Gillian Clarke Says That This Poem Answers the Question: Why Did My Beautiful Baby Have

Catrin

Gillian Clarke says that this poem answers the question: "Why did my beautiful baby have to become a teenager?" The poem contrasts the baby's dependency on her mother with the independence and defiance of the teenager. In a sense, therefore, this poem is for all mothers and all daughters. Gillian Clarke writes that "It is an absolutely normal relationship of love, anxiety and exasperation."

The general meaning of the poem is clear though some details may be ambiguous. At the start of the poem, the mother in the labour ward in a city hospital, before (when she looks out of the window) and during labour (the room is "hot" and "white" and "disinfected"). Perhaps it is hot because of the plate glass, since later it is a "glass tank" - almost like a fishtank, or the vivarium where one keeps a pet that needs to stay warm. From the first mother and child seem to have been in a tug of war or a tug of of love, fighting over the "red rope". Did the poet literally write all over the white hospital walls - or does she mean that she found herself thinking up (and maybe writing somewhere) words, like those in the poem? Or maybe she is trying to explain her reaction to the "disinfected" and "clean" or "blank" environment - without "paintings and toys" and colouring in the white spaces. She sees this now as two individuals struggling to become "separate" and shouting "to be two, to be ourselves".

The second section tells what happened. Neither has "won nor lost the struggle" but it "has changed us both". The poet is still fighting off her daughter who can tug at her feelings by pulling "that old rope". The mother seems very much to want to be able to agree to the request to play out, and it hurts her to say no - not only because she foresees an argument with a strong-willed teenager, but also because she very much likes the idea of her daughter's skating in the dark. But she cannot give in - both because it would be irresponsible to allow the skating, and because it would be even more unwise to allow her daughter to think that she was winning the struggle. This last image, of skating in the dark, may come from a real request but also suggests an episode that William Wordsworth records in The Prelude, when he did just this - skating, as a boy, in the dark on a frozen lake, at a time when children were allowed to take far more risks than is common in the UK today, but enjoying as a result a freedom to explore and learn from the natural world. (In Catrin's case, it was roller-skating. Gillian Clarke says that "the request is half true, half symbolic".)

The poem has some striking images. The "red rope of love" is the umbilical cord. The image is repeated, as "that old rope". Gillian Clarke explains this as:

"The invisible umbilical cord that ties parents and children even when children grow up. I was also thinking of the image of a boat tied to a harbour wall. The rope is hidden. The boat looks as if it's free, but it isn't."

The "glass tank" is the hospital, according to Ms. Clarke. She explains that skating in the dark is meant literally - as an example of the kind of thing children ask to do but which mothers refuse because it is too dangerous.

·  As you read the poem, do you identify with the mother or the daughter or do you see things from both viewpoints?

·  How far do you think this poem depicts the relationship of parents and children like it is? Is it different for fathers and sons?

·  Should the mother have let her daughter go skating in the dark? Are parents too protective? Would you (will you) allow your children to take more risks?

Baby Sitting

Here Gillian Clarke contrasts the natural and instinctive love of a mother for her own child with the anxiety she feels for another's child, whom she does not know. Rather ironically this absence of emotion causes her to express an intelligent sympathy for the other child. Because the baby is too young to understand such things, being faced with a strange babysitter may seem worse, the poem suggests, than the more serious losses that adult women may suffer.

The opening of the poem gives a simple statement of the situation - except that the reader at first wonders how a baby can be "wrong" - not really a fault in this baby, merely its not being the babysitter's own - which is the "right" baby, by implication. The child is depicted very much as the ideal pretty infant - "roseate" and "bubbling" in her sleep, and "fair". But this is contradicted by the cold understatement of "a perfectly acceptable child". Worse, the babysitter is afraid of the child - of her waking and hating her, and of the angry crying that will follow. She thinks of how the baby's running nose will disgust her. The statement about the "perfume" of breath is really a comment on her own children, whose breath does "enchant" the mother in an instinctive way. Ms. Clarke explains:

"In her cot at home is the baby-sitter's baby. In the cot in this strange house is someone else's baby. The baby and the baby-sitter have never met. They are strangers. The baby-sitter is nervous, looks at the baby, sees a lovely child, but fears the child will wake. There'll be no chemistry or familiarity between them if the baby wakes."

The second stanza dwells on the idea of abandonment. Of course, the child is not abandoned, and we can suppose that her mother trusts the poet as a responsible carer. But Ms. Clarke suggests that this "abandonment" is worse than that of the lover "cold in lonely/sheets" or the woman leaving a beloved partner, dead or dying, in the "terminal ward". It will be worse for the baby, because she has not yet learned how to cope - and there is a hint that, in time, she will perhaps face these same kinds of suffering, too. The child will expect "milk-familiar comforting". She will find that, between her and the carer, "it will not come. This ending is ambiguous - it suggests literally milk that will not come to the breast, but is a metaphor for the comfort this brings, which also cannot come from her to the child.

The poem moves from the immediate situation to a more general look at life - seeing the parents' absence as anticipating other hardships that the future will bring.

The poem has short lines - there is no set metrical form, but most lines have four stresses, and many naturally fall into two halves. There are few metaphors but some interesting effects, like the transferred epithets of "snuffly/Roseate, bubbling sleep" (the adjectives should really describe the child, not sleep). The poem also appeals to the reader's senses of hearing (shouting and sobbing) and of smell ("perfume" of breath).

While the poem comes from a specific event, the child is not named and could be anyone - she is identified throughout by the pronouns and possessives "she" and "her". The poem explores the difference between a thoughtful concern for others and feeling this in some powerful and instinctive way.

·  How does the poem show a contrast between what we think and what we feel?

·  Do you share the poet's viewpoint here - how would you (do you) feel towards children who are not your own?

·  How far is this poem about the writer's own children?

·  How does the poet relate the baby's experiences to what happens in later life?

Follower

The title of this poem is ambiguous - it shows how the young Heaney followed his father literally and metaphorically.

The child sees farming as simply imitating his father's actions (“close one eye, stiffen my arm”), but later learns how skilled the work is. He recalls his admiration of his father then; but now his father walks behind (this metaphor runs through the poem). Effectively their positions are reversed. His father is not literally behind him, but the poet is troubled by his memory: perhaps he feels guilt at not carrying on the tradition of farming, or feels he cannot live up to father's example.

The poem has several developed metaphors, such as the child's following in his father's footsteps and wanting to be like him. The father is sturdy while the child falls - his feet are not big enough for him to be steady on the uneven land.

There are many nautical references:

·  The father's shoulders are like the billowing sail of a ship.

·  The “sod” rolls over “without breaking” (like a wave).

·  The child stumbles “in his wake” and dips and rises on his father's back.

·  “Mapping the furrow” is like navigating a ship.

In these images the farmer is not shown as simple but highly skilled.

Heaney uses specialized terms (a special lexicon or register) from ploughing - terms such as “wing”, “sock” and “headrig”. There are many active verbs - “rolled”, “stumbled”, “tripping”, “falling” and “yapping”. There are lots of monosyllables and colloquial vocabulary, frequently as the rhyme word at the end of line. Some of these terms sound like their meaning (onomatopoeia), like “clicking”, “pluck” and “yapping”.

The metre of the poems is more or less iambic (in tetrameters - four poetic feet/eight syllables to each line) and rhymed in quatrains (stanzas of four lines). We see a phrase without a verb written as sentence: “An expert”. The poet uses contrast - apart from the general contrast of past and present we note how:

·  the father's control is effortless (“clicking tongue” or “single pluck/Of reins”) while the powerful horses (“sweating team”) strain, and how

·  the young Seamus “wanted to grow up and plough.” but all he “ever did was follow”.

In thinking about the poem you might like to consider these questions:

·  What does the poem show of the relationship of father and son, and how time has changed this?

·  What does the last line of the poem mean? Does Heaney really want his father to “go away”?

·  Is this a poem about farming specifically or is it relevant to other skills and occupations? How does Heaney explore the idea of family tradition here?