I spoke yesterday about the casually cold tone of the poem. The tone is essential to the poem’s message and meaning as it is suggestive of the voice of the speaker and his self creation. This is of course a major aspect of Duffy’s characterisation of her narrator.
The narrator of this dramatic monologue appears to have an unidentified captive audience and he is gloating over the reenactment of his crimes. Reenactment seems to add weight and pleasure to each word. Gaining and maintaining attention seems to be important to the speaker and the initial question gives dramatic pause to his admission. His delivery is theatrical- as if he is displaying his past as a compelling spectacle, yet this spectacle becomes steadily more degenerate and ‘flatly’ uninspiring as he proceeds. In other words the narrator has a petty, envious banality about his mindset that his actions first reveal, and then reinforce.
The clipped short delivery of the details of the stealing of the snowman give power and resonance to the recollection. There is also I feel a kind of perverse yearning mixed up with the callousness of the act. Perhaps he wants to to be cruel to a probably ‘happy’ , childhood object as his own childhood might have been bleak.
Did he ever build a snowman? Look at the curious yet poetic way he recreates the ‘mute’ snowman. He wants a ‘mate’ as he is isolated beneath the ‘moon’. And then the oddness around his description of the snowman’s mind and his own is peculiar. Something is just ‘not right’ and this is reflected in the lexis. What we wonder is it like to have a ‘slice of ice’ in your brain? Does this suggest detachment, callousness or even psychopathic thoughts? The end stop at the completion of the first stanza horrifies. We are not sure if he is talking about the snowman at all or using the idea of a snowman to talk about something much more sinister. He does relish our shock at this declaration ‘I started with the head.’ and this we guess links to the metaphor of the ‘slice of ice’ for his mental state! Not so ironically for a poem so much concerned with ice and snow, this poem is very ‘slippery’ in terms of its meaning. Displacement is all!
He evidently is interested in inflicting his power over others, more vulnerable than himself. Even when this other is an inanimate snow man. Yet as I have said this snowman represents some way of life alien to the speaker and envy of such playful innocence and pleasure makes him act in this cruel way. He reframes his banal, stupid act by linking it to some platitudinous statement about courage. Its irrelevance or incongruence when compared to this act is obvious. But we have all heard such empty justifications before. Life is littered with cliches because they stop us thinking and assist our mental evasions. And this is one of Carol Ann Duffy’s themes; the emptiness and banality of language; its insufficiency; our over reliance upon cliche. The way lanaguage fails to express what we really need it for. And that this failure makes us feel more empty than ever!
There is an unease created by the lexical choice in stanza two. The word ‘torso’ is suggestive of dismemberment and this complies with our earlier worry about the ‘head’ reference. Even if the speaker is ‘only’ attacking a snowman, we wonder about his imaginative version of the events. What game is he playing in his head and is this a prequel to something more explicitly dangerous and antisocial?
Then again, the verb ‘hugged’ has connotations of care and affection. Yet this act is due to necessity rather than tenderness. Or is it? Duffy delivers a voice who unnerves the reader as we are not sure. This being not sure is part of the poem’s interest and helps perpetuate the poem’s tension.
Then the speaker rhymes ‘chill’ and ‘thrill’ and we know we are listening to someone more than locally unkind. This is the voice of sadist. ‘Life’s tough’. Here again, the cliche takes on an irony that reclaims the ordinary conversational declaration from repetitive nullity. How ‘tough’ life may be when one is entangled with the speaker is only hinted at in this poem. Yet we are already aware of something contaminated in the thinking of the narrator. His self advertisement borders on narcissm and his disregard for others seems to escalate as he speaks. There is a ‘thirst’ for transgression that remains unsatiated in the poem. This is what disturbs as we cannot imagine where this need will lead!!
More to come on the rest of the poem.
The most unusual thing I ever stole? A snowman.
Midnight. He looked magnificent; a tall, white mute
beneath the winter moon. I wanted him, a mate
with a mind as cold as the slice of ice
within my own brain. I started with the head.
Better off dead than giving in, not taking
what you want. He weighed a ton; his torso,
frozen stiff, hugged to my chest, a fierce chill
piercing my gut. Part of the thrill was knowing
that children would cry in the morning. Life’s tough.