‘Where i lived – winter and hard earth.
i sat in my cold stone room
choosing tough words, granite, flint,
to break the ice. My broken heart –
i tried that, but it skimmed,
flat, over the frozen lake.
She came from a long, long way,
but i saw her at last, walking,
my daughter, my girl, across the fields,
In bare feet, bringing all spring’s flowers
to her mother’s house. i swear
the air softened and warmed as she moved,
the blue sky smiling, none too soon,
with the small shy mouth of a new moon.’
Demeter. Carol Ann Duffy.
When I was teaching this poem recently I was asked if there was a recipe for the type of questions guaranteed to open up a poem for interpretation. And if essays can be delivered competently through the use of SEED:
statement;
evidence;
explanation;
development
then perhaps analysis too?
Well having read the poem again , I think just THREE questions could open the poem up considerably:
A Is there any AMBIGUITY in the poem? Where? How does this ambiguity ‘affect’ the poem’s meaning?
R Is there any RHYME or REPETITION in the poem? Where? How does this ‘affect’ the poem’s meaning and ‘progress’ or movement?
T How does the TONE or voice of the poem sound to you? Bitter, longing, lost, angry?
So there you are. ART is the answer!
EXAMPLE
1) Is there any ambiguity in the poem?
The opening line of Demeter states in a highly ambiguous way:
‘Where I lived – winter and hard earth.’
For the speaker seems to be inhabiting a world that is barren and without warmth or heart; a literallly and figuratively ‘heartless’ world. And if this world suggests emotional death, then this is heavily ironic, as it is Demeter’s daughter Persephone who is apparently living in the world of death and is literally ‘lost’ to her mother, yet it is her mother, Demeter who seems dead.
The poem surprises us by the reversal of our expectations. Yet is this not what grief does to us? We feel as dead or even more ‘lost’ than the person we have lost. Our surroundings become irrelevant and just harsh reminders of a still progressing, indifferent world whose words we are no longer interested in.
The ambiguity reveals itself through the position of the words within the sentence. Thus the syntax yields up its own pathos ridden message. For the ‘I’ is imprisoned between the ambiguity of ‘where’ and the emotional limbo created by the hyphen ‘- ‘ and then followed by the crushing bleakness of ‘winter.’ We feel the abject loss of Demeter and her sense of stasis and emotional numbness which is then taken up by the references to ice.
This ice is broken when the poem changes from its tone of loss and isolation into a voice of joy and recognition:
‘She came from a long, long way…’
Demeter as a mother does not need to name her daughter. Her daughter is all she has been thinking of through the endless time without her love. The sense of slow, cinematic recognition conveys the almost unbelievable joy of a mere ‘spectre’ in the distance, from the past and very depths of Demeter’s memory, coming back into focus, returning whole to her mother.
Perhaps Persephone looks changed. The mother’s use of the pronoun ‘she’ creates a real sense of her wonderment and joy. The ice is broken. Her heart is returning. The language of the poem softens and renews itself. It reads fluently and emotionally ‘loose’ giving rhythmic presence to tenderness. Repetition reveals the time spent without her beloved, now overcome by the vision of her return.
There you are ART is the answer!
