GCSE English Literature Unseen Poetry : How to analyse a poem- Carol Ann Duffy ‘A Child’s Sleep’-BE CURIOUS!

I stood at the edge of my child’s sleep
hearing her breathe;
although I could not enter there,
I could not leave.

Her sleep was a small wood,
perfumed with flowers;
dark, peaceful, sacred,
acred in hours.

And she was the spirit that lives
in the heart of such woods;
without time, without history,
wordlessly good.

I spoke her name, a pebble dropped
in the still night,
and saw her stir, both open palms
cupping their soft light;

then went to the window. The greater dark
outside the room
gazed back, maternal, wise,
with its face of moon.

A few more days to GCSE English and you may be looking for an easy way TO ANALYSE THE UNSEEN POEM?

…even if you feel very confident about poetry analysis, there is always the sense of the BLIND DATE with the unseen.

So now I will show you an easy tip that works with students very effectively.

(First just mentioning my own enjoyment of this poem. …..as a short digression?)

 

I explored Carol Ann Duffy’s A Child’s Sleep several years ago on this blog and loved its hypnotic, magical language that manages to expand our understanding of a most tender moment.

A moment in time!

Duffy is very fond of this poem and I can see why. It captures a mother’s almost mystical  awareness of the wonder of loving your child.

It takes place on a threshold. in a literal sense we are behind the mother gazing into his child’s room watching the child sleep and imagining the wonderful dreams that the child might be enjoying.

Metaphorically we recognize that the mother as an adult is for ever excluded by her age and experience from childhood’s innocence and the sleep of the child seems a metaphor for this lost magical world.

In a sense the mother is gazing upon her lost self too and that is why the ending of the poem offers relief to the mother as she too is cared for by something much older and wiser than herself: the moon!

 

How to analyse the Unseen Poem: A Beginning. 

Read the title of the poem and then the first line.  What do you NOTICE?

‘I stood at the edge of my child’s sleep hearing her breathe..’ 

Ask yourself what you are noticing?

Simplicity. Soft sounds. Like sleep? Vowels soft? assonance. Whisper as mother listens? 

Title is clear and the opening line confirms what the title promise. So reader feels the poem is fulfilling its promise straight away.

Yet what word seems to leap out or seem ‘strange‘ in the opening line? 

The word ‘edge’ seems strange. Makes us think about the connotations of the ‘edge of my child’s sleep’ in terms of adulthood/childhood.

Shows respect. Awe at the wonder of being a mother? Threshold between worlds of dream/innocence and daily ordinary world. Maybe the child very active and sleep a rest for all. But told in wondering, awestruck way.

Even magical as mother is transfixed. And this enchantment inspires the poem and makes the poet reflect on the wonder of dreams, and where a child may escape to, and then in gazing out beyond the room’s tranquility and special space  reflects on her own place in the universe and being part of a universal order and scheme of things.

So the gazer becomes the gazed upon and we as readers are gazing upon everyone? 

See how just ONE question leads to a very expansive understanding of the whole poem?

 

A perfect poem. 

 

This was my old reading of the poem ..may be of interest along the way too? 

 

Without sounding trite and then perhaps I do, the poem reminds me of that song by some chap with a difficult name to spell: ‘Where do you go to my lovely..’ with the vaguely Parisian music which was once a massive hit on Radio 1.

Captures the heart stopping wonderment of the mother’s relation to her child. The ‘awayness ‘ of sleep all the more enchanting for its uncomplexity and naturalness than the more ‘thorny’ aspects of adult slumber.

I love the delicacy of this poem: ‘ I stood at the edge of my child’s sleep’..as the adult hangs back from the perfection of this tableau…as if the sleep has become a whole world whose words are so very different from those of the adult. The poet who is also a mother elides the sleep with some Shakeperean Arden where magical things happen and time becoems something fluid, tender, mystical.

Lovely detail with the hands embracing light. Defencless purity of their transcenedent beauty.