His voice then becomes erratic as his studied self control gives way to further alarming disclosures. We are most likely in the company of a madman? OR IF THIS IS AN ALLEGORY OF NATURE’S DANGER THEN IT SHOWS HOW RAPIDLY the apparent safety of nature can be compromised? He ‘can drown the fools.‘ Where is care now? Where is compassion? It is like being in the company of a mentally unstable character whose moods are whimsical and unpredictable. He attaches blame to their lack of respect for ‘rules’ as if he is a saftey advertisement for the water-board!

The rhyming couplet, ‘drowning’ with ‘clowning’ shows his pleasure in inflicting suffering. How can ‘drowning’ be a form of ‘clowning’? Death is not a joke and drowning is a violent death too.   The speaker enjoys inflicting pain and is therefore a sadist. The poem is surreal as everything seems slightly out of focus and inappropriate and serves to contaminate the narrative. His ‘confession’ shows no remorse or compassion. And he is warming up in the poem  for his most important disclosure and confession! More from Stevie Smith tomorrow for part Three. Other AQA Poems on this blog of course. Just look them up!

See More Tomorrow.

I may be smelly, and I may be old,
Rough in my pebbles, reedy in my pools,
But where my fish float by I bless their swimming
And I like the people to bathe in me, especially women.
But I can drown the fools
Who bathe too close to the weir, contrary to rules.
And they take their time drowning
As I throw them up now and then in a spirit of clowning.
Hi yih, yippity-yap, merrily I flow,
O I may be an old foul river but I have plenty of go.
Once there was a lady who was too bold
She bathed in me by the tall black cliff where the water runs cold,
So I brought her down here
To be my beautiful dear.
Oh will she stay with me will she stay
This beautiful lady, or will she go away?
She lies in my beautiful deep river bed with many a weed
To hold her, and many a waving reed.
Oh who would guess what a beautiful white face lies there
Waiting for me to smooth and wash away the fear
She looks at me with. Hi yih, do not let her
Go. There is no one on earth who does not forget her
Now. They say I am a foolish old smelly river
But they do not know of my wide original bed
Where the lady waits, with her golden sleepy head.
If she wishes to go I will not forgive her.

Q: Who is speaking in this poem?

It is a dramatic monologue and like many Browning and Carol Ann Duffy monologues, this poem gives voice to a character we progressively find disturbing and even murderous. (See My Last Duchess, Porphyria’s Lover, The Laboratory, Havisham, Education For Leisure and Stealing for example). Stevie Smith enjoys writing about surreal psychological states haunted by death as my earlier blog entry about her other AQA poem, Come on, Come back reveals.

The River God we presume is male and predatory, despite his  occasional capacity for comedy and has a voice both playful and grotesque.‘I may be smelly, and I may be old..’ This apparently self deprecating start has a wily knowingness that ironises the sense and message. For those that underestimate the powers of this River God, do so at their own risk and peril. ‘Rough’ and ‘Reedy’ are connected by the alliteration in order to communicate the flow of the river and we feel a hint of malignancy behind the attempt at friendliness and intimacy. There is a malign smirk behind the poem’s sense and sound? The kindly ownership of the pronoun ‘my’ again creates a slight feeling of unease.

Is the speaker a benign dictator or a despot?

At any rate, we are listening to a ‘mythical’ creature talking to us and we are held by his contrary, dangerous nature, his insane meanderings and falsities.  The pleasure of this poem lies in its eccentricities and the ‘slips’ in the narrator’s veneer of pleasantry. In this, the poem does have certain similarities to Browning’s My Last Duchess where again power seems to be the overriding principle of the speaker. Both are also murderers and ‘confess’ to their actions during the course of the poem.

More Tomorrow.

I just noticed whilst looking over the poem again, the sly, delayed internal rhyme of ‘wed’ and ‘abed’ both in different stanzas, but irrevocably linked or should I say chained together. ( See Stanza One and Stanza Two). This link reveals the terrifying and lonely predicament of the unnamed Bride, whose forced marriage to some older Farmer( who may have initially masqueraded as a family friend perhaps) gives her no escape from the marriage/sexual/prison.

The sensitivity of the famer to nature does not extend to his bride whom he hunts down and returns to his ‘home’ ( not her home  at all-distinctly ‘unhomely’ in fact) and we notice the rhyme between ‘last’ and ‘fast’ gives cloying weight to the meaning behind the locked door. The rhyme seals the poem in just as the key imprisons the bride within a house that is certainly not her home.

She is incarcerated within her life and within the poem by the famer whose interest in her is only sexual and who only sees her as an object. The poet ironically gives the farmer the voice in the poem to highlight the tragic plight of women locked into marriages they have no wish to be part of.

Grim!

Go and read Armitage’s Harmonium to cheer yourself up!

Most plants were  now made of cheap coloured silk  as her relatives waited for a someone they could persuade  to buy the place and set them free from this old fashioned collection of rooms and passage ways best suited to another time. Her  pictures of course they could tolerate. They were different and Julian Simmons had been only too pleased to suggest a special showing at his gallery in Chipstone.  Such a view of the river too and all those people from London who would be already encircling the date, cheques ready for battle.

Cousin Pat was chewing white toast in the back kitchen when Carla found her. Each mouthful revealed dark red jam like a taunt to the small scarlet plasticine figure who had crawled all the way from a special interview with the Face, just to do what she was about to do. The mouth on this over-painted woman kept smiling to itself the more she ate. Carla watched the mouth fascinated by the mushy lumps doomed for Pat’s stomach and even worse. The bathrooms stank in this house, even with the linen air sprays donated by George’s father. Everyone was holding on to something in this house, so even the bathrooms suffered each morning and at night. It was as if the house was full of dead things, buried out of sight, faintly corrupting the air.

Carla edged across the worktop and then sat upright opposite Pat, dangling her legs, waiting. It was just a question of the breath. As she watched,  she blew Pat a kiss. The sound made Pat pause as she was fishing out another piece of toast, knife ready with a lump of red jam.  The kiss travelled like the anointed arrow the face had told them  that it would. It carried the messages to Pat as her heart began to clench and shrink and words like remember and why danced into her mind burning away at her forgetting, so all that was left for her to do was to fall down onto the lino floor remembering. and her body started to weep for the things she had not done…

This short blog will help you tackle ANY poem, in any state of mind!

I am using a current AQA Anthology poem so this will help students studying this particular text too. Everyone wins!

So read this  AQA Anthology poem first and then read my ‘solution’ at the end of the poem.

This is a disturbing poem, not least because the speaker, who we assume to be the ‘farmer’  narrates the story of the unfortunate’bride.’ I say unfortunate as she has no wish to be married to the farmer, it seems to have been an ‘arranged marriage’ and her fear of sex is vividly displayed in the poem. Yet despite her fear and probable repulsion, the farmer spends all the poem yearning for his poor bride who tries at least once  to run away. The poem is entirely from the viewpoint of the farmer, it is his voice and monologue we hear throughout the poem and the bride remains silenced throughout. This uneasy use of the dramatic monologue ironically makes the bride more the elusive, tragic  object than ever, for she is trapped both within the farmer’s home as well as within the poem itself. Her voice is actually never heard-she is constructed, ‘made up’  by the man she is trying to escape. She is a figure or ‘creature’  hunted and spectated upon, even by the reader: owned by a male whose affection seems sexually predatory and yet desperate. It is hard to decide whether the language the speaker uses is designed to delude himself or others that he does have affection fro the girl bride. Yet there are moments when this affectionate mask slips and I feel the sexual urgency leaks too prominently into the poem and reveals the ‘real’ intentions of the speaker.

Who would want to live in this rural community? The countryside seems a place of hard work, loneliness, sexual longing and compromise. For the bride, it is claustrophobic and confining. It fails to offer her any support in her rejection of the marriage and even colludes with the speaker’s desire for ownership and sexual possession.

The rustic voice of the farmer gives him a real identity for  his listeners and we are made aware of his watchful fascination with this ‘too young’ girl, through the natural images he uses to convey her beauty, youth and vulnerability. It is as if we are confidantes,  listening to the tale of his unhappy marriage and left to judge who seems most unfortunate. The farmer in this way is ‘on trial’ by his readers and listeners, just as we process our judgements throughout Priestley’s remarkable play, An Inspector Calls. However unlike the play, the verdict we may reach about the farmer and his bride is complex though I do feel my final sympathy must remain with the fragile bride, the ‘fay’, ‘hare’ and ‘mouse’ of the tale. For she has had her marriage arranged, way before she seems mature enough to take on wifely duties and her terror of sex makes the farmer’s pursuit of her, predatory and dominating.

As with Owen Sheer’s Mametz Wood, I will analyse this uncomfortable poem stanza by stanza.

Three summer’s since I chose a maid,
Too young may be – but more’s to do
At harvest time than bide and woo.
When us was wed she turned afraid
Of love and me and all things human;
Like the shut of a winter’s day.
Her smile went out, and ’twasn’t a woman-
More like a little frightened fay.
One night, in the fall, she runned away.

The farmer is expressing in his rural voice, the time scale of his marriage to the child bride, the virgin or ‘maid.’ The musing ‘too young may be-’ qualifies and then attempts to justify his choice. we do wonder how young the ‘maid’ may actually be and of course how old the farmer with his hasty lust and longing may actually be.  This is not the opening to Marvell’s arch poem, ‘To his Coy mistress‘ where courtship is leisurely and  can go on and on, time being no apparent object. In Mew’s poem, this is pragmatic love. The farmer wants a worker to assist him on his  his small holding, and also to provide sexual release in his bed. The complete absence of her agreement to this need, seems  to make their marriage a form of slavery and significantly the whole community seem to collude with her enslavement.

The ‘smile’ she had before the marriage disappears when they are ‘wed’ and it is ironic that she runs away ‘one night’ presumably to escape the farmer’s sexual needs and advances. This poem does communicate a very real sense of entrapment and claustrophobia. She turns away from her husband and being ‘human’ and a ‘woman’ in his eyes. The heavy, yearning tone of the farmer’s voice is suggestive of cloying sexual desire, he owns her in a sense,  yet she eludes him, preferring the freedom and innocence of the outdoors rather being indoors with him. Perhaps her innocence perversely increases his longing and this too has a disturbing effect upon the reader. The farmer does not accept or accept her evident revulsion of any sexual relations with him.

“Out ‘mong the sheep, her be,” they said,
Should properly have been abed;
But sure enough she wasn’t there
Lying awake with her wide brown stare.
So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down
We chased her, flying like a hare
Before our lanterns. To Church-town
All in a shiver and a scare
We caught her, fetched her home at last
And turned the key upon her fast.

The farmer’s neighbours spot her ‘Out ‘mong sheep’ and this voyeuristic  information leads to her being ‘chased’ as if she is  escaping prey ‘across the down’ an image that reminds the reader of a blighted fox or hare. The presence of the ’lanterns’ too adds malignant gloom to this whole spectacle of a child bride being returned to the arranged marriage she hates. The inappropriate even Gothic use of the word ‘home’ ironises the disjunction/difference between the bride’s perspective and that of the farmer’s. ‘Home’ is her prison, her nightmare place,  where she feels threatened and violated by the farmer’s sexual advances. The farmer’s relief to have her home is again ironic as he has no guilt or sensitivity to the girl’s terror. ‘And turned the key upon her fast.’ This is imprisonment. She is ensnared for his own ends and needs. She is caught and looked away again against her will. The historical  timing of the poem surely suggests women in rural communities such as this had very few rights. They were commodities to be exploited by men, with the collusion of the community, in any ways that suited these patriachal structures.

She does the work about the house,
As well as most, but like a mouse:
Happy enough to chat and play
With birds and rabbits and such as they,
So long as men-folk keep away.
“Not near, Not near,” her eyes beseech
When one of us comes within reach.
The women say that beasts in stall
Look round like children at her call.
I’ve hardly heard her speak at all.

The poem gives the girl a fairy tale aspect, not unlike Snow White as she seems most happy playing with other  small, vulnerable fellow creatures; they are in harmony and enjoy rapport, unlike the farmer and his bride. ‘Men-folk’ alarm her. They represent the threat of sex and she cowers at their approach. ‘Not near’.He yes plead.  The ‘women’ report( again how creepy and insidious that the girl’s terror is observed and reported on) of the girl’s natural rapport with animals,who are also ironically  locked up by men ‘in stall.’ It is as if she is more at home with the natural animal world because they are all similar and vulnerable. The girl speaks rarely again suggesting her awkwardness near the farmer and men as well as her more natural identity as an animal, who are ironically still under government of men, though are free from their sexual expectations.

Shy as a leveret, swift as he,
Straight and slight as a young larch tree,
Sweet as the first wild violets, she,
To her wild self. But what to me ?

The farmer’s voice has an appreciation of the delicacy, even transience of the girl’s beauty. The preponderance of vowel sounds give a hushed aspect to the girl’s identity. The sibilance too, noticeably deployed at the beginning of each line engenders a feeling of uniqueness and the farmer’s wonderment that she is his, though her distance from him frustrates yet fascinates too.   Her ‘wild self’ tempts and yet elude him and he asks ‘But what to me?’ We do feel his isolation and perhaps desperation at the bride’s evident difficulty with her marriage to him. Yet he has made her his wife without her real consent and we do feel he has only his own lust to blame for his supposed misery at her rejection of his advances. I said in my introduction that there is some element of ambiguity around the sincerity of the farmer’s feelings. Is he really tormented by his unrequited feelings for his young wife? The lexis suggests affection and sensitivity, yet the behaviour beyond the language suggests patriarchal control if not sexual slavery and confinement. Would a genuinely caring human being subject a vulnerable young woman to such terror? Would they not give her freedom and understanding? Surely he is only thinking about his own desires?

The short days shorten and the oaks are brown,
The blue smoke rises to the low grey sky,
One leaf in the still air falls slowly down,
A magpie’s spotted feathers lie
On the black earth spread white with rime,
The berries redden up to Christmas- time.
What’s Christmas-time without there be
Some other in the house but we.

Nature is carefully evoked and described in relation to the passage of time. The seasons are changing yet their relationship seems to be at an impasse. The rhyme scheme remains the same and this is again an indication of stasis. The list of changing colours and visual details suggest that the speaker is watching the world with an almost obsessive focus. The details become slightly disturbing(the ‘magpie’s spotted feathers’  and ‘berries’)  and perhaps reveal the mounting frustration of the farmer stuck in this house with his reluctant bride.  Even the berries are ripening and changing, an ironic contrast to his unchanging relationship with his wife. It seems as though he expects more company, even a child and of course the child cannot happen with sexual intimacy. The rhyming of ‘be’ and ‘we’ adds uneasy weight to his pathological expectations around sex. It as if this ‘we’ is all he can focus on and we feel his insensitivity to the clear distress of his bride.

She sleeps up in the attic there
Alone, poor maid. ‘Tis but a stair
Betwixt us. Oh! My God! the down,
The soft young down of her, the brown,
The brown of her – her eyes, her hair ! her hair !

The final stanza gives expression to his sexual longing, if not as I ahve said, pathological obsession. He dwells too much upon her body, fetishising her beauty into specific parts that haunt his evidently feverished imaginings. She has retreated to the top of the house. We imagine this is to escape his advances. perhaps the attic is teh only pleace she can sleep! The rhymes in the poem seem to encircle the girl in a web of the farmer’s making. Poetry is used here as a collar or even garrotte!

I am not convinced he means ‘poor maid’. Indeed this could be read as another indication of his lust. He is lamenting her virginity?Poor maid who has resisted him?  Or if not her literal virginity, her psychological virginity as she has withdrawn from him as far as she can.

The ‘stairs’ make him shudder with desire as they represent the physical boundary between his body and her sleeping figure. Look at how the use of the two exclamation marks after the mention of the stair gets the speaker ‘going’! He is exclaiming, breaking out into a longing outburst as he imagines what he could enjoy IF he climb that stair and get to her! Ironically the stair has become a literal and metaphorical barrier…even like the hymen perhaps.

The final repetitions accentuate his lingering imaginings of her flesh and the feel of her. It is a shuddering, longing climax that is sexually suggestive if not rather ‘mad’…as he exclaims ‘her hair! her hair! There is definitely a feeling of despair but also maybe a release? He needs to imagine her and part of her allure is her rejection of him? Even though it is clear she is afraid of his unflinching near brutality in hunting her and locking her in, he still remains fixed on objectifying her physically and ‘using’ her body at least in fantasy in order to obtain sexual release.

A strangely uncomfortable, disturbing monologue. It becomes rather voyeuristic and even ‘murky’ sexually as we read on….

Janet Lewison, May 2012

Perhaps it might be helpful to borrow Julia Kristeva’s phrase for deep sadness: ‘ an abyss of sorrow’ in her book on melancholia entitled, Black Sun. For this poem does communicate to me an overwhelming sense of this ‘abyss of sorrow.’ It s a sorrow that goes on and cannot be named or explained ‘away.’ This choice of emotional focus on this ‘abyss of sorrow’  is ironically explored through the female protagonist, Vaudevue, a name ostensibly suggestive of fun and community with its association with ‘vaudeville’ songs and shows. Of course this is an ironic name as this  ’Vaudevue’ is isolated, mentally traumatised and suicidal.

Unusually, as I have said,  the poem has a named female soldier as its central character. Her desolation is both physical and mental and this is highlighted through the echoic internal rhyming of the repeated ‘alone’ with ‘stone.’  We are not far away from the bleak landscapes of Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and Keats’ poem ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. In both poems the isolation of the landscape is a reflection of the emotional states explored within the poem. (Poetic Fallacy)

I love the seemingly random observation that Vaudevue’s fingers ‘tap the ground.’ Is she physically remembering music she has mentally or consciously forgotten, so this movement s almost like an involuntary twitch or convulsion of remembrance? The famous neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks frequently describes the strange residue or left over behaviours of human beings whose brains have suffered damage that incapacitates normal, healthy responses. (See The Man who mistook his Wife for a Hat) This description of Vaudevue does capture the final moments of a human being whose mental and physical capacities have been fatally damaged through conflict. This conflict has taken place on the site of another bloody battle, Austerlitz, and such a terrible repetition reveals that we learn nothing through history and suffering. It goes on, it comes back…

The chemical weaponry and reminders of Nazi  Germany  in stanza two, kill off her memory, so that she has become human detritus, a left over of war and her own identity is now merely physical; ‘she’ has to all purposes, died. Death itself is a mere appendix to her current situation. She tries ‘staggering’ to her only way out, her ownly future, the lake where she can cleanse herself and ironically rebirth herself through drowning.

The oddity of the adjective ‘adorable’ reminds us that this is an excessively brutal, inhuman situation. Psychologically we are in the company f someone dehumanised and violated, whose relief in death makes the lake ‘adorable’ just as a new born baby may be ‘adorable’. Linguistic signs are estranged from their meaning, as was and conflict have destroyed the meaning of the world and teh respect we might have once enjoyed for the sanctity of life.

The feminine moon is both her friend and her enemy/nemesis. Moonlight is synonymous with madness and female emotion, with its ebbs and flow. Sylvia Plath in both poems like Daddy andLady Lazarus,  is close to her in the disturbing choice of Lexis with phrases such as ‘black as her mind’ and her minds as a ‘secret from her.’ This mental place or territory is way beyond any place we would wish to dwell or be. Conflict has torn apart her mental stability so that she has become unknown even to herself.She is now A divided self, that cannot be reconciled or made peaceful except through the release of death.

A wonderful poem and profoundly unsettling and sad. Probably the most challenging in the Conflict section of the AQA Anthology if not of the entire Anthology too.

Come on, come back by Stevie Smith( Extract)

(incident in a future war)

Left by the ebbing tide of battle
On the field of Austerlitz
The girl soldier Vaudevue sits
Her fingers tap the ground, she is alone
At midnight in the moonlight she is sitting alone on a round flat stone.

Graded by the Memel Conference first
Of all human exterminators
M L 5
Has left her just alive
Only her memory is dead for evermore.
She fears and cries, Ah me, why am I here?
Sitting alone on a round flat stone on a hummock there.

Rising, staggering, over the ground she goes
Over the seeming miles of rutted meadow
To the margin of a lake
The sand beneath her feet
Is cold and damp and firm to the waves’ beat.

Quickly – as a child, an idiot, as one without memory -
She strips her uniform off, strips, stands and lunges
Into the icy waters of the adorable lake.
On the surface of the water lies
A ribbon of white moonlight
The waters on either side of the moony track
Are black as her mind,
Her mind is as secret from her
As the water on which she swims,
As secret as profound as ominous.

For years afterwards the farmers found them -

the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades

as they tended the land back into itself.

The natural world reveals the hastily buried young soldiers years after they died violent and unnatural deaths during the battle of the Somme; one of the most terrible, futile battles ever fought. The fact that the soldiers are ‘found’ by ‘farmers’ gives a sense of care and tenderness to what was originally gratuitous slaughter and senseless sacrifice. Time has combined the bones of the dead with the earth, a combination suggestive of reconciliation and even of healing. If the land has not been ‘itself’ then this is because war is licensed murder and the land as well as the soldiers was brutalised and violated to serve some  ideology or greed. The conflict is between the past and the present, between the degraded earth as the hasty dumping ground  for violent death and now as the  pastoral setting for healing through the natural processes of degeneration.

A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,

the relic of a finger, the blown

and broken bird’s egg of a skull,

The delicacy of the soldiers’ remains is highlighted through the poet’s choice of metaphor. The human remains are undifferentiated from one body to another, for the soldiers died together and it is as if there can be no individuation even in death; this is both grotesque and  poignant. Even the term ‘relic’ suggests a religious, spiritual connotation.Symbolism is not static and the meaning and interpretation of any event may alter with the passage of time.  The sacrifice of the dead has attained mythical, transcendent status in the eyes of those who discover them again, so many years after their obliteration in this inhumane slaughter of a battle. The ‘birds egg of a  skull’ reminds me of the end to one of Philip Larkin’s most brilliant and affecting poems, The Explosion where the after a catastrophic explosion in a mine, one of the dead miners is recalled tenderly holding an egg. The fragility of life and its transience captured perfectly and most naturally through this re imagined gesture.

all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white

across this field where they were told to walk, not run,

towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.

Colours and textures of different bodies and the texture of the earth itself where their bodies are like old bits of china, playing at being different materials with different identities. Even our identity as human beings becomes transformed by death and the inevitable passage of time. The criminal stupidity of the order to ‘walk, not run’ made the Welsh soldiers sitting targets for the German gunmen hidden in the wood. The loyalty and disciplined obedience of the Welsh Battalion rendered them victims of both their own leaders and the ‘nesting machine guns.’ Look at the disturbing juxtaposition between ‘nesting’ and ‘machine guns.’ This seems an oxymoron, but then war contaminates all relationships and states. Here the word ‘nesting’ gives the ‘machine guns’ a naturalness that they do not deserve. They appear to be at ‘home’ in the woods, but in fact they are purposeful interlopers waiting to mow down the poor soldiers adhering to their fatuous  order to ‘walk’ rather than run.’  Who were the Generals  in charge of directing military operations at this time and what care did they have for their men? Class divisions were so wide and entrenched that the soldiers were regarded as disposable and to use Wilfred Owen’s famous words, ‘like cattle’ .

And even now the earth stands sentinel,

reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened

like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.

The natural world, the ‘earth’ now watches guard over the lost dead soldiers, yielding the bones of these forgotten men up for the scrutiny and acknowledgement of the living. This is like a from of excavation, where the past returns to the world of the living through the careful disturbance of the earth’s soil. The simile is especially affecting ‘like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.’ Whatever has been buried beneath the surface of things, whether skin or soil will eventually reappear. That which is repressed will return. Memory itself may involve repression too, as Toni Morrrison brilliantly suggests in Beloved when she talks of ‘dis-remembering.’

This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,

a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,

their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre

The discovery ‘this morning’ is made immediate through the use of the present tense. The actual number of the dead gives dramatic reality and intensity to the discovery. The men were not allowed the luxury of individual graves. they are buried, as they died, together, undifferentiated yet poignantly connected too. They appear almost ‘antic’ as they are described as a ‘broken mosaic’ and we may feel the poet is reminding us of the ironic repetitions of history. One place a substitute for another. Pompeii for Mametz wood perhaps?

in boots that outlasted them,

their socketed heads tilted back at an angle

and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.

The pathos of the ‘boots’ outlasting the men. Boots were notoriously short-lived in the trenches as they tended to rot with the sodden conditions. Yet the boots have remained recognisably ‘boots’ whilst the men have become ‘socketed heads’ deprived of flesh and eyeballs, they look as if they are trying to yell something out, dying perhaps crying for something or someone beyond the savagery of Mametz Wood. They seem on the verge of speech, of a message communicated to this living world, after all the buried time…

As if the notes they had sung

have only now, with this unearthing,

slipped from their absent tongues.

Another powerful simile ends the poem. The dead are trying to communictae with the living. Their notes’ have only just manged to escape their buried, silent state with the farmer’s discovery today. Thier tongues have been lost and they were ignored anyway, which is why they died so pointlessly. Now we hear them, we acknowledge their messages and their tragedy. The excavation of the bodies, reanimates the dead, the past in the way that the poem itself is a form of excavation as it brings back, through words, expereinces that have been lost or forgotten, or rendered silent.

A superb poem. One of the best in the AQA Anthology for power and pathos.

Janet Lewison

I am also endeavouring not to cheat and look up what I last said! Besides which, making myself read the poem again is refreshing and should prove exciting as I am sure I will notice things differently….I hope!

Short Analysis:

Duffy’s poem as the title suggests is very much concerned, if not preoccupied with the experience of time in relation to intimacy and love.  For what does an ‘hour’ mean when we are in love? Can it render our love extra special, dramatic, intense? Does it heighten our capacity for pleasure?

What does an ‘hour’ signify when our love is secret or frowned upon or is difficult in some way. Are we more or less desirable to our lover? Duffy is writing this sonnet as a form of reply or continued dialogue with Shakespeare’s very famous sonnet 116. I include an extract here from that sonnet as it has bearing on Duffy’s poem and my analysis.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

Shakespeare argues that love is NOT ‘Time’s fool’ as love can survive the onslaught or  passage of time  and can maintain its power and integrity. ‘Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks’. Time may try to wear love out and love  may have to overcome the intervention of obstacles to meeting, but this love will survive ‘even to the edge of doom.’

Duffy’s poem ‘Hour’ replies to this  famous sonnet with a play on the wording of the original poem. Duffy declares rather differently that ‘Love’s time’s beggar.’ In Duffy, Love has to do a deal with the autocratic dictator ‘time’ who is personified in order to give an intimacy and secrecy to the poem. This personification is continued as if the persona is allowing the poet and her lover a special ‘bought’ time bought almost with a ‘dropped coin‘ empowering their love and making them feel ‘rich’ with the opportunity for love.

This ‘Hour’ is spent not on dining out or an exchange of flowers( I assume here that the lovers are both female) but rather on a luxurious feast of kissing in the outdoors- specifically a ‘grass ditch.’! This part of the poem makes me smile  as the ditch surprises the reader. Not even a sofa or a bed. . It is bathetic( anti climatic) and I start to worry about damp and grass stains! perhaps it is too self consciously anti climatic and whilst revealing the loveers desire to take their pleasure where they can, it also seems rather deliberate? But perhaps lovers can be rather deliberate and ‘natural’?

The poet exists in a state of ecstasy as she adores at the shrine of the beloved’s beauty. The worship of the hair is for me a definite sign of the lover’s female identty. The hair is almost worshipped even fetishised as it is ‘treasure’ in the way that hair in a Pre-Raphaelite painting may be worshipped too…

I have said on my earlier blogs that the reference to Midas makes the love fallible. Midas was a selfish King obsessed by wealth and gold and Duffy writes a very laconic poem about Midas in her previous collection The World’s Wife. it is as if in worshipping the golden hair, Duffy is also recognising the unobtainability  of her lover: ‘Turning your limbs to gold.’ I am sure Duffy has also seen the James Bond film Goldfinger where poor old Bond girl Shirley Eaton dies from being painted head to toe in gold…beautiful to look at but definitely dead!

Duffy’s fabulous feast of outdoor kissing is a deal done with time and even the night. Night stays away after ‘backhanding’ has gone on, so ‘nothing dark will end our shining hour’. Even the ‘cuckoo spit’ at her lover’s ear is a matter for rejoicing. This poem gives vivid expression to the way that intense pleasure makes everything look great! Duffy and her lover are so excited that everything is wonderful to behold|!

Lots has been written about the fairy tale component of the love Duffy describes. I do find it quite possible that the lingering repetition over ‘gold, gold, gold from straw’ is suggestive  of sexual pleasure. through orgasm.  The poem is expanding its excitement in a way suggestive of arousal perhaps and release. Repetition gives representation to the mounting cries of excitement, perhaps not just here, but every time they meet, so passionately connected are they.Duffy’s final line voices the lovers    breathlessly celebrating their intimacy through their special lexical code of ‘gold’. In other words ‘gold’ is their special term for making love.

.

Love’s time’s beggar, but even a single hour,
bright as a dropped coin, makes love rich.
We find an hour together, spend it not on flowers
or wine, but the whole of the summer sky and a grass ditch.

For thousands of seconds we kiss; your hair
like treasure on the ground; the Midas light
turning your limbs to gold. Time slows, for here
we are millonaires, backhanding the night

so nothing dark will end our shining hour,
no jewel hold a candle to the cuckoo spit
hung from the blade of grass at your ear,
no chandelier or spotlight see you better lit

than here. Now. Time hates love, wants love poor,
but love spins gold, gold, gold from straw.

At that time I didn’t find shyness nice at all. It felt like a burden, a dark cloud that affected  everything I did involving other people. Animals were fine- I could talk freely to them!

At University I would sit in certain English  seminars or tutorials bursting to speak, but more often than not finding I would leave the room without speaking up. How frustrating too,  listening to others speak who had often said something I had wanted to say as well…..

I think it was teaching that helped transform me. When you teach you have to say something and I was aware it was a role that could be ‘ acted’  too. I was playing at being  a ‘tutor’.

I deliberately modelled bits of my teaching self on the teachers and tutors who I had found most helpful.I wanted to be a positive tutor and remembered the positive teachers I had been lucky enough to meet….so I took time to reflect on how they were positive, how they made students feel safe and confident…

• I can remember asking myself, how did they do that?
• How would they ask a question or get people to work in groups? How did they show that they wanted to hear what you had to say?

I would still say I enjoy my own company but I also can talk freely to others without worrying about blushing, stuttering or just being ‘wrong’  somehow.

Q:So what can you do to make shyness into something positive and even helpful?

A: Well just looking at what I have written, it shows that I took a decision to examine how to ‘do teaching’ instead of ‘doing shyness.’

It did help me to recognise that ‘being shy’ is something we DO.

WE ARE DOING SHYNESS in other words.

Think about it…how do you ‘do’ your shyness?

So here’s your question:

1) Do you enjoy putting your hand up in class?

Answer honestly…

What happens when you try to out up your hand? Even if you try in your head? Where do you feel shy? Where do you feel that you uncomfortable? Imagine how you will feel when you can put up your hand because you want to, because you are going to ask something or say something or answer a question..or even argue!

In my next blog I will offer a simple solution to this problem.

Many thanks,

Janet Lewison