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.