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’ ?
And the answer to that question is the tantalizing pleasure of this super tale for Christmas and beyond!
Wonderfully nuanced and considered reading, reflecting the ambiguity and evocativeness of the piece itself, like all the best fairy tales or fables!