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 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

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Useful questions for revision with answers

Extra A* material

A* To His Coy Mistress

This is cut and paste from here, and offers a more complex, contextual reading of the poem.


The masculine assault upon the reluctance of the "coy" woman lies at the heart of Marvell's best-known love poem--perhaps the most famous "persuasion to love" or carpe diem poem in English--"To his Coy Mistress." Everything we know about Marvell's poetry should warn us to beware of taking its exhortation to carnality at face value. Critics from T. S. Eliot on took note of the poem's "logical" structure, but then it began to be noticed that the conditional syllogism in that structure is invalid--a textbook case of affirming the consequent or the fallacy of the converse. Has Marvell made an error? Or does he attribute an error to the speaking persona of the poem? Or is the fallacy part of the sophistry that a seducer uses on an ingenuous young woman? Or is it a supersubtle compliment to a woman expected to recognize and laugh at the fallacy? These alternatives must be judged in the light of the abrupt shifts in tone among the three verse paragraphs. In the opening lines the seducer assumes a pose of disdainful insouciance with his extravagant parody of the Petrarchan blason:

An hundred years should go to praise
Thine Eyes, and on thy Forehead Gaze.
Two hundred to adore each Breast:
But thirty thousand to the rest.
An Age at least to every part,
And the last Age should show your Heart.

Although the Lady is said to "deserve this State," the compliment is more than a little diminished when the speaker adds that he simply lacks the time for such elaborate wooing. It is also likely that most women would be put off rather than tempted by the charnel-house imagery of the poem's middle section where the seducer, sounding like a fire-and-brimstone preacher, warns that "Worms shall try / That long preserv'd Virginity." Finally, the depiction of sexual intimacy at the poem's close, with its vision of the lovers as "am'rous birds of prey" who will "tear our Pleasures with rough strife," is again a disconcerting image in an ostensible seduction poem. The persona's desire for the reluctant Lady is mingled with revulsion at the prospect of mortality and fleshly decay, and he manifests an ambivalence toward sexual love that is pervasive in Marvell's poetry."

Nettles by Vernon Scannell

What’s the Point?

• This poem is a first person narrative told form the perspective of the speaker.
• This poem works on two levels.
• It's the story about a boy who falls in the nettles and hurts himself, so his father gets really angry with the nettles (it's a little weird) and goes out and slashes them and then burns them. He then realises it's pointless and that the nettles will just grow back and he will not be able to protect his son forever.
• An extended metaphor about his experiences with war. Scannell felt very angry about the waste of life he saw during World War 2. In this metaphor the nettles represent the soldiers, the sun and rain represent the government who just 'grow' more recuits to have them killed again.

Where’s my Evidence?

• That regiment of spite
• White blisters beaded on his tender skin
• And then I took my hook and honed the blade/ And went outside and slashed in fury with it
• that fierce parade
• But in two weeks the busy sun and rain
• Had called up tall recruits behind the shed

How do I Analyse this?

Form: This poem is written in iambic pentameter which reflects the tight control of military life or perhaps the pulsing anger running throughout the poem. In line 10 the iambic pentameter is broken, perhaps reflecting the anger and loss of control at this point in the poem.
The alternating ABABCDCD rhyme scheme helps to control the rhythm, giving the poem a strict, militaristic feel while also stressing certain ideas (tears/ spears or dead/ shed and parade/ blade).
Alliteration is used effectively to exaggerate key images and emotions: "blisters beaded" sounds painful and exaggerates this image effectively. Similarly the repetition of the 'h' sound in "took my hook and honed my blade" emphasises his breathless fury.

Imagery: The extended metaphor of the Nettles works well. Nettles are common and grow everywhere. Thus they represent the cheapness of human life in war. Also, they are impossible to avoid, like painful experiences in child's life and will always grow back, no matter how much you try to get rid of them.
There is a lot of military imagery in this poem: "spears", "sharp wounds", "regiment of spite". This alludes to Scannell's experiences in war and experiences in the army.
It also reveals that he sees the world as a hard and dangerous place for his children. Scannell had six children and two of them died: one as a baby and one in a motorbike accident. In this poem the reader learns that he feels powerless to protect them: "My son would often feel sharp wounds again."
The imagery of physical hurt: "sharp wounds", "blisters beaded" and "sobs and tears" emphasises the vulnerability of his son or of the young soldiers fighting in the war. Perhaps he is reminding the reader that all these young men were only just out of childhood when they died.
Personification of the sun and rain make them sound foolish and uncaring like the governments who send soldiers to war.

What is the Reader supposed to feel?

This poem strikes me as very masculine. There is something about the order and tidiness of the form (the use of iambic pentameter, the precise use of rhyme, the almost a sonnet-ness of it), coupled with the army imagery which strikes me as distinctly male. It's very different to Ghazal or Praise Song for My Mother, which have more feminine fluidity.


Also, it's a poem about a father and a son and is possibly saying something about the way in which men in the twentieth century were trapped into the roles of soldiers. Both World War 1 and World War 2 had conscription and Scannell tried to desert the army twice. I can feel his helplessness and frustration when he burns the nettles - it's such a pointless and overblown action which achieves nothing ("But in two weeks" the nettles have grown back again). It is also alluding to the endless supply of conscripted soldiers "tall recruits" who continue to feed the war machine. Perhaps Scannell feels that should another war arise, he will be unable to protect his son - that life is full of injustice and that it is impossible to escape it or to protect those you love the most: "the boy..seeking comfort."

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

So why did Scannell write this poem? What does he want to say?


Scannell deserted the army twice and was very affected by what he saw in war. He thought that war was a senseless act and is clearly very angry at the waste of life war engenders. He believes that the government are careless with human life reflected in the bitter tone of  the poem. Scannell thinks that life is full of unavoidable pain and pointless suffering.

Scannell also seems to think that day-to-day life is unjust, uncontrollable and full of danger. He would like to stop his son from feeling pain but seems to believe that suffering and cruelty are part of nature, reflected in the growing back of the nettles, and therefore he is powerless to prevent it. The line "watery grin", "tender skin" and then his fury reveal the strong love he feels for his son but in the end, he says that he cannot protect his son from hardships and pain in life. He feels hopeless. Ultimately, it is a pessimistic poem perhaps reflecting his own unhappy experiences in life: life hurts you and no sooner than you have dealt with one problem, another grows back in its place.

How can I Link this to another poem?

The Manhunt - another poem about life being full of pain and suffering. It also has military imagery.

Harmonium- this poem is about pain in father son relationships and uses imagery to represent aspects of the relationship similarly to Nettles.

Praise Song for My Mother - This is quite different in tone but is also about parent child relationships

BBC Bitesize
Mr Bruff

Ghazal by Mimi Khalvati

What’s the Point?

• A Ghazal is a form of Persian love poetry. Persia was one of the great ancient civilisations and is now Iran.
• Each stanza in this poem is called a sher. And the repeated rhyme is called a radeef.
• Poems were traditionally written by a man to a woman and contained imagery of unrequited (unreturned) love. 
• Khalvati is modernising the Ghazal by writing it from a woman's point of view and in English. She is playing with traditional ideas about love and how women are supposed to be treated by their lovers.
• This is both playful and romantic.

Where’s my Evidence?

"If mine is the venomous tongue, the serpent’s tail,
charmer, use your charm, weave a spell and subdue me. "

"Be heaven and earth to me and I’ll be twice the me
I am, if only half the world you are to me."

"If yours is the iron fist in the velvet glove
when the arrow flies, the heart is pierced, tattoo me."

How do I Analyse this?

Form: A Ghazal is a traditional form which follows strict conventions like a sonnet. The whole poem is written in shers which are couplets reflecting the unity of a couple in love. The repeated rhyme, called a radeef  is "me/me" which creates a slightly self-absorbed tone. This poem is all about what the speaker wants in a lover or what "Mimi" wants... (do you see what she's doing there?). Is she self-absorbed? Is she asserting a woman's right to be assertive in a relationship? You decide...

Imagery: There is a lot of natural imagery in this poem placing the speaker in a more submissive position. She uses metaphors to create the idea that he lover cam complete her, or fulfill her:
"If I am the grass and you are the wind, blow through me
If I am the rose and you are the bird, then woo me."
In this stanza she is passive and her lover will bring her to life. She is also using traditional images of romance.

Different aspects of love are revealed. For example this metaphor suggests that love is a violent and forceful experience:
"If yours is the iron fist in the velvet glove
when the arrow flies, the heart is pierced, tattoo me."
Note the violent imagery, the permanence of a tattoo and the forceful rhythm contained within the word tattoo.

Structure: The poem sounds like it is being tentative with the repetition of "if". It can sound like she is unsure of her lover's reaction. However, note the use of imperative verbs: "tattoo me" or "woo me". This is quite commanding and lends the voice strength.

The use of excalmatory phrases and the dramatic "Oh":
"Oh would that I were bark! So old and still in leaf.
And you, dropping in my shade, dew to bedew me!"
suggests that she is enjoying the drama of falling in love. Perhaps she is playing a role.

The use of long sentences in each sher leave the reader waiting for the end of the sentence, like a lover awaits a response. Each couplet contains a complete image, so we need to read the whole sentence to complete the image. This adds to the sense of anticipation in the poem, reflecting the tortuous and delicious anticipation of waiting for a lover to respond so you can feel completed.

What is the Reader supposed to feel?

This is a strange poem. At first I found it very irritating - her neediness and the overblown romantic imagery seemed exaggerated and unconvincing to me. However, as I explored further, I began to believe that she is playing a game with gender roles in a romantic relationship. At first glance, it seems like she is saying that she wants her lover to 'subdue' and dominate her which is a pretty old fashioned idea. However, her voice does not sound like someone who would be easily dominated. The use of imperative verbs and the repetition of what she expects, starts to make her sound like a woman who knows what she wants. I think that we are supposed to allow ourselves to get lost in her vision of romantic love and to submit to its old-fashioned ideas - hence the use of an old-fashioned and traditional form as a vehicle for these ideas.

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

So why did Khalvati write this poem? What is she saying?

I think that Khalvati is presenting a range of metaphors which define romantic love : love can be beautiful, soft, timeless, ageless, enduring, painful, returned, unrequited, renewing, sublime and earthy. You can find a metaphor in the poem for each of these adjectives (have fun).

However, I think that she is also adding a more modern take on the poem. She is suggesting that within a romantic relationship you can try on different roles: "Weave a spell, subdue me" and allow yourself to get lost and carried away "charmed" by your lover or even improved by your lover: "twice the me". Nonetheless, at the  centre of this Khalvati seems to suggest that it is important to retain a sense of yourself or "me" and this is a more modern and feminist view.

Mr Bruff thinks this is a religious poem and that it's about her relationship with God. I'm not sure but maybe...

How can I Link this to another poem?

The Manhunt - this is written in rhyming couplets, uses a lot of metaphors to try and define what love is and its relationship to your sense of self - Laura has lost her husband.

Hour- another modern poem in a traditional form, written by a woman attempting to define love. Also uses a lot of metaphor.

Sonnet 43 - Another woman trying to define love in a traditional form and also suggesting that she should submit herself to love.

BBC Bitesize
Mr Bruff

Sister Maude by Christina Rosetti

What’s the Point?

• A dramatic monologue in the voice of a wounded woman who feels that her sister told tales on her resulting in the death of her curly-haired lover.
• The speaker in the dramatic monologue comes across as a little crazy and I think that the reader is being invited to read between the lines and to find the speaker a bit disturbed.
• The voice is angry and malicious, and slightly obsessive. Maybe Sister Maude is a nasty piece of work but you can't help but feel that the speaker is enjoying her role as angry victim.

Where’s my Evidence?

• But sister Maude, oh sister Maude,/ Bide you with death and sin.
• Cold he lies, as cold as stone,/With his clotted curls about his face: 
• my sister Maude,/Who lurked to spy and peer.

How do I Analyse this?

Form: Dramatic monologue. In the tradition of dramatic monologues you have to read between the lines to actually understand what’s going on. Clearly the speaker of this poem is very angry and she repeats "sister Maude" throughout the poem so that it begins to sound like a hissing insult. The word "sister" should suggest closeness but in this poem it is used to emphasise anger and betrayal, Rosetti worked in a community of "fallen women" who  called each other "sisters" and had plenty of opportunity to witness backstabbing and rivalries between the sisterhood - how women who should stand together can tear each other down.

Imagery: There is the imagery of the death of the lover (emphasised through alliteration: "comliest corpse" and "clotted curls") and there is something about the juxtaposition of love and death that is quite unpleasant and adds to the sense that the speaker is a little unhinged. The imagery of death is continued in stanzas 3, 4 and 5 with all the talk of souls and "My father may sleep in Paradise". The speaker doesn't just want Sister Maude to suffer in this life but she wants her suffering for all eternity. This actually makes the speaker sound very vindictive: it's not for her to be dealing out punishments for the afterlife.

Structure: The poem opens with a rhetorical question which sets the accusing tone but also serves to cast doubt over the speaker's assertions. The use of a question suggests that maybe Sister Maude isn't actually guilty of everything she is being accused of and this creates some doubt in the reader's mind about how reliable the speaker is.

The regular rhyme and rhythm in this poem makes the speaker sound angry and naive. There is a nursery-rhyme lilt to this poem, a sing-song malice reminiscent of children's taunts in the playground. 

The use of repetition and sibilance throughout further emphasise this childish angry tone. The last line in the fourth stanza is too short and again makes the speaker sound like she is not quite in control of what she is saying.

What is the Reader supposed to feel?

I personally find the speaker of this poem incredibly annoying. I think that is Rosetti's intention. Her whiny repetition, the obsessive tone this creates, combine to make me feel much more sympathy for Sister Maude than I do for the speaker. It is of course, possible that Sister Maude is not entirely blameless (then again, who is?) but the speaker's self-righteous tone is very alienating. I also think that the lines: "Though I had never been born at all/ He'd never had looked at you." really gives away what's going on here: she's jealous and possessive. Rather than mourning the death of this man she claims to love, she is fixated on venting her rage at Sister Maude.

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

So why did Rosetti write this poem? What is she saying? It's a really odd poem and it's taken me ages to get a handle on it.

To understand what's going on, I think you need to know that Rosetti worked in a community for fallen women which attempted to rehabilitate prostitutes and women who had engaged in sexual activity outside marriage. She became fascinated by female sexuality and relationships (not necessarily sexual) between women. This experience inspired her most famous work: Goblin Market.

I think this is a poem about sexual jealousy and how vile women can be to each other when they start fighting over men. The speaker of this poem is not really a conventional, meek Victorian virgin - she's fierce and angry about the betrayal by Sister Maude. I think Rosetti is telling us something about how relationships between women can sour and lead to obsessive anger. The key to this poem is the sense of betrayal: sisters should support each other but rivalries over men can cause a breaking down of the sacred bond of sisterhood. Perhaps this poem is a warning to women: prioritise your sisterly relationships over lovers!

How can I Link this to another poem?

The Farmer's Bride - another dramatic monologue and these poems both focus on female sexuality and madness.

Brother - another poem about sibling rivalry

Nettles- another poem about conflict in family relationships

BBC Bitesize
Mr Bruff

The Farmer's Bride by Charlotte Mew

What’s the Point?

• A dramatic monologue in the voice of a farmer who wants a wife like he wants a new sheep: she’s just another farm animal to cook, clean, help out and have babies.
• The wife isn’t very into being an animal (there's a surprise!): in fact, she’s completely freaked out by him.
• The farmer doesn’t understand why she’s so scared of him despite his creepy obsession with her body hair.

Where’s my Evidence?

• “chased her" 
• “turned the key upon her fast”
• “shy as a leveret, swift as she”
• “flying like a hare”
• “the brown, the brown of her”
• “her hair, her hair, her hair”
• “her wide brown stare”

How do I Analyse this?

Form: Dramatic monologue. In the tradition of dramatic monologues you have to read between the lines to actually understand what’s going on. The Farmer is confused that his wife doesn’t love him but the fact that he “chased her” and “turned the key upon her fast” (rhyme) gives us some clues about his attitude towards her.

Imagery: All the imagery of wild animals: “shy as a leveret” (simile), suggests that she cannot be tamed. She is a free spirit who feels trapped on a farm. She is not a domestic animal. His obsession over her body (repetition) suggests a kind of animal lust that is not reciprocated and reinforces her wildness.

Structure: The first three stanzas have a galloping, iambic tetrameter rhythm which makes the farmer sound simple and thoughtless. It also makes the chase sound fast and fierce. In stanza four the rhythm changes and becomes far more pulsing and steady. This reflects how the Farmer's Bride is out of rhythm with the community around her. Notice the strength but also the flow here, created by use of enjambement and sibilance. She is a force of nature.

The structure becomes really fragmented at the end - see use of hyphenation and repetition. He's almost speechless with lust and frustration. How long till be climbs those stairs? Remember, rape within marriage was not recognised in law until the 1990's. He might have thought that it was his right, even his duty as a husband to climb those stairs and 'possess' his wife.

What is the Reader supposed to feel?

I feel a range of things as I read this: firstly, I feel pity for The Farmer's Bride - she seems so trapped and the imagery of the hunt presents her as a victim. However, I also admire her courage and strength in running away. The shift in rhythm in the fourth stanza suggests to me that she is unusual and different to those around her. Maybe she's just in the wrong place at the wrong time? I think the farmer is a brute but I know that some people feel sorry for him. Considering the time the poem is set in and his cultural background, he does seem to show some restraint in this icy marriage. I don't see a happy ending for either of them. They are so fundamentally mismatched.

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

So why did Mew write this poem? What is she saying?. I think she's commenting on the position of women in society in the early twentieth century. The Farmer's Bride is literally and spiritually trapped in her life and I believe that Mew wants us to empathise with how trapped a woman could be in this world. The Farmer's Bride has no choice but to endure however, she doesn't really seem to have the mental ability to cope with this life. Mew's family all suffered with mental illness and maybe she's trying to show how family dynamics can lead to terrible situations resulting in madness, depression and suicide.

How can I Link this to another poem?

The Manhunt - conflict in marriage but in a more emotionally connected way

To His Coy Mistress - another unpleasant man, another dramatic monologue

Ghazal - a stronger female voice and use of natural imagery

Mr Bruff
BBC Bitesize
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