Harmonium by Simon Armitage

Click here for a video of Armitage talking about this poem

What’s the Point?

This is an autobiographical poem where Simon Armitage returns to Marsden, the village he grew up in, to collect a harmonium from the village church. His father helps him to carry the harmonium out of the church and this process causes him to reflect on the relationship he had with his father in childhood, singing in the church choir, and to face the fact that one day, possibly soon, his father will die.

How do I Analyse this?

Form: This poem is an autobiographical poem which flicks between the past and the present day. It is written in four stanzas – stanzas one and four are set in the present day and the middle two stanzas are set in the past. Perhaps this symbolises how the past is contained within the present moment. Each stanza has a different theme:

Stanza 1 sets up the narrative – that the harmonium needs a new home or it will be thrown away.

Stanza 2 is a description of the church, the harmonium and the organist.

Stanza 3 is a memory of father and son singing in the choir.

Stanza 4 is a description of Armitage and his father carrying the harmonium out of the church.

St Bartholomew's Church, Marsden

Imagery: The imagery the first stanza creates a sense of old memories: “dust” and “shadowy” suggest a place that has been neglected for some time. Perhaps this is metaphorical and Armitage is revisiting memories that he has not thought about for some time. There is also a pun "mine, for a song.." which has a double meaning: he can have it cheap or he can have it to sing with.

However, the second stanza starts with the word “sunlight” which contrasts with the darkness of the previous stanza. His memories are lighting up this dark place and the image of the sun streaming through the stained glass windows seems to bring his memories to life or “raise the dead”. The phrase “beatify saints” (beatify is when the Roman Catholic church declares a life holy) suggests that the past seems like a wonderful and saintly place.

Sunlight, through stained glass...

The imagery of the harmonium and its organist are then introduced and this is clearly an extended metaphor for the decaying of the aging process both before and beyond the grave. The images are quite homely and comfortable: “woollen socks” and “leather-soled shoes” which suggests that his father is a down to earth, traditional man. The harmonium is personified “the fingernails of its keys” and “one of its notes had lost its tongue” which relate it to the father’s decay and suggest death.

Harmonium

The end of stanza three contains this strange metaphor/ simile after the subdued imagery of the previous stanza: "gilded finches - like high notes - had streamed out." This is a kind of miraculous metaphor because it is likening their voices to fiches but then using a simile to liken the finches to "high notes." Finches are famous for their song and gilded means covered in gold, so this is a really exuberant and exaggerated image at the heart of this poem. It suggests how precious this memory is to Armitage.

Click here to hear a Finches' song

The final stanza contains imagery of his father in the present day: "smokers fingers and dottled thumbs" which makes his father sound down to earth but also old. The image of them carrying out the harmonium: "And we carry it flat, laid on its back" mirrors the image of a funeral possession and the assonance of the "a" sound creates a harsh, brisk note which jars with sing-song rhythms of the previous lines.

Structure: 

The use of consonance in stanza 1 creates a hushed tone and the lack of rhyme creates a conversational rhythm as if he is starting to recount an anecdote. In stanza 2 assonance  is used to create a more uplifting tone and rhythm: "day to day", "beatify", "saints", "raise", "aged", "case".  As the memories take on a life of their own, enjambement and rhyme ("treadles"/ "pedalled"), are used to speed up the rhythm underpinning the stanza with energy and emotion.

Stanza 3 uses phonological features to mimic the musical sounds it is describing. Both onomatopoeia and alliteration are used in "hummed harmonics" to imitate the sound of the harmonium. The internal rhyme: "throats" and "notes" add to the musicality of this image.

The final stanza contains two very important rhymes. Firstly the internal rhyme in the line: "will bear the freight of his own dead weight" emphasises the quick-wittedness of his father and his flat, dry humour. In contrast the three lines of enjambement at the end of the stanza and the overly long sentence emphasise Armitage's sudden loss for words at the realisation that his father will die, leaving both Armitage and the reader "starved of breath". It also has the effect of making the poem sort of peter out with the word "heard" which closes the final couplet of the poem, so that we literally do not hear the final word. It emphasises the idea that he cannot make himself heard and express his love towards his father.

What is the Reader supposed to feel?

This is such a beautiful poem. It's full of nostalgia for this childhood relationship he enjoyed with his father. I get such a sense of warmth about his father from the images of "grey woollen socks" and the father's dry humour. I think it's also saying something about the deep feelings that memories can create and how difficult it can be to articulate feelings of love for people you love the most. I really feel the sense of fear that Armitage seems to experience at the thought that his father might not live for much longer and what a terrible loss this will be for him. His focus on the specific imagery of the church, the harmonium and his father communicates the importance of these memories for him and how deeply he treasures them.
There is an irony contained within this poem as, really the whole poem is a tribute to the love that Armitage feels for his father and the fear he has of his death. Although he cannot think of a reply in that moment described in the final stanza, the poem itself is a reply: the words "too starved of breath to make themselves heard".

How can I Link this to what the writer is saying?

Armitage is telling the reader about the nature of memory and grief. He is using this poem to try and communicate the tenderness he feels for his father that he is unable to communicate in the anecdote in the poem. It is a poem about memory, aging and death and also about the ways in which fathers and sons communicate their love for each other. Although, Armitage and his father do not have a conversation about the feelings they have for each other, the shared memories they have around singing in Marsden church bind them together and are important to both of them. Even though Armitage creates a sense of his father's frailty: "smokers fingers and dottled thumbs", it is still his father who is helping him to do this task. It is Armitage who wants the harmonium and the father is still in a paternal role of helping him. Perhaps that is why the realisation of this inevitable change in their circumstances hits Armitage so hard.

How can I Link this to another poem?

Nettles - another father son poem

Praise Song - a poem which also celebrates parent child relationship and memories from the child's perspective. It also touches on bereavement.

Mr Bruff

BBC Bitesize

A* extension work

A* Harmonium extension

Click the title to go to the original site:

Simon Armitage’s ‘Harmonium’: An Analysis-the scent of lost time?

by Janet Lewison

Sometimes we can step into a special place and may enjoy the sudden certainty that we are  caught up in spaces where linear or chronological measurements of time cease to be so defined or regulated. We are all ‘specks of time’ in so many ways: swirling about each other both  in our heads and outside, coming together, departing and perhaps re-ecountering each other in many ‘else-wheres‘.

I have just come back from my Aunt’s funeral and as I walked in to the chapel and stood with my mother singing the first hymn, it was as if the chapel was spilling over with people from our lives, all shining with different shades of light upon their faces, all looking younger and more alive ironically than when we had last seen them.

Remembrance can be painful and healing both at the same time and alternately. Toni Morrison uses a lovely, visionary word in her marvellous novel, Beloved. She talks of ‘rememory’ and this trope on the act of remembrance communicates the possibility of memory being an act where thepast becomes animated enough to become tangible, to live again, even on its own terms perhaps, beyond us yet within us too.

This poem describes an  intimate moment which condenses and ‘meets’  other moments from the past,  and tenderly describes a temporary near epiphany between the poet and his father about the latter’s mortality. The former encourages the latter event. It is as if the very attentiveness and awareness of the ‘event’ of the situation,  increases the possibility of other types of communication, communication that maybe precluded by the everyday habits of our often  inattentive lives. For how really present are we to the present?

I say ‘near epiphany’ as the poet himself qualifies the recognition as he acknowledges his own failure to meet his father’s aside about his inevitable mortality  with any real depth or presence. Yet the poet is brave enough to admit his lack,  his feeling of inadequacy and to publish the poem so that  we recognise that the poem’s admission of ‘failure’ is also   an act of love. The poem avows the poet’s tender affection for his father and makes public his feelings forever, even if the harmonium is more directly communicative than they!

As I have just said, the catalyst to the exploration of unspoken feeling is the harmonium itself. The instrument is rescued from ‘death’ by the poet who wants to save it , an ironic mirror perhaps of the poet’s awkwardness around his father, whom he cannot save and who seems to be fragile and probably unhealthy.

The harmonium is the means by which father and son are reunited in their local church, a place where they and many other fathers and sons have played out their roles in the choir. The fact that the harmonium is a musical instrument suggests that music can manage forms of communication that ordinary language fails to deliver as it can transcend our human, awkward limitations. The ironical ‘song’ for which the poet acquires the instrument becomes the means by which he nearly finds a near elegy or requiem for the inevitable approach of his father’s death.  The harmonium is thus an ‘event’ in both a literal and a metaphorical sense. It gives voice to the unspoken desires we have to connect with each other and to the our place in history as we repeat relationships with each other.

The harmonium has become worn by the passage of time. The sunlight that makes the church look beautiful yet it also causes the harmonium to age, to lose its original beauty and perfection. The homeliness of the organist’s socks makes the transcendent also part of the daily and humanises the instrument after the suggestion of personification with the ‘fingernails’ and the ‘tongue’. This is an instrument in harmony with those who visit the church, it is part of their worship and beliefs.

The ecstatic release of the’ gilded finches’ from the ‘throats’ of fathers and sons as they sing to the harmonics of the harmonium offers a powerful poetic metaphor for joy, for shared experience, for spirituality and release. It is ostentatiously poetic and is in contrast to the more practical aspects of the rest of the poem where the experiences of the harmonium are described in details suggestive of the physical or material world. It is the release of the song that heralds the entrance of the poet’s father in the poem. He has been one of the  singers, releasing the special soaring bird song, transcending the limitations of their human groundedness. Perhaps this singing ability, perhaps this revelation of faith has been in the distant past, now the poet’s father is a less transcendent figure, focused here on the practical task of moving the harmonium, symbolically a connection between the two males as the younger attempts to save and rescue the condemned harmonium from the ‘skip’.

Nowadays the father is covered in smoke, fragile  and aware of his life’s vulnerability. He joins the chapel’s narratives again as he predicts his own participation in repetition. The ‘next box’ will be his own  he claims. This prediction is perhaps a test of his son’s relationship with him; for although it may be a joke or flippant comment, there is a recognition on the poet’s part that this is a comment the father has made before.

He wants to speak about death, his death, but his son finds such a conversation difficult.  His inability to reply adequately is also a from of repetition and reveals the areas of their relationship where intimacy is hard to achieve or even maintain. They seem to ‘do’ things together rather than to express how they feel about each other.

Ironically the harmonium can say more than they can. it is a symbol of their connection and has a language unavailable to them.  Perhaps the final irony is that they are less harmonious than the instrument, even when the instrument is itself rather out of tune in comparison to its original state.

A beautifully thoughtful, most moving poem. A natural elegy seems to arise out oft he ‘incident’ or ‘event’ of the harmonium.

Born Yesterday by Philip Larkin

What’s the Point?

This poem was written for Sally Amis, daughter of famous novelist Kingsley Amis, the day after she was born. Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin were friends and Larkin wrote this poem to celebrate the birth of his friend's daughter. As you can see, it's not that celebratory. Larkin was a depressive who had some serious issues around women. This is one of his more optimistic poems and, whether or not you see it that way, he was probably trying to generous to his friend's daughter. Rather than wishing her beauty or intelligence, he wishes her ordinariness because he believes that it is in the ordinary that happiness can be found.

Where’s my Evidence?

• Tightly folded bud
• May you be ordinary
• dull -
  If that is what a skilled,
  Vigilant, flexible,
  Unemphasised, enthralled
  Catching of happiness...

How do I Analyse this?

Form: This poem is written in two stanzas and a series of short, tight lines. The first stanza deals with Larkin telling the reader what he does not wish for Sally Amis. He reveals what he is wishing for at the beginning of the second stanza: "may you be ordinary" and it is somewhat anticlimactic. He uses the rest of this stanza to explain that what he is really wishing for her is "happiness". This is not revealed until the final line, creating suspense and anticipation.

Imagery: He opens with a metaphor  of a tightly folded bud.

Tightly folded bud

Tightly folded bud

Apart from looking like a baby, this is a very feminine image and holds the promise of 'blooming' in the future.
The line "I have wished for you" brings to mind the christening in sleeping beauty. Perhaps Larkin sees himself, slightly ironically in the role of fairy godfather, bestowing a wish or blessing.

Fairies granting blessings at a christening

The second stanza has very understated imagery as it is celebrating the ordinary and is thus very plain in its language. He uses the metaphor:"Nothing uncustomary/ to pull you off balance" suggesting the fragility and instability of happiness. The enjambement used in this line exaggerates this idea of balance as the line feels slightly unbalanced.
The list of adjectives at the end of the stanza do not create powerful images but then the surprising metaphor "catching of happiness" is then sprung on the reader in the final couplet. It sounds like you might catch happiness accidentally, like a cold or that happiness is something that might easily be missed, something that needs to be 'caught'.

Catching happiness?

Or, catching happiness?

Structure: The enjambement at the beginning of the poem, gives the poem a conversational tone, creating deliberately understated tone, reflecting this celebration of ordinariness. This dismissive tone of ordinariness is picked up in the line "well, you're a lucky girl." which is dismissive and scornful of luck. In fact the whole of the first stanza is telling the reader what Larkin does NOT wish for Sally. He is scornful of the usual cliche.

It is not until the second stanza that we finally get to Larkin's wish: "May you be ordinary" and it is an anticlimax. The list of adjectives:

"dull -

If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled"

are deliberately understated but linked through use of both consonance and assonance. He even rhymes "dull" and "flexible" as if celebrating the idea of "dull". However the final line is lifted by both the image and sounds in "catching" and "happiness" (note how these two words are also linked by assonance) and the use of a rhyming couplet brings the poem to a satisfying close, perhaps gently underscoring his desire for Sally Amis to be happy.

What is the Reader supposed to feel?

I'm not sure that I'm supposed to feel this, but I find this poem infuriating. Sally Amis died tragically in her early 50's from alcohol related problems and to be quite honest, if this is what greeted her arrival into the world, it's not surprising. It's so mealy mouthed: "may you be ordinary". Would Larkin have written this for a man? Would he have wished this for, say, Martin Amis - Sally's extremely successful novelist brother? I appreciate what he is saying and possibly, as someone who spent his whole life depressed, "happiness" is the greatest of all achievements but I'm not sure that I buy into the sentiment that an "average of talents" is the key to happiness. I suppose a more sympathetic reading is that Larkin is trying to avoid cliche and is saying to Sally, not to undervalue the importance of an ordinary happiness.

How can I Link this to what the writer is saying?

Larkin was somebody who certainly struggled to "catch" happiness. In this poem he seems to be saying that happiness lies in balance and in 'ordinariness'. He suggests that too much talent or beauty might 'throw you off balance' and thus prevent you from 'catching happiness'. I think that the sentiments expressed in this poem are sincere and that he genuinely wanted Sally Amis to have that most simple but most elusive of qualities: happiness.

How can I Link this to another poem?

Nettles - a poem where an adult is wishing to protect a child. Scannell wishes he could protect his son from harm but can't.
Harmonium - A poet who also struggles to find the words to express emotion. He expresses his love for his father through a series of 'ordinary' images.
Praise Song - Another celebration of ordinariness but a rather different celebration of the feminine.

Mr Bruff

BBC Bitesize

A* extension work

A* Analysis of Born Yesterday

I found this essay here and thought it might be useful. 

Philip Larkin and Happiness  On "Born Yesterday"

For those familiar with Philip Larkin’s work, the title of this short essay will seem to offer a juxtaposition so improbable as to be laugh-out-loud funny—rather like that old joke staple, the tiny book titled German Humor, or the admittedly unlikely prospect of a panel at a New Formalist conference on “The Achievement of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E Poets.” Indeed, if we do associate the word with Larkin, we’re most likely to think of poems in which happiness is mentioned as an absence—as in the narrator’s rueful longing in “High Windows” for “everyone young going down the long slide / To happiness, endlessly.” I don’t want to suggest that Larkin’s poetry gives us glimpses of joy with anything resembling regularity. But I think that the topic of happiness—what it is, how to attain and cultivate it—is crucial to his work, and I’d like to try to show how. I’ll focus on one poem, “Born Yesterday,” with a few quick forays into other poems.


“Born Yesterday,” written in 1954 and dedicated to Sally Amis, the third child of Larkin’s lifelong friend Kingsley, appeared in his 1955 collection The Less Deceived. In the first of the poem’s two stanzas, Larkin reveals that he’s already made a wish for the infant Sally, but rather than let us in on the wish right away—and thereby ruin our delicious suspense—he offers a list of what it does not consist of: “the usual stuff” of beauty, innocence, and love. These traits would of course be nice, but they are the by-products of luck; young Sally has no power to control their arrival.


The poem’s enumeration of clichéd notions of happiness also recalls Larkin’s scorching tally of dusty platitudes about poetic childhoods in the poem, “I Remember, I Remember,” written just several weeks earlier. In this poem, as we will doubtless remember, the narrator, visiting his Coventry birthplace with a friend, wryly lists all the things that didn’t occur in his decidedly un-Wordsworthian childhood: he “did not invent / Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits”; there was no “farm where I could be / ‘Really myself’”; at no point did he lie down with a young lady as “‘all became a burning mist’”; and so on. All that happened there, he tells his friend, is that “my childhood was unspent.” But in “Born Yesterday,” Larkin’s corrective to trite ideas about Childish Things works very differently, since, in the poem’s second stanza, rather than substituting real negatives for false positives, he replaces false positives with real (and surprising) positives: his hopes that Sally may be “ordinary,” “Have . . . an average of talents” and even “be dull.” These wishes certainly catch us off guard—is this happiness?—but by the time we arrive at the stanza’s end, we’re convinced, remarkably enough, that it is, “If” (Larkin’s charmingly modest disclaimer) “that is what a skilled, / Vigilant, flexible, / Unemphasised, enthralled / Catching of happiness is called.”


This final list is wonderfully dense with insistence and implication. After wishing Sally “nothing uncustomary/ To pull you off your balance, / That, unworkableitself, / Stops all the rest from working,” Larkin adds a third word prefixed by “un”: he wants Sally’s happiness to be “Unemphasized,” strikingly suggesting that a lack can be a virtue. And the movement in the line from “unemphasized” to “enthralled” powerfully enacts the quickening, joy-bringing effects of this lack: a depleting “un-” causes an invigorating “en-.” As for the list’s first three adjectives—“skilled, / Vigilant, Flexible”—they are forcefully linked by their shared vowels and consonants, and the fact that “flexible” rhymes with “dull” invites us to consider the connection between these words: is what others may deem unexciting (dullness) really an openness to change and growth (flexibility)? Finally, “Catching of happiness” is a delightfully surprising phrase which—in another instance of the poem’s subversion of expectations—transforms infection, the “catching” of a flu, into something potentially good; you may need luck to “catch” happiness, but once you do it can take you—like a bus or a firefly you have just “caught”—on a magnificent adventure.


Perhaps a word or two should be said about the poem’s title. Read literally, it can refer to the simple fact that Sally is herself a newborn baby. It may also be an allusion to the 1950 George Cukor movie, which describes the mayhem that ensues when the shady tycoon Broderick Crawford brings the showgirl Judy Holliday to Washington—where he intends to bribe a congressman—and hires a tutor to educate her, only to find that she’s smarter than he thought and can more than hold her own amid the D.C. shenanigans, both falling in love with her tutor and ratting on her former paramour. The title’s possible evocation of an ostensible “dumb blonde” who is actually the shrewdest person in the room may be intended to make us reappraise the naiveté associated with the term “born yesterday,” just as Larkin as made us reconsider the normally derogatory “dull.” I think it’s also likely that the title supplements the second stanza’s list of desired virtues with a hint about how Sally might achieve them (and, by extension, how we all might achieve them): by cherishing fresh starts as well as certain traits of character that enable us to feel we were “born yesterday,” open to anything, even if we are forty or sixty or eighty years old. (Tragically, it should be noted, Sally Amis died in 2000, at the age of 46.)


In its emphasis on fresh starts, “Born Yesterday” recalls, or rather prefigures, two later Larkin poems, “Water” and “The Trees,” and I’ll hazard a guess that the earlier poem allowed Larkin to test out the very ideas of unorthodox baptism, of being born into happiness every day, which made them possible. “Water” imagines a religion involving the eponymous substance in which “Going to church / Would entail a fording / To dry, different clothes”; the three quatrains of “The Trees” beautifully describe the way “recent buds relax and spread” (remember that Sally was described as a “Tightly-folded bud”), telling onlookers, “Last year is dead . . . Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.”


“Born Yesterday’s” peculiar but persuasive account of happiness also happens to come at a point in The Less Deceived when readers have already encountered two poems concerned with that subject. In “Coming,” Larkin’s narrator “starts to be happy” after hearing the singing of a thrush and remembering spring’s imminent arrival; in “Reasons for Attendance,” he stands outside the window of a theater where dancers are “Shifting intently . . . on the beat of happiness,” but decides that they are “not for me, nor I for them; and so / With happiness.” Coming in the wake of these two poems about how happiness is or isn’t possible only makes “Born Yesterday’s” treatment of it more moving and powerful.


These are, however, just a few of Larkin’s poems in which happiness seems to me a crucial theme, be it overt or muted; there are others. In “Solar,” Larkin praises the sun for its ability to, “unclosing like a hand . . . give forever.” In “Show Saturday,” he follows a lengthy, loving description of a yearly small-town festival with praise for this spectacle “That breaks ancestrally each year into / Regenerate union,” ending with the rapt demand, “Let it always be there.” Although, unlike the poems described so far, these two poems are not explicitly about happiness, they nonetheless describe conditions and situations in which happiness happens. And in the little known, extraordinary early poem “On Being Twenty-six,” Larkin, lamenting the withdrawal of “Talent, felicity,” wishes for the black-and-white experiential universe of the newborn for whom, both despair and ecstasy are readily accessible:


I kiss, I clutch

Like a daft mother, putrid
Infancy,

That can and will forbid
All grist to me
Except devaluing dichotomies:
Nothing, and paradise.


In these poems, happiness makes itself known in the form of a distant star; a yearly festival that, for all its charms, has little connection to the modern world; and one half of an infant’s primitive, polarized consciousness. Dazzling sunlight, recurring ritual, and “paradise” certainly sound desirable, but I will confess a hopeless preference for the happiness described in “Born Yesterday,” whose eloquent, hopeful zeal for fresh starts and luminous praise of the ordinary feel like Larkin’s attempt to formulate an even more rewarding and plausible version of happiness, and thereby to counter the problems—the passing of time, the difficulties of human relations—that so many of his poems bemoan. In “Born Yesterday,” Larkin finds a happy medium between “Nothing and paradise,” joy’s absence and its fragile or otherworldly abundance; and if we are skilled and vigilant and flexible enough readers to pay attention to this important, quietly profound poem, we will be enthralled.

Editor's Note: I asked Rachel for this piece last year, and I am terribly sorry that it was not published before she passed away at the end of 2009. She did, however, approve this final copy. We hope you enjoy it.

Sonnet 43 Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning

What’s the Point?

This poem is a Petrarchan Sonnet. It is in a book of poems called Sonnets from the Portuguese. This is a series of sonnets was written to her husband Robert Browning. It's a passionate declaration of love and says that she will love her husband beyond death.

Where’s my Evidence?

• How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
  I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
  My soul can reach
• I love thee with the breath,
  Smiles, tears, of all my life!---and, if God choose,
  I shall but love thee better after death.

How do I Analyse this?

Form: Petrarchan sonnets have eight lines (an octave) and then six lines (a sestet). The octave follows an ABBA rhyme scheme and the sestet follows a CDCDCD pattern. The turn comes between the octave and the sestet. The octave seems to list the ways in which she loves him while the sestet is more melancholic and introduces the idea of love surviving beyond death.

Imagery: Browning opens with a ridiculous question: "How much do I love thee?" and then proceeds to use language from the semantic field of measurement: "count" "height", "breadth" and "depth" mixed with the abstract concepts of "soul", "grace" and "love". Obviously love is impossible to measure in this way but by mixing these ideas Browning introduced both the physical and spiritual aspects of romantic love. The use of enjambement at the end of the second line emphasises her exuberance and emphasises the idea of her soul and love being a transcendental experience.
The second half of the octave builds on this idea as she lists the ways in which she loves him but continues to used ideas associated with religion: "purely", "freely", "candle light", "as men strive for right". All of this suggests that her love for Browning is a moral imperative: she is ordained by God to love him and it is her spiritual destiny to do so.
The sestet introduces imagery of death and sadness,which might seem out of place after the excitement of the first octave: "lose", "lost saints", "childhood griefs" and "death". This deepens the idea of her love and suggests that her love is a whole emotion which embraces and surpasses all other intense emotions, be they joy or sorrow. The final rhyme is "breath" and "death" emphsising the shortness of life: "breath" symbolising the fragility of life and "death" the end of life. However, she is saying that "if God choose", she will love him beyond death. This again, connects the idea of romantic love with Godliness. Falling in love with her husband seems to be a religious experience for her.

Structure: The opening of the poem is quite energetic with the short question and response being contained in the first line. It's almost as though she is challenging the reader with this audacious question: "How much do I love thee?" and then it's immediate response: "Let me count the ways." this is playful in tone as the reader knows that love is impossible to "count". She then follows this up with two lines of enjambement which create a passionate, emotional tone and emphasise the largesse or greatness of her love. Her love is unconstrained and fluid and expands beyond lines of poetry.
The use of repetition or anaphora: "I love thee" exaggerates the passion in her voice. This is an unfettered declaration of love. The poet leaves us in no uncertainty about her feelings and the use of "thee" creates a romantic and nostalgic feeling. 'Thee' was very old fashioned in Victorian times and perhaps Browning is trying to make the voice in the sonnet sound timeless, emphasising the timelessness of her love.
The use of a list in the final three lines emphasises the diversity and expansiveness of her love and unifies the poem in a satisfying way as it recalls the list in the second line. The list at the end is not connected by 'ands' which makes it sound like her emotion is now tumbling forth. It creates a crescendo in the poem while picking up on themes introduced at the beginning. This creates a sense of completeness in love.

What is the Reader supposed to feel?
This is an interesting poem because it is a passionate declaration of  love by a Victorian woman. The unconstrained, open hearted passion of this poem has a strength and assertiveness which would normally be the provenance of a man. She claims that she loves him 'freely' suggesting that she expects nothing in return for her love. It's a very romantic and idealistic poem and I personally find her complete devotion to Browning quite terrifying. I guess it's a poem that is remarkable for it's open heartedness. I don't know that I'd have the courage to put my heart out there in quite this way.

How can I Link this to what the writer is saying?

Barrett Browning is linking her love to her husband to a religious experience. She was a very devout Roman Catholic and she claims that she loves her husband with an almost metaphysical passion. She claims to love him with the open-heartedness of a child. She believes that her love will overcome death and that it overwhelms all other emotions, be they happy or sad.

How can I Link this to another poem?

Sonnet 116 - another sonnet about how love endures beyond time

Hour - a modern sonnet that claims the opposite of Sonnet 43 - love is an emotion which is only felt intensely for a short time. It also is written from a woman's point of view but has a much more cautious and cynical tone.

Ghazal - Another powerful and passionate female voice who embraces her feelings of love openly and declares love whether or not it is returned.

Mr Bruff

BBC Bitesize

Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare

Henry Wriothesley

What’s the Point?

This poem is a Shakespearean Sonnet. It is in the sequence of sonnets  that were addressed to a young man called WH. The young man in question is believed to be Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton who was a very important patron of Shakespeare's. Whether they actually had a love affair or just an intense friendship is widely speculated. I guess ultimately, only Shakespeare and Wriothesley know.
This sonnet deals with agape (spiritual love) and suggests that true love conquers time and death. It suggests that true love outlasts aging and physical attraction and that ultimately it is agape is the only real type of love.

Where’s my Evidence?

• the marriage of true minds
• Love is not loveWhich alters when it alteration finds,
• it is an ever-fixed mark,That looks on tempests and is never shaken
• It is the star to every wandering bark,
• Love's not Time's fool,

How do I Analyse this?

Form: Shakespearean Sonnets follow a very strict structure. They have three quatrains (a group of four lines) and a rhyming couplet. Each quatrain follows an ABAB rhyme scheme and deals with its own topic. The turn in the sonnet (the part where the real meaning of the sonnet is revealed) comes in the rhyming couplet at the end.

In this sonnet the first quatrain explains that he is talking about a mental connection between two people ("the marriage of two minds") and how this never changes.
The second quatrain introduces celestial imagery and suggests that love is as strong as anything in the universe.
The third quatrain claims that the aging process and death cannot conquer love.
In the final couplet, Shakespeare stakes all his writing on the belief that love is the greatest force in the universe.

The whole sonnet is well organised and follows a formal argument structure.

Imagery: Shakespeare opens with a metaphor: "marriage of two minds" which introduces the idea of spiritual love but which also uses the word 'marriage' which suggests a physical union and a lifelong commitment.
He says that love is "an ever fixed mark" which is a lighthouse. This is a metaphor and suggests that love guides you in life and keeps you safe.
He uses celestial imagery with the metaphor: "It is the star to every wandering bark". Stars are eternal, heavenly, lights in the darkness and in Renaissance times, sailors used them to navigate with.

Sailor using the stars to navigate

Love and Time are personified through the use of capitalisation and Shakespeare suggests that love is stronger than time. The "rosy lips and cheeks" symbolise youth and the "bending sickle" is a reference to the grim reaper or death, and Shakespeare believes that even death cannot overcome true love.

The Grim Reaper

Structure: Alliteration is used to link "marriage" and "minds" emphasising the link between agape love and marriage. Maybe this suggests that this poem is not just about agape love? The marriage service is also being echoed in the word "impediments" which is used in the line :"If any of you know cause or just impediment.."
Alliteration is used again in "bending sickle's compass come" perhaps to emphasise the brutality of death.
The enjambement used in the first line gives the poem a slightly formal, rhetorical style like he is a lawyer beginning a speech. It is slightly surprising in the context of a love poem. Why do you think he adopts this tone? It is mirrored in the final couplet with the proved/ loved rhyme which again mixes this slightly legal tone with love. It's an oddly formal, argument tone which jars somewhat with the contexts of a sonnet.

What is the Reader supposed to feel?

I personally think that this is a poem about connection between like minded men. Whether or not they are in a sexual relationship is not the primary concern of the speaker in this poem: what he is saying is that love is ultimately about "true minds" not a physical union. He claims that what he loves about this man is the connection they have, something that will not change with time or the aging process. It seems reasonable to believe that there is also a sexual connection between these men given the word marriage, the phallic imagery of the lighthouse, the concern about "impediments" and what we can infer about about Shakespeare's views on sexuality from his body of works . I'm guessing that the "impediment" to their union is that homosexuality was taboo in Elizabethan times and he is saying that this is not enough to keep two people apart, even if they are soul mates.

How can I Link this to what the writer is saying?

Shakespeare is deliberately ambiguous about what he is saying. One of the reasons that Shakespeare endures is because he is a populist: he is a crowd pleaser. He deliberately keeps this poem open ended so that it can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Maybe it's a poem about spiritual love , perhaps he's saying that the only love that really matters is agape - a spiritual connection between people. Or perhaps it's a bisexual's anthem: you don't fall in love with the outer packaging - it's what's inside that really counts, regardless of whether your lover is a man or a woman. Or maybe it's the first ode to gay marriage. What do you think?

 How can I Link this to another poem?

Sonnet 43 - another sonnet about how love endures beyond time

Hour - a modern sonnet that claims the opposite of Sonnet 116 - love is an emotion which is only felt intensely for a short time.

To His Coy Mistress - another Elizabethan poem that claims that time is running out and that love is inevitably conquered by time. 

Mr Bruff

BBC Bitesize
Useful questions for revision with answers

Extra A* material

To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What’s the Point?

This poem is a dramatic monologue. It is written in the character of a man who is trying to seduce a woman. The reader is not necessarily supposed to agree with the man's arguments.

The poem is called To HIS Coy Mistress which suggests that it is not Marvell's own voice that we hear in the poem.

The man is arguing that we should "seize the day" (which is carpe diem in Latin). He thinks that life moves fast and that you should take pleasure as and when it comes up. The belief that you should live life for pleasure is called hedonism.

It is unlikely that Andrew Marvell was a big believer in hedonism, He was a political reformer and despised fast living and "carnal pleasures". It is very likely that this is a satirical poem and that the reader is supposed to dislike the speaker. Marvell was most famous for his many political, satirical poems.

 

Where’s my Evidence?

• An hundred years would go to praise/ Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze
• For, Lady, you deserve this state/ nor would I love at lower rate.
• worms shall try/ thy long preserved virginity
• Now let us sport us while we may
• like amorous birds of prey

How do I Analyse this?

Form: This poem is a dramatic monologue written in a three part argument structure. It is written from the point of view of a man who is trying to get some woman to climb into bed with him. He does not promise marriage or commitment as an honorable man would have at this time, He just promises "rough strife" and to take her virginity (lucky girl - who can resist an offer like that?).

 

He uses an argument structure. The first part of the poem tells this woman how he would love to spend time complimenting her; the second part tells her that he can't because we're all going to die; and the third part tells her what he wants to do. The use of a formal structure has the effect of making the speaker seem quite calculated and cold. This contrasts with his passionate, spontaneous persona, perhaps giving the reader a clue that he is not quite as lost in his passion as he pretends to be. 

The first part of the argument is a satire of the blason from. This can be seen in Romeo and Juliet and was popular in Renaissance times. Blasons were like Just the Way you Are by Bruno Mars. Poets listed all the parts of the girl's body and said how perfect each one was. It was as rubbish then as it is now. Marvell is satrising (taking the mick out of) this kind of drivel.

Imagery: The listing of body parts is very sexualised and emphasises the fact that this poem is about eros or physical love rather than a more spiritual or agape love. He uses hyperbole to exaggerate how long he would spend adoring each body part which might sound quite sweet, but the quote "all the rest" feels careless and suggests that he can't even be bothered to list each part in this first stanza. He also finishes this part of the poem talking about a "lower rate" which suggests a financial transaction and undermines (takes away from) any romanticism in the previous lines.

 The second stanza uses a lot of imagery about death. there is the particularly gruesome image of "worms" taking her virginity. This means that when she dies, she will be eaten by worms but is also an allusion to sex. He is trying to frighten the woman in this stanza by reminding her that she will inevitably die.

The final part has a lot of violent images. There is a simile "like amorous birds of prey" and a metaphor "tear our pleasures/ with rough strife". And the speaker personifies the sun saying that "we will make him run". This is quite a far cry from the romantic and sweetness in the first stanza. Moreover words like "devour" and "fires" and "languish" all connote hell. Although the speaker might be urging this woman into bed with a sort of carpe diem, YOLO urgency, the subtext is that if you engage too freely in the pleasures of the flesh (sex), you might find your soul being condemned to eternal damnation (hell).

 

Form: The poet uses a galloping iambic tetrameter throughout which lends the poem pace and urgency. He doesn't want to wait around and the rhythm reflects the quick pace at which he wants to live. The rhyming couplets emphasise this and are commonly used in love poetry to promote the idea of unity.

The use of enjambement and alliteration in "our sun/ stand still" emphasises the speed with which he wants them to live their lives.

The use of modal verbs (would/ should) in the first stanza and the use of the conditional (if) at the beginning, immediately lets the reader know that he has no intention of doing any of this romancing.

Note the change in pronouns: stanza 1 = "I"; stanza 2 = "you"; stanza 3 = "we". Why do you think this is?

What is the Reader supposed to feel?

 

I quite enjoy this poem. There is something about its energy that is very enticing and something about its audacity and carpe diem message that appeals to a twenty first century point of view. However, I find the voice of the speaker quite sinister and forceful. He is not affectionate at all towards this woman he is seducing and his audacity, although entertaining, is clearly not rooted in any feeling other than the desire to have a quick "roll in the hay".

 

I think it's quite a tricky poem because it is so old and almost impossible to access if you don't have any context for Marvell, his beliefs and his life. Marvell takes the "pleasures of the flesh" far more seriously than it is possible to take them today - he lived in a very different world and the consequences of casual sex, particularly for a woman at this time, could be catastrophic. It wasn't just socially taboo, it could also result in syphilis (a very frightening and prevalent disease which was incurable) or an unwanted pregnancy outside marriage.

 

I find it difficult to relate to the idea of anyone taking casual sex so seriously but I think he captures the voice of a predatory man perfectly and perhaps gives us some insight into how little the art of seduction has changed over the ages...

How can I Link this to what the writer is saying?

 

Marvell spent his life fighting corruption in Parliament and probably dealing with people who wanted to live their lives in this way. I think that he is extremely scornful of this point of view and believes that only a fool would risk eternal damnation for fleeting pleasure. He is satirizing seduction and he does it very impressively. His control of imagery and poetic form is masterful and muti-layered, making this poem a real pleasure to pick apart.

 

 How can I Link this to another poem?

The Farmer's Bride - another dramatic monologue, another man who is thinking mainly about his own needs.

Sonnet 116 - a poem about agape love which contrasts well with to his Coy Mistress. it uses some similar rhetorical devices and also has many layers of possible meaning.

In Paris With You - Another dramatic monologue in the voice of a sleazy guy.

 

 

 

 

Not Mr Bruff but better

 

BBC Bitesize

 

Extra A* material