Carol Ann Duffy’s Demeter is one of my favourite poems and moves me intensely. I think its position at the close of Duffy’s The World’s Wife is essential as it reminds us that reconciliation is still possible. It is a love poem and the rush of feeling Duffy communicates about the return of her child make me cry.
Here, I found myself writing about a girl called Demeter who had difficulties in being certain about the identity of things. and then I found the family followed!
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…’ The hawk in the aquarium seemed to confirm what she already knew: that it is only by looking at the edge of things that you got their drift. So she wandered through life looking for edges, for small movements just where your eyes nearly lose interest, and so even when she stumbled over the present she always retained a sense of the peripheral. The thing that was there just at the corner of her gaze was only waiting to be introduced. She saw shadows everywhere and could not be left at night in the house without her believing she was not alone, that other things were there. She had been an awkward child and her late teenage years brought out a luminosity that her clumsiness superficially contradicted.
Her school colleagues would look at her, and then pass on unsure what to speak on. . Her attractiveness didn’t give them a way to reach her except in small portable exchanges about time-tables, 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 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 Hardy for his relentless fatalism, Demeter unnerved them all with her passionate defence; she left the room red-faced but curiously enervated, 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 one of identification. Demeter knew what she was not: her problem was actually knowing who she was.
It was only when she met Amy that her awareness of others became at all solid. Amy was 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 she was. If Demeter blinked and then reopened her eyes, Amy would still be there, looking back at her. Amy would not let her friend disappear. And Demeter had to love her for that.
By contrast, Demeter’s mother Alice appeared to live in her camel brown hand bag. She was always found 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 the dark leather bag tutting to herself, and would hope that just one time, for a change, she 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 thing; I have my bag and my memories after all. Demeter could not imagine her mother without the bag. Alice would just disappear.
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, 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 terms of what needed to be acknowledged. Perhaps he was more outward than they Demeter thought. He went out and stayed out far longer than the rest of his family could ever countenance. 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.