Daddy by Sylvia Plath - some introductory thoughts

SOME THOUGHTS ON DADDY

Below are a few observations on the poem Daddy that you might find helpful to consider.

·         The poem is largely autobiographical. However you should write about the narrative voice of the poem rather than Plath herself. She has adapted and edited the material significantly.

·         So the poetic voice of the poem is that of a woman whose father died when she was very young.

·         The poetic voice we read is that of a woman who has not properly grieved the death of her father. She has been left with a complex and powerful group of emotions that are torturing her. These powerful emotions include anger at being abandoned by him and deep desire to love him and be with him.

·         The subject of the poem is that of the woman attempting to end the damaging influence of the distorted and magnified memory of her father. She wants to be completely and finally separated from him.

·         Every child over years is naturally separated from their parents. This is a healthy part of growing up. But because the father dies when the child was so young she has not had the ability to distance herself from him. She uses shocking lexis to describe this separation as he ‘Daddy I have had to kill you / You died before I had time.’

·         Because she has never properly grieved for him over the years her feelings and memories for him have become magnified and distorted. In her imagination he has become all powerful, he has grown to colossal proportions – a head in the Atlantic, a toe in the Pacific. Because Plath’s father was a German speaking Pole she associates him with the persecuting all powerful Nazi’s and herself as a Jew – a victim of the Nazi’s. In the second half of the poem she has exhausted this holocaust imagery and adopts the supernatural imagery of the vampire.

·         At this point in the poem she introduces a second figure – a husband who also assumes the character of a persecutor an image of evil.

·         The poem ends with a declaration of victory over both men.  However we are aware that this is an apparent victory. We don’t really believe she has really achieved this state of total emotional and mental separation from him. Her use of the informal, slang noun ‘bastard’ still shows her to be angry – thus full of unresolved feelings.

Mending Wall - A Personal Response

Mending Wall is another poem by Robert Frost that will enable you to write about the past.

In this poem Frost recalls an annual ritual of mending a wall that divides two farms. The work is done every year. The work is repeated. It even has its own name ‘spring mending time’ to show this job has been done many times before.

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

It is written in the first person and we feel it is strongly autobiographical. As in all of Frost’s poems the starting point is personal experience. 

Notice the first person plural pronoun ‘we’ that suggests team work – people working together, agreement. 

Notice also the strong rhythmic quality to the poem – created by the iambic pentameters. This rhythm helps create a sense of movement and flow in the poem that perhaps gives the impression of walking.

The phrase ‘once again’ picks up the repetitive nature of the work they are doing. It feels as if this work is ongoing and will never be completed. Is there a sense of frustration in the tone of the poem at this point?

Most of the poem is written in the present tense. This gives us a direct experience of the work that is presented to us as if the work was being done as we read.

We realise as we read that Frost disapproves of this job. He thinks it is meaningless and can serve no purpose. One way he devalues this work is to refer to his neighbour as 

I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

For Frost the neighbour is trapped in the past. A past where there was no rules, laws, even civilisation. He refers to him as primitive, lacking in trust, full of suspition and doubt about people. It reminds us of the wild west of the previous century. It reminds us of cowboys and Indians.

Note the alliterative ‘stone savage’ and the post modifying adjective ’armed’ emphasises the idea of threat, defence and potential violence that characterised rural life in America a century earlier.

Notice also the adjective 'darkness'. This is deeply symbolic refer to darkness as ignorance, evil, primitive.

Frost represents a modern America. He is idealistic and optimistic about human nature. He thinks America and its citizens no longer require the outdated behaviour of the past where the West - depicted in so many western films like ‘High Noon’ was presented as lawless and primitive.

His neighbour’s father represents this generation – now dead. But his son – Frost’s neighbour holds on to the rules of the past out of fear.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

After Apple-picking - A Personal Response

The way the past is presented in this poem is very interesting.

A main point I think is that Frost is referring to the work of harvesting he has just completed as a farmer. This is referred to in the lines

And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.

A second interesting point is Frost's state of mind. He has been so obsessed by the work of the harvest during the day that although he has stopped the physical work he cannot stop thinking about the work. In fact he recollects the memory of work so strongly it is as if he is reliving it again in the present. Consider such lines as

And I could tell    What form my dreaming was about to take.    Magnified apples appear and disappear,    Stem end and blossom end,    And every fleck of russet showing clear. My instep arch not only keeps the ache,    It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.    I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.    And I keep hearing from the cellar bin    The rumbling sound Of load on load of apples coming in. These lines are really helpful and there are lots to write about them. Firstly the past comes to him as a dream. It completely dominates his sleep.We notice he dream about the apples in lots of detail. he even imagines  his body has kept the shape of the ladder he has used to pick the apples. And in the last few lines of this quotation he refers specifically to sensory imagery. He can feel and hear the past. Each one of the sentences above can act as a topic sentence for at least four paragraphs.
He returns to the work of the day in the following lines.Frost wants to communicate the enormity of the work he has been doing. We get a strong impression of the vastness of the orchard, his love and care of each apple and the work.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.    For all    That struck the earth,    No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,    Went surely to the cider-apple heap As of no worth.
I hope you find these quotations and comments helpful for your essay.

Funeral Rites A Personal Response

Introduction

Funeral Rites combines the personal and cultural - the private and the public responses to deaths that take place in Heaney's family and wider community. Heaney calls for the deaths to be marked by private and public ritual. It is through the rituals of death that resolution and healing can take place. It is through ritual that the pain of loss and anger can become dissipated and order, stability and peace can be restored.

The First Section

In this first section Heaney focuses on family deaths. We are immediately reminded of the poem Mid Term Break in which Heaney writes about the death of his younger brother. Heaney still at school is called upon to take up the responsibilities of one of the chief mourners within his family and wider community. Private grief is contrasted with Heaney's public display of grief.

In this poem he is older now. Tall enough to be one of the coffin bearers and experienced enough to understand and cope with the loss of a number of family members. But only just. This humility and fragility is picked up in the opening phrase 'I shouldered a kind of manhood'. The pun on the word 'shouldered' picks up the physical and emotional role that Heaney now plays within his community. The phrase, 'a kind of' is informal and conversational. The poem draws from everyday and ordinary experiences.

We have to make assumptions about these family deaths as the focus of the poem here is on the description of the rooms and the bodies of the dead. We are on familiar ground here. We are reminded of poems such as 'The Grauballe Man' and 'The Tollund Man'.

However unlike 'The Grauballe Man' and 'The Tollund Man' - whose deaths were violent there is no direct indication that Heaney's family deaths referred to here are violent as well. However Heaney does write elsewhere of family casualties of the violence in Northern Ireland in poems like 'The Strand at Lough Beg'. Despite there being no direct reference to violent deaths the description of his relatives seems to suggest Heaney's relatives are all laid out in a single room all at the same time reminding us of the 'Stockinged corpses/Laid out in the farmyards...' in 'The Tollund Man'. If Heaney was describing a family massacre we might expect a more detailed, more explicit and direct account of it. Instead the phrase 'And always, in a corner,/the coffin lid,' the adverb 'always' indicates the progress of time.

So I think these are the natural deaths of elderly relatives. Perhaps the 'Their puffed knuckles/had unwrinkled' suggests age. And the contrasting nouns of the first section's 'deaths' with the second section's 'murders' makes this point. But it is not clear - perhaps dileberately.

But Heaney does something similar with these corpses as he does with the other violent bog corpses of say 'Bog Queen' or 'Punishment'.What he does is soften them. He transforms death into something of beauty, something familiar and comforting. The distances that death creates are shortened through a series of phrases culminating with 'Dear soapstone masks,/Kissing their igloo brows...'. In the selective descriptions of the corpses and the paraphernalia of death - for example the 'little gleaming crosses' and 'rosary beads' these deaths are turned into portraits of love, respect and even awe. They become a kind of work of art.


The Second Section

In the second section there is a broadening of the scope of the poem. Heaney's focus turns from family deaths to 'neighbourly murder[s]'. In this term he is referring to the sectarian violence that dominated Northern Irish politics during the mid twentieth century.

This violence is an expression of the conflict between two cultures, religions and national identities. On one side is the Roman Catholic and Republican community. Their goal is a united Ireland independent of British rule and influence. This community draws its identity from pre-history, from Viking, Celtic and the early Christianity of Patrick in the 5th century and the Classical civalisation. The second group are Protestant, British and Unionist. A country occupied and deeply influenced by the Roman Empire and Norman France as well as Viking. Britain is seen as a seafaring nation that developed a strong culture of trading, industrialisation and colonisation.

The conflict between these two groups has developed over hundreds of years and Heaney refers to this conflict specifically in the second and third sections of the poem. We are shocked by the phrase 'neighbourly murder' - the idea of murders taking place within communities is picked up in poems like 'The Tollund Man' and 'Punishment'. These murders have taken place on British soil. And not one murder but hundreds of murders stretched out over decades. The need for ritual is described as instinctive and powerful. Yet Heaney describes the rituals as comforting and peaceful. The phrase 'temperate footsteps' the adjective 'temperate' picks up on moderation and restraint rather than anger and revenge the traditional response to sectarian violence.

Heaney draws on the distant and recent Irish past to give the rituals of death and peace authority and legitamacy. He wants to break the culture of violence so embedded with the Roman Catholic culture. So he makes a reference to the burial 'chambers of the Boyne'. These are neolithic burial mounds built around 2000 years ago. The markings link the stones to the bronze age.

Heaney imagines a funeral procession. It moves to the sounds of thousands of car engines as a whole nation mourns its deaths. The sound of the engines becomes the music for these imagined funerals. Heaney is making a point about the traditional rituals of sectarian funerals accompanied with gunshots, drumming and tribal music. The picture here is one of peace and resolution. It is 'somnambulant women' the widows that contemplate the 'triumph' of a peaceful funeral picked up in the noun phrase, 'Quiet as a serpent' - a Celtic symbol.

I think that Heaney is desperate for some resolution to the situation in Ireland. For Heaney I think that conventional Christianity - in the form of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism - has failed. It cannot offer Ireland the solutions it needs. It exists in Ireland as a tribal, sectarian and empty of spiritual power. Only representing and reduced to the political identities of two conflicting ideologies. Therefore he turns to a pre Christian spiritual tradition for inspiration. Heaney is vague about what the past can offer. He seems to have turned his back on Christ and the full meaning of that sacrifice. Instead he looks to Ireland's ancient past and the figure of Gunnar - a great Norse warrior.

He offers a message of peace to these divided communities. I don't think his message of peace would have been received sympathetically by the extremists in these communities and his message as a poet must have come at a price

The Third Section

In the final section of the poem Heaney offers his readers an alternative to a barbaric image we have of the past of waring tribes motivated by hatred and revenge.
He uses this image to guide the present and future state of Ireland. He continues to imagine a funeral where personal pain and loss are no longer transformed into hatered, anger, and revenge.

A Constable Calls by Seamus Heaney: A Personal Response

INTRODUCTION

A Constable Calls combines three important themes in Heaney's poetry. Firstly it is an autobiographical childhood poem that links back to poems like "Digging" and "Death of a Naturalist". Secondly it's a poem that communicates a moment of epiphany - an experience of intense, powerful and vivid insight, that can be found in poems like "Sunlight" and "The Seed Cutters". Finally it's a poem that links to the political and cultural conflicts that existed in Northern Ireland during Heaney's childhood - and still exist to some extent in Northern Ireland today. Other poems that engage with these ideas are quite wide ranging, from "The Other Side" to "Bogland" and "Act of Union."

WHAT HAPPENS IN THE POEM

The poem takes a routine - perhaps annual - visit by a local official who is checking and recording the crops and assets of the farm Heaney grew up on in County Derry. This is done for tax purposes. It will enable the British and protestant administration in Ulster to charge an accurate tax on Heaney's family.

The young Heaney - perhaps aged 10 watches his Roman Catholic father being questioned by a Protestant police constable. Heaney's eye focuses on his bicycle, cap, ledger - in which the figures are recorded and finally revolver and holster. Then the poem records the last couple of questions asked by the constable and Heaney's emotional and internal response to them. Finally the poem returns to a description of the constable as he prepares to leave.

CHILDHOOD / AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The poem recounts an incident in Heaney's childhood. It takes place in the family home with his father. Seamus is a marginal passive figure in the poem observing the main action and taking in details. It is written with a first person narrative voice we take to be Heaney's. And its written in the past tense.

Again Heaney concentrates on an apparent ordinary incident but draws out from this key and familiar topics.

However the poem is dominated by what Heaney observes. He focuses on the props of power and authority - like "Follower". However in "A Constable Calls" power and authority are located with the constable, not the father whose only response to the constable is a weak "No".

EPIPHANY

Heaney makes the subject of the poem really stand out. One way he does this is the selective but detailed descriptions of the constable and the paraphernalia and symbols of his power for example, 'The line of its pressure ran like a bevel
In his slightly sweating hair.' This line shows a very specific detail that perhaps only a child would notice. The constable 'sweating' might indicate the heat of the afternoon but also helps create tension.

Heaney creates a tension in the poem with references for example to the constable's 'boot', the 'cocked' dynamo, and the line that helps underpin the tension 'Arithmetic and fear.' is very effective. I think also the casual way the symbols of power are mentioned and they are often associated with light, for example, 'Heating in sunlight, the "spud" Of the dynamo gleaming'and polished holster'

POLITICAL / CULTURAL CONFLICT

Political and cultural conflict is introduced at the start of the poem with Heaney's narrative voice focussing on the presence of the constable. Heaney's detailed description of the constable's objects picks up his strangeness. There is something out of place and unexpected about him in this family home.

We can see the constable as a symbol or representative of authority and power in Ulster at the time. And the poem records the family's response to that power partly in Heaney's father's lie but also in the line 'Arithmetic and fear.'

Suppressed physical violence is an important feature of this poem. It exists as a presence or a possibility throughout the poem. It is explicit in the references to the "revolver" and "polished holster" as well as the "baton-case" in the seventh stanza. The young Heaney cannot help "staring" at the gun - a child's privilege. However there are also less direct references to republican violence - a bomb attack on a barracks referred to in the line "...Imagining the black hole in the barracks." and the final "...And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked."

The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams: A Personal Response

The Red Wheelbarrow is an interesting poem. William's intended to write poetry that was essentially American rather than a poetry heavily influenced by European and Classical references. He despised Eliot and Pound. Perhaps there are two ways he makes this poem distinctly American. Firstly the reference to the 'white chickens' - probably an American breed, and the colour references red, white and the blue 'rain water', reflects the colours of the American flag.

He also wanted a simple poetry. In this poem he has created a photographic portrait of a common wheelbarrow probably found in hundreds if not thousands of farms and small holdings all over the rural United States. He wanted to elevate the ordinary, the common and appreciate it for itself. He raises the wheelbarrow up by making it the subject of the poem and reinforces its status by using the adjective 'glazed'. This word makes the wheelbarrow radiant, makes it shine and this makes it stand out.

Another way in which the poem can be seen as American is the way it fuses both eastern - European and Western - Japanese and Chinese poetic features. The language obviously is English but except for the final full stop, the syntax is non European. Instead William's draws on the Japanese Tanka and Haiku simple and minimalist poetic forms, used extensively in Imagist poetry in Europe.

However despite William's intentions I love this poem because it also gives us the opportunity to do the opposite to what he intended.

Firstly there is the question, so what depends upon a 'red wheelbarrow'? There are two answers to this question. Firstly its the farmer who depends upon the wheelbarrow. It enables him to do his work - to produce food - and thereby make a living. And we all depend upon the wheelbarrow as consumers of the food the farmer produces. But the farmer may have a wife and children to support and so the family also depends on the wheelbarrow. The money he earns supports a local economy and the taxes he pays supports both State and National services, which in turn helps a global economy.

A second answer builds on the same idea. What depends upon a red wheelbarrow? The whole of western civilisation depends upon a red wheelbarrow. A wheelbarrow is made up of two simple machines - wheel and axel and inclining plain. The idea of a "simple machine" originated with the Greek philosopher Archimedes around the 3rd century BC. However there is archaeological evidence for wheelbarrows in use, that go back to Suma - Mesopotamia over 3000 years BC. Suma is thought to be where writing was first invented. It is thought to be the cradle of civilisation. The wheelbarrow then quite literally is a fundamental building block of society.

Prayer by George Herbert: A Personal Response

I think Prayer by George Herbert is one of the most beautiful poems in the English language. Although written in the seventeenth century the poem has a very modern feel to it. At its core is a simple list of phrases, each one defining Christian prayer. For me each phrase triggers rich and powerful associations that resonate deeply. They compel the reader to make an emotional, intelectual and an imaginative response to each word and phrase.

There is no prescribed doctrine but an invitation and a freedom to explore and plummet the readers imagination. The poem is deeply sensuous and elemental. And therefore creates strong vivid imagery.

Each time I read it, the poem evolves and shifts its meaning as my experience of the world changes. In the end it is a kind of patch work or collage of striking images