become transformed  into insatiable vindictiveness-not unlike that of Lady Macbeth whose dead child becomes horribly resurrected as the murder plot for King Duncan.

Think about Arthur’s loss of composure here as he is devoured by her stare.  Relate this to a terrible trope around ‘decomposition’.  Think again of the ‘rusty’ black!

Third  sighting(Final)

This is the final, seemingly ‘postscript’ sighting of the woman in black. We never learn if this signifies her final release, but we recognize that Kipps does not father any more children and this could be profoundly significant.

‘ I looked directly at her and she at me….she moved quickly, her skirts rustling as if to step into the pony’s path…Then silence. …The woman had disappeared.’ 

Recognition and acknowledgement are followed by a terrible encounter with ‘destiny’. The earlier ’pony and trap’ chapter is played out again bringing a grotesque relief for the woman in black. Only violence against another mother and child can assuage her thirst for vengeance.The supposedly  innocent femininity of her rustling skirts has become re- translated as the ghastly sound of an avenging she-devil.

We have no idea where she goes and what sort of liberty is attained through this final act, an act we realise she has been anticipating throughout the narrative and an act Arthur has been dreading revisiting  For as he narrates his tale, he is literally reanimating the past, leading up to this event, an event that brings him a ‘silence…to last for years.’

Little wonder that a first person narrative seems a terrible form of self persecution! Who would want to witness this tale all over again?

 

 

 

EASTER REVISION – NOT TO BE DREADED AND DEFINITELY NOT TOO EARLY!

by Jenny Bennion

You may be sat at home thinking that the summer exams are miles away (and Manchester & Bolton’s current weather would forgive you for thinking that!), but in reality there are less than 8 weeks before some exams start! Now this is not to scare you into frantic and panic-ridden revision, this is to tell you that there is still time to get some really good and meaningful revision planned and underway.

 

So, once the panic has subsided lets think about the good things about revision – yes there really are some truly great things about revision! One of the most amazing gifts that we possess is the ability to learn and our innate curiosity, and revision is a wonderful way of satisfying this. Even if you think that Comprehension is boring or that Shakespeare is just a pile of out dated ramblings, there are still nuggets of information that can get our synapses firing even in the most seemingly mundane things. Also that feeling when you are on a roll and things just seem to be flying into that wonderful grey matter of yours, is just brilliant!

 

Right so we’ve stopped panicking and we’re even feeling positive about the value of getting that Easter revision started, so let’s think about some great and engaging ways of actually doing that revision. Just as everyone looks or behaves differently, just so everyone learns differently. But regardless of your mode of revision, the golden rule is to ensure that you tantalise and feed that wonderful curiosity of yours. Pouring over your texts and making reams of notes may very well be the best thing for you, but what about combining it with really delving into your subject and finding out what you love (or hate) about it. Some great essays have been written by people who thoroughly despised their text, but could wonderfully describe exactly how and why they felt that way.

 

One great way of really getting your revision juices flowing is to have a look at some of the free English resources available on www.tusitala.org.uk. These are like York Notes for the soul and can be a fantastic way of altering your revision path and thought process. As said above everyone learns differently and so getting a real range of resources, thought and opinions can be a great way of finding out what really inspires you. And it is inspiration that avoids revision stress induced perspiration!

 

Remember, revision by its very essence means going back to something that you’ve already done. You already know this, so all you’re doing now is finding out why you love it!

Special Guest writer:  Jenny Bennion

www.jennybennion.co.uk

 

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”. 

If I had one piece of advice to English Literature students it would be this. BE CURIOUS!

For curiosity leads to questions and the students who ask questions reveal the underlining ‘character’ of any text.  Look for the strange in a text;  look for the moments where something makes you uneasy or even  surprised !

Remember the quality of your curiosity is reflected in the quality of your questions and leads to lively insight.

I have written about this poem elsewhere on this site so do look there fora  further, detailed analysis too.

Here we are faced with Shelley’s famous poem about power. It is a strange poem as we are gifted with the visual oddity of the broken fragments of some monumental structure stuck in the middle of a desert. Why should such an ambitious enterprise end so shabbily? 

So my questions might be as follows:

1) Who is speaking in the poem and where are they speaking from? 

The reader is listening to a framing narrator in Shelley’s Ozymandias. The narrator announces himself as a first person narrator  ‘I’ and yet we find they seem incidental to the actual ‘event’ on which the story of the poem is based. For the ‘I’ ‘ is a shadowy witness, who in turn has encountered a ‘traveller’ whose observations form the basis of the poem and yet who also seems at a significant time distance from the ancient sculpture lying abandoned in some ‘antique land‘. This framing device gives the poem a casual aspect, suggesting that the encounter is only incidental to the lives of the narrators who bear second hand witness to Ozymandias’s yearnings.  So it is a Russian Doll type of narrative model with the ‘original event’ kept at some signification distance from the interconnecting narrators who bear witness to the strange encounter .

2) Do we feel the narrators manage to communicate something of the long dead character of Ozymandias? 

I can feel the intensity of Ozymandias’s ambition in the poem coupled with his dread of death and probable yearning for his monument to grant him eternal life. This is a deeply ironic poem as ambition and grandiosity lie ruined before us and before both narrators who reconstruct Ozymandias once again.

And yet  ironically perhaps, despite the labyrinthine narrative device, we still feel the presence of Ozymandias’s futile yearning.

So we do feel the narrators manage to resurrect something of the character of Ozymandias and of his far away kingdom, so that the bathetic grandiosity of Ozymandias’s  voice still resounds in our ears today:’ Look on my works, ye mighty and despair!’  How have the mighty fallen indeed!

The arrogance of the ruler’s attempt to transcend time, through his own image of himself is palpable. Indeed it is he who is left to ‘despair’. The ruins of his monument to his own power lie about the traveller, each testifying to the megalomania of the long dead ruler: ‘The hand that mock’d them..‘ Power has become fragmented and destroyed, cast aside by the inescapable march of time that has the power to obliterate(indifferently) the futile strivings of human beings no matter how much ‘status’ they may have once enjoyed.

 

3) Is Ozymandias’s vanity our own and if so does the poem deliver a very moral message to the reader? 

The final three lines of the poem remain stark and haunting in the memory of the two narrators as they give presence to this image, as well as in the memory of the reader too.

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”. 

For we recognize our own fears in the defiant arrogance of the dead King. We fear our own dusty decay, our return to nothingness, where our lives disappear and ore forgotten as if we had never been.  Hence I feel the admiration and tragic pathos of the ‘colossal wreck‘. For if  Ozymandias with all his power and wealth could not cheat time then  neither can we who have far less economic and worldly power.

All we are left with is this final  empty vista into timelessness and nothingness. The ‘sands‘ being synonymous with the relentless passage of time. We are haunted and awed at once, aware of the very bleak yet beautiful ‘gift’ the poem has brought us as we re-imagine the literal and metaphorical fall of Ozymandias, ‘king of kings’ now reduced to ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone.‘ Ambition like life itself has become dismembered by the steady onslaught of time.

Q: How do you write effectively about Slim’s character  in Steinbeck’s  Of Mice and Men? 

A: The character of Slim in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men   provides the reader with a figure who is consistently  trustworthy and fair. His presence in the novel acts as a yardstick of relative ‘normality’ by which we can read other characters.

In a novel concerned with the dangers and cruelties of reaction, Slim seems reflective, thoughtful  and balanced. He is a figure of stability. 

In a fallen world, where George and Lennie dream of recapturing the lost Eden, through their special dream  farm, Slim seems a detached ‘God-like’ figure who tries to maintain a certain stability and respectfulness among  his men at the ranch.

Slim’s kindness to George after the death of Lennie suggests that George may have gained the support of a friend who is his equal in terms of intelligence, maturity and sensitivity. George’s isolation after killing his friend, is thus alleviated by Slim’s knowing intervention and care. Think how bleak the novel would seem if we were only left with the careless, unknowing words of Curley and Carlsson at the novel’s end , without the kindly conduct of Slim towards a grieving George.

Thus Slim   is very important in terms of the novel’s possibly hopeful resolution after the tragedy of Lennie’s death and without him, all would look very lonely indeed  for George.

This short exploration of the presentation of Slim in Of Mice and Men will look at three  quotations that add to the interesting characterization of Slim by Steinbeck’s third person narrator.

Remember characterization works like a series of ” real’  encounters. The reader accumulates a series of ideas about a character and eventually may arrive at some ‘verdict’ . Steinbeck deliberately varies the details about his characters in Of Mice and men so that the characters seem ‘real’ and complex-like ‘real’  life!

The reader’s first experience of Slim is as a disembodied voice as he greets the trespassing figure of Curley’s wife after has come to inspect the ‘new boys’ George and Lennie as they settle into the bunk house. The contrast between the ‘girl‘ who comes to take the ‘sunlight’ away from the friendship between George and Lennie, and the diplomatic good sense of Slim instantly recommends him to the read even before we actually meet him.

”Slim’s voice came through the door.’Hi, Good Lookin”

‘I’m trying to find Curley, Slim.’

‘Well, you ain’t tryin’ very hard.I seen him goin’ in your house.’

She was suddenly very apprehensive. ‘Bye Boys.’ 

 

This is a revealing exchange as Slim’s behaviour toward’s Curley’s wife indicates both protectiveness and care. Slim is assured enough of his position in the ranch to banter in a flattering way with the attention seeking figure of Curley’s  needy, lonely wife. He is momentarily giving her the attention she craves.

But he is also aware of the danger her flirtatious behaviour poses to his men and the stability of the ranch. So he seeks to remove her from the area, without offending her. Perhaps he is also aware of her difficult marriage to the violent Curley and he is trying to help her too, through this gentle rebuttal of her lame excuse for lingering around the bunkhouse.

Curley’s wife does know that this is  very much a ‘safe’ form of banter,  as she also tries to apologize to Slim for her trespassing into the ranch hands’  bunk house.

Hence Slim’s reply above,  is an ironic and subtle warning about her behaviour and also of her personal danger if she is discovered  in such a compromising place by her husband Curley.

Curley’s wife takes immediate heed of the warning and hurries away:’suddenly apprehensive ’ This seems to indicate her own fear of Curley perhaps because of his temper and predilection for violence. Presumably she is also indebted to Slim for this gentle, yet pointed warning.

Slim’s status is therefore confirmed-from the beginning   as an intelligent and caring leader whose opinions are to be trusted and respected.

Always look at the ‘arrival’ of a character in a text as this ‘entrance’ offers a context by which we can read their likely development and role. 

A little later in the novel when Slim’s ‘calm and God-like eyes’   are ‘fastened’ on George during a subsequent conversation in the bunk house,  they encourage the latter to talk about the origins of his relationship with Lennie.

George’s spontaneous trust of Slim seems the outcome of Slim’s unusually developed sensitivity to others, something all the more special as this time and setting seem to produce characters who are selfish and defensive, rather than emotionally nurturing.

Interestingly, although the  description of Slim’s’God-like eyes’  eyes, is delivered from the third person narrator, the view also seems to reflect the opinons  of the other ranch hands. This reference emphasizes Slim’s authority and exceptional status on the ranch. He seems omniscient in a very flawed world. His ‘hatchet face was ageless.’  Slim cannot be quantified or cheaply ‘known’. He represents something different and special on the ranch, something wise and mature, though tough too as the description suggests.

This device also allows the back story about Lennie  to unfold in a natural way, allowing the reader to learn about Lennie’s Aunt Clara and the incident at Weed without any obviously clumsy narrative ‘memory’.

The final glimpse we have of Slim I have mentioned briefly in my introduction to this short reading of Slim’s character.

For when George kills Lennie in order to protect him from Curley’s vindictive rage, Slim recognizes the real importance of what George has had to do and he offers George support where Curley and Carlson remain ignorantly insensitive.

Slim twitched George’s elbow…

”George let himself be helped to his feet.’Yeah, a drink.’

Slim said, ‘You hadda George. I swear you hadda. Come on with me.’ He led George into the entrance of the trail and up toward the highway.’ 

Slim assists George here, reversing the unequal dependency of Lennie on George. The repetition of ‘hadda’ underlines Slim’s knowledge of what George felt beholden to do. Slim’s sensitivity to George’s grief and horror is in direct contrast to the heartless insensitivity of Steinbeck ending to the novel where Carlson says to Curley: ‘What the hell is eatin’ them two guys?’

Imagine if George had no friend like Slim and was left alone with these two men for comfort? The novel would have felt very hellish and hopeless surely?

By contrast also Slim leads George ‘up’ suggesting he is leaving the hellish past behind and moving towards something more positive and lighter. We feel that Slim’s friendship with George is a relationship between equals and could lead to a better future for both of them, for perhaps even Slim with his secure status on the ranch has needed a colleague on his emotional and intellectual level?

 

Quickdraw

I wear the two, the mobile and the landline phones,

like guns, slung from the pockets on my hips. I’m all

alone. You ring, quickdraw, your voice a pellet

in my ear, and hear me groan.

You’ve wounded me.

Next time, you speak after the tone. I twirl the phone,

then squeeze the trigger of my tongue, wide of the mark.

You choose your spot, then blast me

through the heart.

And this is love, high noon, calamity, hard liqour

in the old Last Chance saloon. I show the mobile

to the sheriff; in my boot, another one’s

concealed. You text them both at once. I reel.

Down on my knees, I fumble for the phone,

read the silver bullets of your kiss. Take this …

and this … and this … and this … and this …

Overview.

Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Quickdraw playfully explores the ambivalent role of the  telephone during an argument during a  love affair.  We may believe that  communication is a good thing in a relationship,  but this poem ironically reveals that too much accessibility gives lovers the opportunity for behaviors both destructive and hurtful.

Being ‘ in touch’ is significantly a most anti-tender experience in this playfully affecting poem. Words have become transformed into metaphorical pellets or bullets, so that dialogue becomes fraught with verbal missiles intent on emotional damage.

Interestingly Duffy plays with the  Western Cowboy convention of the gunfight at high noon. Typically in Westerns like High Noon, The Magnificent Seven  and the later Tombstone, cowboys fought each other at set times in the main street; for money, honor and territory.

The fastest  meanest,  most degenerate  gunslingers would face the solitary Sheriff or ‘Shane’ -like heroic figure, who would courageously remain alone in town to defend the weak and virtuous against all the odds.

Duffy ‘borrows’ such a scenario for her poem in order to entertain the reader and to provoke them into new ways of considering their own experiences. The playful combination of mobile phone and gunslinger ‘teases’ the reader into thought!

Carol Ann Duffy also enjoys recreating such a scenario as she enjoys creating new personas in her poetry. It’s a form of literary cross dressing or ventriloquism. Here in Quickdraw, we detect a certain urgency and tension as the inevitable duel between one ‘cowboy/girl/ lover’ fight l it out via the telephone!

Think About.

Carol Ann Duffy’s poem appropriates very familiar objects from today’s daily world and makes us think about their impact upon our hearts and minds. Is the art of communication really enhanced by so many ways of ‘getting in touch’ or are these ‘ways’ in fact far from intimate? Are we less in touch than we realise as everything is so rushed, reactive and sometimes ill considered?

Ironically perhaps, do they distance us in fact from kindness and reflection, so that hurtful behavior may be  too easily experienced as we react immediately and have no time to reconsider the effect of our reactions?

Stanza One.

I wear the two, the mobile and the landline phones,

like guns, slung from the pockets on my hips. I’m all

alone. You ring, quickdraw, your voice a pellet

in my ear, and hear me groan.

Love can make us defensive. We ‘wear’ ‘phones as if they are weapons; weapons for us to use aggressively,  as well as to be utilized against us. This is the irony of ‘phones. We are both receivers as well as deliverers.

How many times have we all encountered hostility over the ‘phone? And perhaps mobiles with their shortened messages by text make hostility easier or understanding so much harder?

The poet is here in a state of expectation as well as preparation. ‘Phones are ‘like guns, slung from my hips.’ Love and its fall out make us ever ready for combat, for the repercussions of challenged intimacy.

Why does the poet declare that she is ‘all alone.’ Is this her normal state? Or is it a loaded admission? An admission loaded with irony? I am alone  so we could be enjoying our relationship, yet here we are fighting? Is there someone else involved too? Perhaps the ‘sheriff’ mentioned later in the poem?

Has  her lover has left her?  Or has  her public partner   gone away, so that her private lover and her can battle it out across all the phone systems? Tension in the poem seems complex and entangled.

Then the  inevitable  expected call comes and takes the speaker by surprise: ‘You ring, quickdraw, your voice a pellet/in my ear, and hear me groan.’ The lover attacks first. They are the faster gunslinger; is ‘right’ on their side or are they more prepared, more used to verbal combat?

The words damage the poet, so she groans, wounded by her lover, less equipped to deal with her lover’s quickdraw than her two guns suggest.

Does the lover enjoy inflicting this verbal wound upon the poet? Is this exchange about point scoring with metaphorical  ’bullets/pellets’.?

Stanza Two.

You’ve wounded me.

Next time, you speak after the tone. I twirl the phone,

then squeeze the trigger of my tongue, wide of the mark.

You choose your spot, then blast me

 This is a powerful declaration. ‘You’ve wounded me.’ Love involves hurt. Love is HURT perhaps?

Communication can kill.  Just like the Quickdraw of the title. And presumably this is the danger of intimacy  We know enough about our beloved to damage them , especially when love renders us vulnerable and more susceptible to hurt. We lash out with the intent to wound.

How brave is it to admit that someone has caused you pain? Or is such an admission egocentric or ‘weak’? Or designed to make the other feel guilty?

The reactive quality of this Quickdraw continues in the second line. ‘Next time, you speak after the tone.‘This is a battle conducted by telephone!

Once again, being in communication or being ‘available’ is dangerous as we literally can be found and then attacked. Once again think of the poetic conceit Duffy is deploying. Survival needs a fast gun and  adequate protection. A Quickdraw!

As the poet/narrator retaliates, the ‘verbal trigger of my tongue’  attack goes ‘wide of the mark’. Perhaps the poet is less adept at this conflict within a relationship than the lover. For the lover is an expert assailant’you choose your spot, then blast me..‘ Notice this line is not end- stopped as we might expect with such an attack. In fact it goes over the line into the next stanza via the use of enjambment. The attack is sustained and destructive  as it goes ‘through the heart.‘ Words have the power to deeply wound like real bullets. Wounds carry on, the spill over into different parts of one’s life.

Perhaps bullets are in some ways cleaner and more honest?

Stanza Three

through the heart.

And this is love, high noon, calamity, hard liqour

in the old Last Chance saloon. I show the mobile

to the sheriff; in my boot, another one’s

The noun ‘heart’ is then end-stopped as we linger with the impact of this ‘fatal’ hit. Those whom we love, often know enough about us to hurt us deeply, deeply enough to ‘kill’.

The irony and pathos of the next line emanates from the list of iconic associations with the Wild West gunfight: ‘And this is love, high noon, calamity, hard liquor…’ This list is contextualized in the ‘old Last Chance saloon‘. Surely this place is a metaphor for the love affair itself? Love it seems brings disorder, chaotic behaviour and the hurtfulness of fights.

The poignant or cynical resume of the love affair is cut short by the appearance of a mysterious ‘sheriff’ whose identity we remain unsure of. Does the poet have a partner who asks to see what all the texting ‘phone furore might be? Couldi t be that the lover is  female too? 

At any rate, surely the number of ‘phones that the poet owns connotes secrecy? Why would you own several ‘phones unless you are leading a double life?  The fact that like a real gunslinger  one ‘phone remains hidden in the boot, yet is known to the lover, leads the reader to believe this is a secret relationship and perhaps that is why it is so riddled with intensity?

Once again Duffy deploys enjambment at the end of this stanza to give an ongoing, unfinished aspect to the events of the poem.  In fact the word ‘concealed‘ is then sealed as you can see just below, by the emphatic use of a full stop. This adds irony to the device and once again stresses the secrecy of the relationship.

Stanza Four. 

concealed. You text them both at once. I reel.

Down on my knees, I fumble for the phone,

read the silver bullets of your kiss. Take this …

and this … and this … and this … and this …

 The lover is not to be deceived. They know the strategies and ways of the poet. ‘You text them both at once.’ This is all out assault; passionate verbal victory too? For what is said, makes the poet ‘reel’. Is is a revelation, a message that cannot be ignored or denied? Or even we wonder an ultimatum with a declaration of love. For look how the poem ends with ‘the silver bullets of your kiss.’ Several famous gunslingers used ‘silver bullets‘ These are precious kisses or bullets of love as they seem to render the poet submissive and perhaps yielding to the victory of the other. 

Is the submission exciting erotically? Or is this about relief through the release or catharsis of the fight? making up extra passionate perhaps after the stormy exchanges that have lead up to this reconciliation?

Who knows. We are left to make up our own ending to this ‘gun fight.’ Will the lovers love again or is it all  over in a famous hail of bullets? Or is it perversely a storm of kisses, healing over the squabble yet again? 

Time and time again students ask how can they improve their writing and I always reply with the same imperative. READ!

How simple and how empowering!

Reading inspires you to write and to write effectively. If you read, you have access to so many different minds, minds equipped with alternative perceptions and new ways of using language. Shifting our word patterns creates fresh writing.

No one writes well without reading well

I love reading short stories as they are so unforgiving of waffle. You have to get it right, you have to intrigue the reader NOW not later. And nothing has to be resolved absolutely or finally. All is suggestiveness. All has to PAY creatively. All has to MEAN.

One of the best stylists in the English language is Saki. I would love to be able to draw out a mind map of his head-brimming with his anarchic ideas, his strange meetings and subversive resolutions.

Saki loves irony. He knows its power to unsettle and to heal. Irony unearths uneasy yet often liberating truths!

“Good gracious!  Have any lives been lost?”

“Heaps, I should say.  The second housemaid has already identified three bodies that have floated past the billiard-room window as being the young man she’s engaged to.  Either she’s engaged to a large assortment of the population round here or else she’s very careless at identification.  Of course it may be the same body coming round again and again in a swirl; I hadn’t thought of that.”

Irony has an alternative fairness in Saki and this keeps the reader reading.I love the throwaway pretense at self correction: ‘I hadn’t thought of that’. But surely she will! Vera’s mind is a mind on fire with improvised possibilities. She is a consummate story teller like so many of Saki’s heroines:adaptable, circumspect and provocative.

She appreciates the value of alternative irony!

When we read these two extracts from Saki’s two short stories, ‘The Lull and Tobermory,  we find that Saki uses irony rather ‘alternatively’ and that we enjoy such alternatives heartily. Saki’s mind is very much a mind at play!

‘So what do I mean by his alternative use of irony then?

By ‘alternatively’ I mean that the expectations generated through the use of a more conventional form of prediction/foreshadowing are subverted radically through the intervention of the surreal.

We definitely find that spending time with Saki’s protagonists leads us to explore maps of the mind previously unknown!

In other words Saki has a most unusual sense of reality and a wicked interest in punishing hypocrisy or rigid modes of behaviour through the intervention of the eccentric, the surreal,and the fantastical.

For when Vera promises (The Lull) that things remain to be  ’seen’ we have no idea what these ‘seen’ things might be  let alone what they might lead to! Ordinarily we trust the ‘seen’ or the visible’. This seems to make things credible and available for our judgment.

 

Look at the use of the adverb ‘moderately’ in the first extract from The Lull below. The word ‘moderately’ reinforced by another adverb ‘tactfully’ reflects Latimer’s staid, dull character and communicates his self seeking  neutrality where animals are concerned. Such a man would never be enthusiastic we guess, about anything. And it is his dullness that provokes Vera- the -teenager, who enjoys making Latimer forget his political pamphlets in favour of a ‘small black pig’ and a ‘game cock’.

 

 

“I know he’s going to sit up half the night working up points for his final speeches,” said Mrs. Durmot regretfully; “however, we’ve kept politics at arm’s length all the afternoon and evening.  More than that we cannot do.”

“That remains to be seen,” said Vera, but she said it to herself.

Latimer had scarcely shut his bedroom door before he was immersed in a sheaf of notes and pamphlets, while a fountain-pen and pocket-book were brought into play for the due marshalling of useful facts and discreet fictions.  He had been at work for perhaps thirty-five minutes, and the house was seemingly consecrated to the healthy slumber of country life, when a stifled squealing and scuffling in the passage was followed by a loud tap at his door.  Before he had time to answer, a much- encumbered Vera burst into the room with the question; “I say, can I leave these here?”

“These” were a small black pig and a lusty specimen of black-red gamecock.__

Latimer was moderately fond of animals, and particularly interested in small livestock rearing from the economic point of view; in fact, one of the pamphlets on which he was at that moment engaged warmly advocated the further development of the pig and poultry industry in our rural districts; but he was pardonably unwilling to share even a commodious bedroom with samples of henroost and stye products.

“Wouldn’t they be happier somewhere outside?” he asked, tactfully expressing his own preference in the matter in an apparent solicitude for theirs.

“There is no outside,” said Vera impressively, “nothing but a waste of dark, swirling waters.  The reservoir at Brinkley has burst.”

“I didn’t know there was a reservoir at Brinkley,” said Latimer.

“Well, there isn’t now, it’s jolly well all over the place, and as we stand particularly low we’re the centre of an inland sea just at present.  You see the river has overflowed its banks as well.”

“Good gracious!  Have any lives been lost?”

“Heaps, I should say.  The second housemaid has already identified three bodies that have floated past the billiard-room window as being the young man she’s engaged to.  Either she’s engaged to a large assortment of the population round here or else she’s very careless at identification.  Of course it may be the same body coming round again and again in a swirl; I hadn’t thought of that.”

 

 Tobermory is one of Saki’s best stories and this extract introduces the talking Tobermory to his flabbergasted audience in the drawing room. Saki wickedly enmeshes cat like features,’ velvet tread’  within the characterisation of his eavesdropping hero. The insouciance of Tobermory, ‘studied unconcern’  perfectly fits his world weary superiority and arrogance.

The nervous incompetence of Lady Blemley’s milk pouring is ironically converted into a human fault and human neglect of a much valued carpet make, Axminster’. This shift from the ordinary to the extraordinary is seamless, ironically alternative  and superbly sardonic. 

We believe Tobermory would talk in this way. We adore him immediately  He is the embodiment of our secret urges to tell the truth and to shock. 

If only we had the swagger of Tobermory! 

In the midst of the clamour Tobermory entered the room and made his way with velvet tread and studied unconcern across the group seated round the tea-table.

A sudden hush of awkwardness and constraint fell on the company. Somehow there seemed an element of embarrassment in addressing on equal terms a domestic cat of acknowledged dental ability.

“Will you have some milk, Tobermory?” asked Lady Blemley in a rather strained voice.

“I don’t mind if I do,” was the response, couched in a tone of even indifference. A shiver of suppressed excitement went through the listeners, and Lady Blemley might be excused for pouring out the saucerful of milk rather unsteadily.

“I’m afraid I’ve spilt a good deal of it,” she said apologetically.

“After all, it’s not my Axminster,” was Tobermory’s rejoinder.

 

This still remains one of the most vivid and revealing dreams of my life! I woke up feeling so protective of my dream companion; deeply affected by  the emotional power and resonance of this strange encounter in the dusky heat of a Roman night. 

Who could resist this beautiful arctic fox who needed to escape with me on a red piaggio scooter!

Still present. Still stunning. Still Amore!

Not every day you wake up wondering why you have spent all night riding around Rome’s secret squares on a Red Piaggio Scooter with an arctic white fox.

 

But I have.

 

And I do…

 

Who told my mother of my shame,
Who told my father of my dear?
Oh who but Maude, my sister Maude,
Who lurked to spy and peer.

Cold he lies, as cold as stone,

With his clotted curls about his face:

The comeliest corpse in all the world

And worthy of a queen’s embrace.

You might have spared his soul, sister,
Have spared my soul, your own soul too:
Though I had not been born at all,
He’d never have looked at you.

My father may sleep in Paradise,
My mother at Heaven-gate:
But sister Maude shall get no sleep
Either early or late.

My father may wear a golden gown,
My mother a crown may win;
If my dear and I knocked at Heaven-gate
Perhaps they’d let us in:
But sister Maude, oh sister Maude,
Bide you with death and sin.

Christina Rossetti with Frances Rossetti, her mother.

Overview

How wicked is ‘Sister Maude’?

This seems the main concern preoccupying  the reader  in this creepy and unsettling poem. For Sister Maude  is a poem which explores the  purposeful malevolence of Sister Maude herself, a woman so jealous of her sister’s happiness that she destroys it in every way she can.

The narrator of the poem relates here  a tale of  shocking sibling rivalry which  poisons the lives of every one concerned.This poison is shown through the disturbing details of the poem as the narrator reveals the shocking extent of her sister’s interference in her life and that of her lover and close family.

The poem progresses quickly through such details ending with the profoundly bitter last line where Sister Maude is condemned to ‘bide (you)with death and sin.’ The accumulative effect of this final declaration is powerfully corrosive. There can be no forgiveness, no spiritual sanctuary for Sister Maude, even in a poem littered with religious references. This religion leads to the binary choices/ oppositions between heaven and hell.

Further Thoughts.

How ironic might it be that the poem’s ‘ballad’ form ( arranged in quatrains with regular metre) reveals a sordid tale of sibling betrayal precipitated by romantic rivalry? The regularity of the poem’s form is set against the conflict and disorder of the relationship between the two sisters. This incongruity adds to the dramatic effect of the poem and makes the words have a very special ‘pulse’ as we read about the destructiveness of jealousy.

Thus the sound of the poem, its rhythm, communicates an escalating sense of inevitability as the characters move through the ballad to their own fate in either heaven or hell. Perhaps the poet is revealing the way that our choices have consequences that reverberate far beyond this ‘petty’ world and we may damn ourselves forever by our negative actions  here.

Stanza One. 

Who told my mother of my shame,
Who told my father of my dear?
Oh who but Maude, my sister Maude,
Who lurked to spy and peer.

Demeter had seen her. She had been waiting and now she had seen her.Of course Demeter knew that if she looked for the woman then the woman would not be there.

But when she didn’t look in that way, then of course the shape of the golden woman appeared. And how golden she was. The light caught at her hair and radiated a heat that burnt at Demeter. All the years between here and then just sprinkled around at the edges of the woman.

Why did everyone worry about history thought Demeter and smiled  at the woman’s shape as she walked towards her home.  History was just a net to convince you that things could be trapped and stared at.

The golden haired woman smiled at Demeter through time’s amber corridor, and for once Demeter did not feel alone. She had reached the gate and felt through her damp gloves at the key in her pocket. She stood still and felt the orange shape start to cover her arms and her feet, then her mouth started to taste of orange too and she moved her tongue slowly around her mouth. The ground unsteadied her, shifting slabs of stone and planting flowers; orange and purple cyclamen she whispered; orange and blue hibiscus.

‘All for you Demeter’ the woman vowed.’all for you’ and then slipped away with her golden light  into  time’s shadows, before Demeter could whisper her thanks. 

I am hooked on Father Brown- currently drip feeding myself his adventures  via the iplayer!

This new interest has temporarily broken my fixation with another murderous area, Midsomer, whose perfect   prettiness veils  unsettling secrets never laid to rest. Midsomer Murders  like Father Brown uses captivating theme music to jar creepily with the often gruesome  discoveries, making us rethink the meaning of propinquity!

In the new Father Brown, psychological  mayhem reigns on  in sleepy villages; grudges ferment dangerously beneath the apparently civilized surface of parochial 50′s life. No place seems more perilous than a well attended  church fete.! No place seems  less safe for the criminally minded than in the vicinity of the apparently naive  Father Brown.

The transplantation of the Father Brown tales to the 1950′s may upset the Chesterton purists,as the original tales were published in the early 20th century. However I feel that  one age of repression  has just been exchanged for another, and that the success of any version  depends upon the characterization  of Father Brown himself.

 

The Priest has to be played as a subtly understated,  yet  compelling  figure,  whose ability to think ‘otherwise’ about crime  leaves the more conventional  Police Detectives flummoxed. Father Brown pays real attention and I do like the slightly Patrick Jane(The Mentalist) or Goren(Law And Order)  physical ’tic’ involving the gentlest tilt of the head.

Head Tilting is a signifier of thoughtfulness and imagination. In this I can see also another tenacious detective, always overlooked until way too late for the criminal- Columbo !

Father Brown is no Sherlock Holmes. He is not a cold, detached observer of human foibles with a fatal weakness for drugs. He is instead a master observer of incongruity. He notices mismatches and thinks laterally or ‘otherwise’.  And although he is a tenacious detective and pursues cases to the uncomfortable end, he is compassionate and accepting too.

Chesterton is also one of the best readers of Dickens and his essays on Dickens I find some of the most refreshing ever written.  In Father Brown, I enjoy the idiosyncrasy of the writing, the alternative understanding of human nature and motivation. Here is a extract from one of the most famous stories, The Hammer of God, a tale interestingly updated in the new series:

After a moment he resumed, looking tranquilly out over the plain with his pale grey eyes. “I knew a man,” he said, “who began by worshipping with others before the altar, but who grew fond of high and lonely places to pray from, corners or niches in the belfry or the spire. And once in one of those dizzy places, where the whole world seemed to turn under him like a wheel, his brain turned also, and he fancied he was God. So that, though he was a good man, he committed a great crime.”

Wilfred’s face was turned away, but his bony hands turned blue and white as they tightened on the parapet of stone.

“He thought it was given to him to judge the world and strike down the sinner. He would never have had such a thought if he had been kneeling with other men upon a floor. But he saw all men walking about like insects. He saw one especially strutting just below him, insolent and evident by a bright green hat–a poisonous insect.”

Rooks cawed round the corners of the belfry; but there was no other sound till Father Brown went on.

“This also tempted him, that he had in his hand one of the most awful engines of nature; I mean gravitation, that mad and quickening rush by which all earth’s creatures fly back to her heart when released. See, the inspector is strutting just below us in the smithy. If I were to toss a pebble over this parapet it would be something like a bullet by the time it struck him. If I were to drop a hammer–even a small hammer–”

Wilfred Bohun threw one leg over the parapet, and Father Brown had him in a minute by the collar.

“Not by that door,” he said quite gently; “that door leads to hell.”

I 

In this story, Father Brown imagines the changed perspective brought about by looking down upon the world from a high church tower. Such a perspective he believes can give an observer a ‘god like‘ arrogance, dangerously aided by the force of gravity!

 

For Father Brown recognizes that the reason that a small hammer can mash a man’s brains out completely, is because it has been dropped from a high place; a place high enough to give the hammer thrower delusions about his moral rights over the sins of others.  So he takes the murderous vicar back to the church tower and shows him the view in order to encourage a confession.

Simply brilliant!

I love writing six word tales. They have a intimate compression that ‘leaks’ drama and mystery, adding resonance to a simple idea so that the idea becomes wider and suggestive. Like poetry, the words each have to connect in immediate yet sometimes unexpected ways.

It’s painting in  short strokes, so that the intimate  juxtaposition between each stroke/word conjures up an effect. Even the single word ‘wolf’ has an intense resonance. It is brimming with associations…

Years ago I read Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago and saw the film. The scene where a lonely Zhivago writes freezing in a snowy waste, surrounded by the magisterial gathering of wolves,  has magical hypnotic power.

Zhivago has to  write because he loves Lara passionately  and time is not on his side. 

He creates because he is at the very edge of creation, bounded by the ambivalent  intimacy of wolves!!!

The wolves wait, predators capable of bloody savagery, yet also respectful of all the world seeming to be in exile, to be retreating from human connection,  as the  Russian revolution widened its geographical dominance and powers.

Wolves are loyal, courageous and exceptionally beautiful creatures whose eyes have the power to mesmerize  When Zhivago looks out across the frozen wastes he is looking at another manifestation of himself, of his steadfast, enduring, yet savage  passion.

I reread these yesterday and was reminded of two of my favourite texts on this site. Dylan Thomas’ poem ‘Do not go gentle…’ about his dying father and David Almond’s graphic novel The Savage. Winterson has also admitted she is a savage at heart in her best novel, The Passion and I know Emily Bronte in both her poetry and Wuthering Heights  gave unsettling expression to the savagery that lurks beneath our  veneer of civilisation and manners.

Love and loss makes all of us  savage at times.

So these tales are just a collection of glimpses of the wolf outside and within. Check for fur!

Wolf Tales

Your eyes,

      more wilderness,

                 than prayer.

Stand greyheartedly

   alone enough

to dare.

                                                    That unholy winter’s night became you…

Your gaze

raw enough

to burn.

                                            Their ridged darkness promised passion, blood…

Only you

And my undivided

 attention…

                                   Our lost places,

uncover souls’ propinquity…

They shouted for me

” ‘There they go,’ cried Constance, and then added in a gasp, ‘In Heaven’s name, what are they hunting?’

“It was certainly no mortal fox. It stood more than twice as high, had a short, ugly head, and an enormous thick neck.

” ‘It’s a hyena,’ I cried; ‘it must have escaped from Lord Pabham’s Park.’

“At that moment the hunted beast turned and faced its pursuers, and the hounds (there were only about six couple of them) stood round in a half-circle and looked foolish. Evidently they had broken away from the rest of the pack on the trail of this alien scent, and were not quite sure how to treat their quarry now they had got him.

“The hyena hailed our approach with unmistakable relief and demonstrations of friendliness. It had probably been accustomed to uniform kindness from humans, while its first experience of a pack of hounds had left a bad impression. The hounds looked more than ever embarrassed as their quarry paraded its sudden intimacy with us, and the faint toot of a horn in the distance was seized on as a welcome signal for unobtrusive departure. Constance and I and the hyena were left alone in the gathering twilight.

” ‘What are we to do?’ asked Constance.

” ‘What a person you are for questions,’ I said.

” ‘Well, we can’t stay here all night with a hyena,’ she retorted.

” ‘I don’t know what your ideas of comfort are,’ I said; ‘but I shouldn’t think of staying here all night even without a hyena. My home may be an unhappy one, but at least it has hot and cold water laid on, and domestic service, and other conveniences which we shouldn’t find here. We had better make for that ridge of trees to the right; I imagine the Crowley road is just beyond.’

Oscar Wilde referred to hunting as ‘the unspeakable chasing the uneatable’ and this succinct  summary is rather aptly represented   in Saki’s short story, Esme.  The Esme tale is woven inside another tale and this act of entwining, gives a delightfully surreal  aspect to the macabre exuberance of the narrative. Indeed the exuberance seems to give the reader permisssion to expect the unexpected and to revel in the disrespect for convention.

It is certainly a tale to be passed on, to be exchanged, as its power lends itself to retelling, albeit in a very knowing, arch way! 

The tale is narrated on the outside by Clovis, a recurring character-narrator in several Saki tales. Clovis is suitably louche and sardonic  and relays many tales of the extraordinary that lurk just  beyond the  safe threshold of the shrubbery!

This framing device gives a recurring context and authenticity to the casually macabre antics and encounters of the mannered soicety of  Saki’s world.

Saki escalates the ludicrous with dead pan ease in Esme and the prominence of the lost hyena serves to remind the reader that earnestness is as much a sin in Saki’s world as that of Oscar Wilde!

Only the resourcefully imaginative survive in Saki.

Lateral lying feeds Saki’s fiction and his narratives follow the direction of the least conventional, the most grotesque or absurd.

Saki dares to say to himself,  ’I wonder…suppose that…’

in Saki’s hyena tale,  Esme shows the reader where following the pleasure principle might lead!  Miss Prism’s handbag a close tie!

Demeter was walking in her favourite wood. She had left school for the dentist and then found no reason in her form diary to return that day. All the golden leaves lay sodden before her like some dismal bridal train. She felt in her duffle pocket and discovered something chipped and round and dared herself to name it before she clambered up to the folly at the top of the lane. Was it red? Was it edible? Precious?  She realised she was talking to herself again.

Her teeth tasted sedimenty and she breathed out on her damp glove. Sometimes she had to breathe out to check if she was really here, if she was Demeter or some mirage of a person sprung up out of the earth; the rocks, she decided dreamily. Mud squelched up over her boots. Rich dark brown stains. She sucked in her cheeks and swallowed. She tasted sweetness.

A few moments later and she was at the folly and peeped over the broken wall to stare down at the grey lake. A few friendless  ducks swam by and she had a clear view to the motorway if she really concentrated. Something whirred in her other pocket. Her mobile. A text. Demeter read the dental inquiry from her mother and sent back a legion of kisses.

‘They get everywhere’ said a voice she recognised. And there was that woman from the New Year walk, clad again  in a huge bear coat, smiling with a mouth that went on and on. She had the bluest eyes she had ever met. She could not remember them from New Year. Was it the same woman? The woman laughed.

Demeter felt she was wandering around the edges of this woman, following her mouth’s strange performance and strangely dizzy as the brown eyes gazed upon her.

More mud she felt beneath her boot and she staggered a little sideways. And then took a step back and leant against the wall.

‘Last time we met you were with a new friend and this time you are alone, yet here we are meeting again. Demeter. And you can see all the way across today, and the woman pointed across the lake to a place that seemed to form just on the border of what Demeter thought she had seen. A smoky avenue of trees that took your eyes with them and then seemed to lose them. Was there a door?

‘I am making a new map today Demeter’ said the woman’ and I want you to help me – perhaps. ‘

-Perhaps? Was this an invitation or a doubt?

‘Old maps are so constricting after all,’  continued her companion who was now equipped with some unusually yellow paper and a soft pencil and was sketching away as she turned her head slowly, this way to that.

‘ I make maps once every change of government and then we can all see more clearly where we have to go, you see. ‘

And Demeter did see, though what she saw eluded her, but she thought it might have a door and a path and even a dog perhaps.  She looked down at her boots and they were no longer muddy and were shining in the bright light which had suddenly arrived from nowhere.

Even her gloves felt warm and Demeter laughed as she pulled out the small object

That was a marble afterall. She was pleased she knew this. A marble from her pocket. It was amber now she could see it, amber with a slash of ancient honey. When she held it in this light there was something tiny caught in its centre, shaped as a heart, a very small heart. She held the marble against her cheek, strangely scalding now against skin. Not even her own skin. She was slipping into another place, the amber ball expanding her senses into one another. She could taste the amber, honey trickling down her throat like the residue of a long kiss. And then she could feel it there, here, in her breast, tingling, burning at her edges. It was a centre, pure heat.  Pure time.

‘You have many hidden places Demeter and it is your destiny to seek them again. Find what you have hidden and set them free. ‘

Warm words; courageous words for a girl who had always felt afraid. She lay her gloved hand across her breast and could sense each idea swirling around beneath her touch. Winter, summer, autumn; words and seasons like leaves; like care; like love.

‘Like love itself ‘completed the woman who was still drawing out her map. ‘Find the heart of the journey and the journey is over.’

And then the  amber marble seemed to dazzle Demeter with its dark centre which promised so much. It matched its pulse against her own. She met the rhythm and its honey climbed inside her. There was that beat; one; three, five, seven. Prime time. Honey time. Secret love.  Molten time.

She turned the amber ball once again against her skin and felt its heat: electron the Greeks had called it. Elektron. The energy of the past. The small heart with its secret pulse seeping into her, taking her through something that she could sense but not see. She saw Amy’s ring for a moment, she saw Amy’s face and then lost her in the swirling glittering gate that seemed to descend upon her. Unbounded impressions were everywhere around her, nothing remained itself ; inky darkness swallowed her. Demeter put the amber in her mouth and tasted the raw ancient honey.

Pine resin from the neck of a Roman wife. The woman’s throat pulsed and blood poured down her slim neck; sticky scarlet stains upon Demeter’s mouth as she tried to save the woman who was staring at the dark sky through eyes that were already  milky with death. Her hands trembled at Demeter’s lips as her visitor tried to breathe her life back again as her soul yielded to a Godless wound. Farewell my strange angel Demeter wanted to say. But her voice was through a heavy darkness, curtained from the souls of the dead.

‘You cannot save her’ said the woman.’She died 2000 years ago. Her husband betrayed her for his own life. A trade he could not resist. They killed him in the mountains. Fed him to their pigs.’

Demeter smeared her bloody mouth on her coat and smelt the stain. This is real, this is her suffering on my arm. This is new blood.

Nothing ends Demeter, everything is carried through time, here and there and everywhere. Shapes make us believe that this is that and so we trust to our seeing that sees so little and then we get glimpses, and here the woman paused, You get glimpses Demeter that there is something else, just at the corner of your eye waiting to be known.

The woman turned and looked back along the path. I think we are about to become three again Demeter.

There you are! That voice. Amy had missed her.

At first there were just two. A pair of heavy hands that did things and then suddenly could do nothing at all. Looking back there, I am aware that I am looking at his hands still, reading them as if to decide how much of me he needed, how much I could let go. We were a family of season watchers for whom summer could never be too long or too hot. Autumn and winter would come and his fingers would start to slow down, freezing solid like bunches of grotesque stalactites. I can see his hands like claws in the air trying to make a point at breakfast, angry at the papers, trying to lift a cup. I reach across and sugar his tea. The sound of the spoon on the cup.

Sta-lac-tites. I spell again slowly, bringing the past near. I am small once again, on a school visit, staring at cavern after cavern of limestone contortions, numb and ridged to the touch. I trail my hand against them just to be sure. I had just learned about metaphor and simile and felt unexpectedly sick. A favourite teacher told us that this was a magical forest of nature that we should carry in our minds forever – for nature had great secrets to reveal after all and only a mile beneath a prettyDerbyshireVillage. How picturesque she said.

The masquerade persisted for years as we would set off one Sunday a month in packed squashy Cortina cars, families balancing extra kids on knees, bound for one of Castleton’s car-parks. They were always full of Mr Longson’s yellow coaches that had got there before us and chatty queues for the ladies toilet by the National Trust bins. My childhood was full of backseat arguments about which way stalagmites grew and who had found the best piece of Blue John and what all those secret minerals were doing depositing things that drew thousands of visitors and made Sam Longson a millionaire before he was forty. I kept my mind tightly wrapped those times, never daring to ask why nature might leave things inside you that couldn’t be given back. Not ever.

And so I looked at my father’s hands twenty years later and faced up to the metaphors. I thought of Castleton with its ancient minerals and of the deadly secret deposits that even then were already trying to steal away his movement and his future.

Seasons were now irrelevant. His saucepans were too heavy. His coats impossible for him to put on. He would hold out his arms like a child when he wanted to go out and I would lift the material gently around him, buttoning him up against the cold and patting down awkward creases that would frustrate him.

I became aware of the weight of everything. I would pick things up even by myself at night, balancing this against that, trying out handles on doors, testing locks… Until you are ill you take the weight of your world completely for granted. And then suddenly you are surrounded by hostile, foreign things: coats; keys; shirt buttons; letters.

Each day for him was impassable without help, without others’ awkwardness, his pain; his familiar environment suddenly his arch-enemy. I went around detached from ordinary objects, angry that illness makes us know our separateness even before we leave.

Or we beg to leave.

The Doctors would try new things – of course. They were aware he was a young man and wanted a full life. They smiled.  Of course Mr Wilson. No awkwardness here. Miss Taylor will write soon. A neat strip of perfectly new tablets. Keep a record please.  We will monitor your progress with interest.

When the sore throat came it seemed so commonplace. It was a spring Friday. Bright yellow daffodils by the front door.  Just a sore throat that was all. He promised to take aspirin and we would see him on Monday.  Monday came and no, he couldn’t decorate our stairs for a week or so and broke a promise to my mother. I asked him to open his mouth and gazed into an angry scarlet cavern. I tried to imagine him swallowing and tried swallowing myself and couldn’t. He couldn’t manage the walk to the hall toilet. We improvised.   My mouth tasted of sediment all the time. I knew it was fear and I felt I was becoming him, even wanted to be him-intimacy’s complicit gift of mimicry.

He heated up. And up. I held his wrist and he’d electrocuted me. We called his GP again-he wouldn’t meet my eye. They needed to carry out tests. He had his own room in the city’s new hospital. They said he needed privacy and they needed to be sure. My brother and I would catch the train and then a bus and would eat chips on the way there. We found a new routine.

 And then they told us about all this tunnelling and scraping away beneath the skin. Erosion.  Auto- immune activity.  Bone marrow I heard. Cells eating away at themselves and no, as a daughter I was nowhere near enough to scrape out some of mine and put it in him. No where near at all.

I read Virginia Woolf’s diary to him, as I revised and read about her tunnelling process behind her characters. Metaphors again. There we were, nodding, aware of the inches between us, feeling our way silently around the possibility of an early death, an easy death. I write possibility. That is a lie. But you probably knew that too? I know you want to read this but those that say knowing helps are just rearranging their vocabulary.

After two weeks he started picking at the sheet with his right hand and I almost congratulated myself for noticing this odd habit. His hands again giving me a sign. A brave nurse bundled my brother and I into an empty laundry room one late afternoon in March   and spelt out the life left. It felt oddly erotic, detached and completely sad and even today the smell of fresh washing leaves me agitated without feeling entirely able to admit why.

Your breath turned to brimstone and. sulphur. Your ghastly smile when we came in and our fragile proximity across the sheets. All speech had gone from you. This was like nothing at all. Think about it please-absolutely nothing at all.  You calcified, eroded away in a month, mixed up in our earlier story about stalactites and deposits; you just eroded away at 105 degrees.

What shape fear takes can be a surprise; you are meeting something within when you believe you are meeting something without. I signed a formal piece of paper with a pen with a hooded nib. Black ink by myself, for a man who had always signed himself alone, no matter where he was or who he was with, or who he was trying to be. I felt like I had met Blind Pugh and stared, eyes streaming at a huge black spot of ink. That final dot. After a while the registrar gently took her pen away and then filed the paper and mother took me home. 

Perhaps it is true that our destiny merely involves an old story rising up unbidden to meet us once again. We love to embrace ‘destiny’ and luxuriate in fate that brings us together happily ever after.  But such connections can also be terrifying, especially medically, for if this connects with that, and that links to this, then there is a pattern, and patterns even awkward ones get to kill you in the end.

They do. They really do.

I have missed someone to argue with. I look back and know that talking was our best thing. I could never get the better of your words even when you didn’t believe in them and I suppose it has felt like fencing by myself. All foil… I do not know what you might think of some of my choices, but I make them anyway and sometimes I hope that I guess right. I try to listen as hard as I can, but your voice is locked miles and miles below in a strange white forest, full of shapes that seem to salute me. I hear just an echo of another echo- a hope without end.

Your going hurt, yet I cannot remember your last word.

The December bride who, bored with dancing, skipped from the castle hall to play hide-and-seek, a white bird flickering into the dark . . .

The groom, who searched each room, calling her name; then the bridal guests, flame-lit, checking the grounds . . .

The fifty Christmases till a carpenter jemmied an old oak chest; the skeleton with its unstrung pearls, loose emeralds, its rings of diamond, sapphire, gold . . .

The running feet, the shouting for others to see what he’d seen; mistletoe in the loose bones of a hand . . .

like love, patiently green.

I was going to write about this poem by Carol Ann Duffy before Christmas as it provoked lots of different responses from students. But then I got ‘flu and felt more like her  skeleton bride than I cared to imagine!

Of course it is debatable in itself whether this is a poem, or whether it is a prose poem; it is  a ‘story’ at any rate,  where Duffy compresses the essentials of a festive mystery, almost around the festive  fire. We are being read to, just like James’ Turn of the Screw ghost story,  and this in itself engenders a rather comforting atmosphere despite the impact of the sudden coffin!

It is also great fun to read out aloud and to try out different voices. This gives lots of subtly different nuances to the tale.

For  should we read this in a sombre , reflective voice or should we take on a more bright voice at least  initially, before we fall into the Gothic horror of the rediscovered lost bride? Or is the whole poem elegiac in tone? Does it invoke a lost time; lost love, yet magic too?

I do wonder too about the impact of the final line.

I am sure Duffy wishes to tantalize us! The juxtaposition of the simile ‘like love’  with the phrase ‘patiently green‘ unsettles as it beguiles.    Most of my students read it positively, believing the ‘green’ redeemed the tragedy as it suggested endurance and longevity.

Being a more cynically inclined reader  or perhaps convinced  of Duffy’s  perverse imagination I found the ‘green’ conjured up magical connotations connected with the longevity of the mistletoe and my worries about who the bride had actually encountered once she renounced the wedding celebrations for the thrill of hide and seek in the ‘dark’.

For we watch the bride disappearing ’ into the dark’ as a ‘white bird’ underlining the dangerous excitement of her choice. She chooses the unknown, the ‘dark’ as opposed to being ‘bored with dancing’. a phrase perhaps literal and metaphorical  She may be ‘bored’ with the rituals of convention, even the behaviors associated with convention.

The groom endeavors to call her back, suggesting care and longing yet there is something unnerving about the ‘bridal guests, flame-lit checking the grounds.’ How innocent is the verb checking? Is it a verb that connotes care or has it a proprietorial aspect too, not unlike the chilling AQA Anthology poem by Charlotte Mew, ‘The Farmer’s Bride’, where the missing bride is a form of prey to be hunted down and returned to her imprisoning marriage. I also find the ‘flame lit’ guests rather garish, even predatory, reminiscent of lots of medieval or Gothic scenes of hunting and mob activity.

Perhaps it is the way that Carol Ann Duffy deliberately places the focus of our attention and what can be seen, on those seeking the bride rather than upon the bride herself. It is as if the poem is playing hide and seek too and we almost sense a feeling of relief that she has escaped their clutches, even their gaze. Displacement  unnerves the reader and makes the next stanza with its fifty year leap of imaginative faith, dramatically effective.

For some reason, the verb ‘jemmied’ with its slightly quaint sound idiosyncratic sound operates like the word ‘silly’ in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and the famous knock at the door in Macbeth, signally a return to a more pragmatic world, where that which has been hidden by time, the supernatural and obfuscation becomes more visible, and available for judgement.

We may be shocked by this visual surprise, this degrading of ‘bride’ into ‘skeleton’ or perhaps we are secretly thrilled by the horror, as the tale has more to it than a petulant game.  The female has become depersonalized into an it and the list of fabulous jewels stands in place of the once alive, the once pulsating. skittish  figure of the bride.

Ellipsis is used after every stanza except the last. We are left to wonder about the direction and message of the tale. Is it an allegory, a tale with a moral purpose? Or is it a ghost tale, where we are left to guess and wonder along the margins of its reality or ‘unreality’?

The stampede of movement where ‘running feet’ and ‘shouting’ noises invade the privacy of the recovered lost bride, presents the reader with another, final mystery. The ‘mistletoe in the looses bones of a hand’. Questions are immediately asked. Who was the mistletoe for and where was it used?

Is the bride dead by a tragic accident, suffocated within the imprisoning chest as she waited playfully to kiss her groom?

Or was she a victim of someone or something more malignant, even less earthly than a mere human groom?  Who did she meet when she playfully ‘skipped from the castle hall’? Did the bride find her boredom led to her downfall as she renounces the known, the ‘visible world’ of the castle hall for something transgressive, a perilous kiss?

Yet the final line adds a new, tender note to the poem. Love is ‘patiently green’. Love endures, survives even lovers. The miracle of the still green mistletoe testifies to love’s eternal energy. Maybe this has an irony too, like Larkin’s conclusion to his poem Arundel Tomb, ‘what survives of  us is love’, an irony that whatever we do, something tender may endure and go on?

Or are we missing a point? Perhaps the assignation with the being whose mistletoe is eternal, was worth the conventional ending of death and we may instead imagine the bride ‘married’ in an elsewhere with an ‘other’ ?

Who knows?

And the answer to that  question is the tantalizing pleasure of this super tale for Christmas and beyond!

Saddled with you for the afternoon,me and Paul
ambled across the threadbare field to the bus stop,
talking over Sheffield Wednesday’s chances in the cup
while you skipped beside us in your ridiculous tank top,
spouting six year-old views on Rotherham United

Suddenly you froze,said you hadn’t any bus fare.
I sighed,said you should go and ask Mum 
and while you windmilled home I looked at Paul
His smile,like mine,said i was nine and he was ten 
and we must stroll down the town, doing like grown-ups do.

As as bus crested the hill we chased Olympic Gold.
Looking back i saw you spring towards the gate,
you hand holding out what must of been a coin.
I ran on,unable to close the distance i’d set in motion

December 7 th is my brother Duncan’s birthday and after reading this poem again,  I experienced such a a surge of memories about our childhood, that I had to write about Duncan more or less  straight away.   This surge of remembrance  underlines one of the ways in which  reading can restore us to our lives. In fact, reading may help us not to miss our lives. For the way we miss our lives may be life itself!

For think about it. When we read, we absorb words that express emotions and behaviours relating to human experience. Our individual experience of being alive is often rediscovered(or recognised!)  when we read because the words of books help us to read ourselves. Sometimes very differently, sometimes painfully, sometimes comfortably.

In Andrew Forster’s deceptively simple poem, the poet/narrator revisits an earlier memory and gives expression to shame. And his shame seems very resonant as we have all done or felt things that we would rather forget about or bury. Writing in this poem is therefore a form of resurrection where the past is concerned and perhaps an uncomfortable resurrection at that!

The first stanza of Andrew Forster’s Brothers draws attention to the tensions between siblings; where one brother  is  feeling the claustrophobic weight of  responsibility, the unwanted ‘duty’ of care imposed on children by the adult world. It may seem as if the adults are shifting their sense of imprisonment within the family, temporarily  onto their  children, who in turn feel the loss of their freedom.

One generation displaces their responsibility onto another. ‘Freedom’ seems something very precious, almost a commodity to be bartered or exchanged.

The resentment of the older sibling in the first stanza is carefully resurrected through the resonance of certain words. Words like ‘saddled‘ and ‘ambled’, ‘skipped‘ and ‘spouting’ all give animation to the very real conflict between one brother’s perceptual position and another. Each brother is living in their own world whose words are antagonistic to the other- even if perhaps unknowingly in the younger brother’s case.

For the older brother is setting off with his friend ‘Paul’ for the relatively grown up , exciting pastures of ‘town’. This pleasure is blighted by the imposition of the younger brother’s presence  Such a presence is very irritating to the speaker as the younger brother looks and behaves like a six year old boy!

Yet the poem ends with the speaker recognising that his initial shame at being seen with his sibling in company, has changed through remembrance and reflection into shame at his betrayal. It is the tension between the self consciousness about the speaker’s public behaviour and the subsequent guilt he feels privately, that forms the drama and psychological interest of the poem.

Rereading the poem again, I not unnaturally thought about my own brother Duncan and perhaps because of his birthday smiled at several memories somewhat oddly linked to books. I say somewhat oddly only because I can remember trying to impose my love of reading on my brother from quite an early age with a rather missionary zeal. I was a book pest!  Duncan was far more out going than I was as a child and teenager,  and books were not any where near as exciting to him as I felt they should be!

For a good while until our parents’ divorced, I can remember my brother and I squabbling. My two years extra on the planet did nothing for our relationship!   Then suddenly parental chaos arrived and we took a thoughtful walk around our road, where we decided there and then upon a truce.  We were both in the new situation together and our new respect for each other led to enduring support and reliance.

Even before the truce Duncan had inspired some fierce moments of loyalty and admiration, not least with his bravery with bullies and his charismatic wit, even in the face of some very bleak times.

One especially happy memory took place in our kitchen where Duncan announced it was his O level English Literature in the morning and perhaps a spot of revision might help as he hadn’t really read Hardy’s Far From the  Madding Crowd with much interest at all.  So we stayed up all night and read about Bathsheba Everdene’s destructive romantic  passions and her eventual reformation over lots of cups of tea.

Duncan  passed of course as he did so many examinations , often under similar circumstances and deadlines. I don’t think I ever had the sense of embarrassment that Forster’s older brother experiences in the poem. For my part, even when we bickered  that was just between us, the world beyond was different and we were a team.

He even sorted our bargain taxi home on my 21st, after arriving back from a boys’ own holiday in Spain where he had obtained an impossibly tanned complexion and lost all his front teeth. Resourcefulness was and still is his pivotal characteristic.

I have mentioned books in relation to Duncan and aside from the cramming night filled with the delights of Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd, I can remember two more books looming large in my memories of Duncan.

The first involves Solzhenitsyn’s immensely thick book The First Circle, a book I gave Duncan to read on his solitary February Inter-rail when he decided a book might just fit in his ruck sack. The book came home battered but safe, after adventures including a mugging in Morocco where thankfully Duncan escaped several knife carrying thugs whose intentions were unsavoury!  I can remember him teasing me that the book was not the most upbeat read to spend time with, but read it he had and he even brought it home!

The second book is the famous cult novel of travel, youth and dreams, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.  Duncan read the book several times and again its battered appearance suggested a fondness that Thomas Hardy never quite managed to attain!

Forster’s poem ends with his bleak admission that his early betrayal of his brother’s affectionate enthusiasm created some sort of ‘distance’ that perhaps still lingered on.  I would end this short happy birthday memory with the best Kerouac quote of all and one that in so many ways applies to my brother who fancied long ago he was Kerouac’s anti hero Dean Moriarty, but has turned out to be so much, much more. A fabulous dad, husband  son and brother.

Happy birthday Duncan!

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!

 

Demeter could not easily differentiate between one shape and another.

Her toes would stroke over objects at night and she would wonder what she was sleeping with- an old shirt, a newspaper, a biography. Everything seemed differently arranged and she would act surprised and say out loud, ‘Oh is that what it is? It doesn’t feel like it…’  

 

Her small sister Annie would play games with her,  placing objects under her duvet and then listening for the muddled voice of Demeter who was trying once again to understand a world that to others seemed perfectly simple.

 

 Annie liked collecting oddly coloured glass and would experiment with the sun light on her window sill so that her occasional visitors would exclaim with pleasure at the purple rays of light across her school books. Annie dressed up the half century old push dog in royal outfits that came from the supermarkets and left labels all over the house saying ‘Annie is sad’ when a family friend left.

 

Demeter could never bring herself to be so direct. The red tailed hawk in the aquarium seemed to confirm what she already knew: that it was only by looking at the edge of things that you got their drift.

 

So she wandered through life looking for edges, for those small movements just where your eyes nearly lose interest- those peripheral shades of sudden truth.  Yet, when she stumbled over the present, she always doubted its integrity.   It was the  thing that was there at the corner of her gaze that was  only waiting to be introduced.. a beckoning.  She saw shades of other things too and could not be left at night in the house alone, without her believing that something was there.  

 

She had been an awkward, solitary child and though her late teenage years brought out a luminosity and light to her movements, an essential clumsiness and difference remained.

 

Her school colleagues would look at her curiously, and then pass on unsure what to speak to her about.   Her striking looks didn’t give them an obvious  way to reach her except in small portable exchanges about time-tables, the long queues for lunch and essay dead-lines.

 

Demeter veered from apparent carelessness about her school existence to a kind of unresolved aversion. She spent much of her time gazing out of the window and only her English teacher seemed capable of drawing her back to this world. When all her class rejected Thomas Hardy for his relentless fatalism, Demeter unnerved them all with her passionate defence ; she left the room red-faced but curiously uplifted, seeing in Hardy shapes of intimacies too rich to tell. She loved Bathsheba more than Troy or Oak, yet did not kid herself that her affection was merely one of identification. Demeter knew what she was not: her real problem was in knowing who she was.

 

It was only when she met Amy that her awareness of others became at all solid. Amy was simply and devastatingly there. She moved in from the daily periphery and stood clearly before Demeter and for once,Demeter could not look away. ‘I am here’ said Amy, and of course there she was. If Demeter blinked and then reopened her eyes, Amy would still be there, looking back at her, waiting for her to speak. Amy would not let her friend disappear away into her thoughts and edges. And Demeter had to love her for that.

 

By contrast,Demeter’s mother Alice appeared to live in her camel brown hand bag. Her family always found her intent upon its contents somewhere, tipping them out, counting them up, replacing them again and then checking the zipped inner pocket for something she never declared or named. It was if she had lost something long ago as a child and had never quite managed to forget it. Demeter would watch her staring inside her dark leather bag tutting to herself, and would hope that just one time, for a change, her mother might actually find what she was looking for.

 

 Her mother needed the reassuring dusty scent of the old bag each day and the ink stains made her breathe more slowly, more truly. Each part of her ritual unzipping and gazing and looking soothed her: here I am again she would think; I have my bag and my memories after all.Demeter could not imagine her mother without the bag.Alice would just disappear away.

 

Her step father John was always at some repair shop or another. He remained convinced that we lived in a broken world with broken things that hung on by minute threads, threatening to betray his world’s fragile stability at any time.

Demeter would meet him in the porch, on his way out with some thing wrapped up in a supermarket bag heading for the village. The cork notice board had a special protected area for coloured perforated tickets with pencilled in dates for collection. Everything in the house existed in a state of anticipation. Kitchen utensils, bath rails, cupboard handles, and taps: Demeter would find herself checking to see what she could give John as a gift for repair so that he didn’t have to start murmuring and searching by himself. ‘I thought this needed to be looked at John’ she would say, and he would stop and nod and gratefully examine the proffered object, turning it carefully until its imperfection made him sigh. Demeter hoped that her gifts limited her step father’s disappointment with the world. She hoped that their successful repair would ward off his gentle assumption that all things end, that all things finished in pieces.

 

So the family were involved with the shape of things: they each held to their personal vision of things, strangely united despite their apparent isolation, in their vivid sightings of a wary world. Only Callum appeared uncertain of where he should be in the family and in this world. He wondered what he needed to acknowledge.

 

 Perhaps he was more outward than they were Demeter thought. He went out and stayed out far longer than the rest of his family would  ever countenance. One day Demeter feared  he would just break the thread and not return and they would be left unsure of any directions and any report from the places they never visited. They each wondered in their own way what he might be doing out there beyond the ‘edge’, but there was no hostility in him when he returned and he always came back with a story that moved them temporarily away from their separateness and quiet despair.