The Yellow Palm

'The Yellow Palm' (click here to hear the author reading it)   is a poem born out of the author's real experiences in Baghdad. Robert Mihinnick discusses the genesis of the poem at length at Sheer Poetry, but one of the most striking things that he says is that 'there's no sign of this poem in my notebooks. I wrote it in my head and put it straight on to a computer'. This process of composition (reminiscent of the ways that poets such as Tennyson were said to compose in their head by reciting the poem over and over again) reflects the ways in which the poem is, quite simply, a memorable poem because it has a strong and repetitive rhythm and rhyming scheme.

The poem takes the form of what Mihinnick describes as 'an audenesque ballad', and its resemblance to a traditional ballad is clear immediately, with a typical rhythmic pattern of one longer and one shorter line (though not the typical ballad four-line stanza). The metre seems hard to determine initially, as the syllable length of lines is very variable--it is probably simplest to think of it as being made up of four-stress lines followed by three-stress lines, so 'As I made my way down Palestine Street / I watched a funeral pass'. It has six stanzas of six lines, each of them with a simple rhyming scheme (ABCBDB) and includes a great deal of incremental repetition, the whole poem being built around the opening line of each stanza: 'as I made my way down Palestine street'. Each stanza seems to introduce positive images (eg lilac flowers, the golden mosque) which are then contrasted with harsher ones (the face of a dead man, blood on the mosque walls)

The street of the poem is actually Al-Rasheed street, which is a major thoroughfare int he city, but Mihinnick uses the word 'Palestine street' perhaps to reference the British Colonial powers who (as in Belfast Confetti) tended to name streets in foreign countries after battles or places in which they had influence. The word 'Palestine' also summons up connotations of Christianity, through the link to palms, perhaps reminding reader of Jerusalem, and Palm Sunday, the commemoration of Jesus's entry into Jerusalem before his passion and death. This frame of reference prepares the reader for a symbolic narrative.

As the poem progresses, the use of parison emphasises the ways in which the speaker's reactions change. All his senses seem to be involved in his perceptions of the city.In the first stanza it is 'I watched...' then in stanza 2 'I heard', progressing to 'I smelled... I met'. There is a sense that he becomes more involved in what happens, reacting to what he perceives, for instance stopping at the door of the mosque to see people at prayer, or giving money to beggars. In this way he becomes more identified with the life of the city, going through a series of traumatic memories and references to events that have injured the people of the city until the final stanza, which suggests a sense of the imperishable sweetness of life.

The first image in the poem, the glass coffin in the first stanza, seems fairy-tale-like to western sensibilities. The only place most of us have thought of a glass coffin would be in the story of Snow White (excuse for a film clip), but they are also associated with saints,and the viewing of respected or sacred bodies. It's not clear here if the image is supposed to be literal, or if the glass suggests the vulnerability of the dead man and his family--in any case, there is a contrast between the glass coffin, which enables someone to see within, and the'face of the man who lay within'--a victim of poison gas, and presumably not a pleasant sight for that reason--Wilfred Owen in 'Dulce et Decorum Est recounts how the face of a man who had died in this way haunted him: 'in all my dreams, before my helpless sight / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning'. The reference here is presumably to the Iraqui Kurds who were killed by poison gas by Saddam Hussein in Halabja--one of the crimes for which his cousin 'Chemical Ali' was executed in 2010 (for more about this episode of Iraqui history, see the website KurdishRights.org)

The next stanza deals with a murder in a mosque. Although it would be easy to assume that this references some episode of the gulf war, in fact it refers to a specific event that Mihinnick describes on the 'Sheer Poetry' site:: ' 'Blood on the walls' of the mosque refers to a strange story I heard in Baghdad of invaders of the city who spoke 'a mountain language' (which means a 'primitive' language) murdering one of the boys who helped the muezzin and writing words in his blood on the mosque walls.' The idea suggested, though, is one of war and violence intruding on a peaceful and prayerful situation--that there is something violent behind the apparent peace of the 'faithful' praying at the golden mosque.

100 dinar note dating from 1994

The next image, of two blind beggars, is one which shows the speaker becoming fully engaged with the life of the cty: 'into their hands I pressed my hands' suggests more intimacy than the ordinary giving of money. The dinars mentioned are the currency of Iraq, the 100 dinar note being printed in dark ink (see left) may suggest the description of 'black dinars', though it could as easily refer to money exchanged informally, on the black market ( For more information on how foreign exchange works, click here). In some countries US dollars, for instance, are valued so strongly that they can be exchanged for many times the formal rate on the black market, something often taken advantage of by travellers. These beggars salute the speaker not, as might be expected, with a simple 'thank you', but with a gesture that identifies them as part of Saddam Hussein's former bodyguard, the Imperial Guard. The 'mother of all wars' is a reference to a speech of Hussein, where he declared the first gulf war to be the 'mother of all battles'(Arabic: أم المعارك umm al-ma‘ārik). The speaker is evidently surprised that these feared troops have sunk so low, reduced to begging on the streets after their injuries.

The river Tigris as it flows through Baghdad

The fourth stanza describes the smells of the city, and the natural aspects of the country--the wide river, the burning sun--the sun is described in terms which share the semantic field of war--'barbarian..armistice', implying that in this land even the weather can be violent, but the river is described as something that 'lifts the air' implying respite from the harshness of the hot weather, and foreshadowing the ending of the poem.

A caravan of camels

Cruise missile

The fifth stanza contains what is probably the most shocking image in the poem--that of a cruise missile, a long-distance weapon of mass destruction, and something used by both sides in the first gulf war to deliver chemical and conventional weapons. A cruise missile operates like a small unmanned plane, capable of independent flight over long distances. From the description in the poem it is unclear where exactly the missile is--it could be being transported over land, creating the image of a 'slow and silver caravan' (in the middle eastern sense of a caravan being a line of animals of vehicles transporting goods) , or the image could simply describe the movement of the missile, apparently slowly, in the sky. It is reminiscent of an incident in 1991 when the BBC journalists John Simpson and Bob Simpson reported seeing a cruise missile travel (fly) down a street in Baghdad and turn left at a traffic light. The idea that a beggar child smiles innocently at this weapon, unaware of its deadliness, powerfully foregrounds the innocence of the child, and heightens the contrast formed by the juxtaposition of these two images.

The final stanza, then, seems to move away from the images of war and of past violence. As thought the child's smile has had a healing effect on 'Palestine street', the speaker now notices, instead of the debris of war and violence, the beauty of the palm trees hung with yellow dates--as he has noted in his notes for the poem, an essential food for the people. The dates fall easily into the child's arms without effort, suggesting the bounty of nature, and the preservation of good things amidst the horrors of war.

You could compare this poem to 'Belfast Confetti', as it also deals with the impact of war on non-combatants (and the street names have an interesting resonance) or in form to 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', or perhaps most easily to 'The Right Word' as it is interested in different perspectives and how they change our view of events.

'Come On, Come Back' by Stevie Smith

This poem is subtitled 'incident in a future war', and  briefly describes the fate of a young female soldier in that war. Alone and injured by a weapon which has left her physically unharmed but mentally scarred, she weeps on a battlefield. Seeing a lake, she undresses and dives into its waters in the middle of the night. An enemy soldier finds her clothes and whistles a popular song while he waits for her to surface, but unknown to him, she has been carried away by the current and drowned.

The poem picks up on several themes in which Smith was interested--most obviously, it resonates with her most famous poem, Not Waving but Drowning, which briefly describes, in the voice of a dead man, how people did not realise that he was 'not waving but drowning'. As bystanders specilate about what caused him to drown, he protests that he was not 'larking about' but in fact waving for help. It concludes 'I was much too far out all my life, /And not waving but drowning'.

The theme of this poem--the accidental death misunderstood, and the loneliness of the individual--seems to connect quite stongly to the much longer poem 'Come On, Come Back'. The title of the latter is repeated throughout the poem at key points (like the phrase 'Not Waving But Drowning') and is supposed to be the title of a popular song sung by soldiers in the 'future war'. The song links together both sides, specifically linking together Vaudevue, the young solider, and the unnamed enemy who waits for her to return. There is no song called 'Come On Come Back' that I have been able to discover, but the title implies the conflict between urging someone to go to war (for whatever noble purpose), or urging them on in battle (come on), and wanting them to come back quickly. It is slightly reminiscent of the joke current in the Peninsular Wars of Wellington, that there were some officers known as 'come ones' and some as 'go ons'. In default of the real song, here's a clip of Big Country's anti-war song 'Come back to me'.

Vaudevue seems to be a name picked to resonate with the reader; despite its lack of specific association (it is not a common name), it resembles the word 'vaudeville' which is the name for a style of musical comedy, deriving from the French name of a type of popular song, and thus has connotations of pleasure and peace--perhaps Vaudevue is supposed to be a kind of pierrot figure. The etymology is disputed--one version says that it derives from the French 'voix de ville' meaning 'voice of the city' where another suggests it is connected to the Vau valley in Normandy.  Both versions, though suggest that the word originally derived from the word for a type of popular song, which seems significant, given the importance of a popular song in the poem. the change from 'ville' to 'vue' has connotations with 'view' as in 'looking'--is Vaudevue an actor in the war who is now reduced to being a passive spectator?

It is worth noting that at the time of writing, the idea of a girl soldier (implicitly a child) would have seemed much more shocking and futuristic than it does now. This futuristic edge to the poem is emphasised not only by the subtitle, but by the reference to 'the field of Austerlitz', Austerlitz being the site of one of Napoleon's greatest battles. Instead of being an active warrior, though, Vaudevue is simply 'left' by the battle, which has implicitly passed beyond her. The end-rhyme 'Austerlitz/sits' emphasises her passivity, as does the following couplet 'alone/stone'. The alliteration and internal rhyme of 'midnight in the moonlight' emphasises how the repeated 'alone' creaes a 'dead' internal rhyme as well as an end-rhyme. The image in this first stanza is almost a romantic one.

The second stanza starts more brutally. The Memel conference is an imaginary conference in a real place--a city now in Lithuania that was annexed by different countries in WW2. The use of 'graded' and 'exterminators' creates a clinical feel--the weapon ML5 is clearly intended to be something futuristic and somehow more horrible for its lack of traditional bloody results. Vaudevue (perhaps the only survivor of the battle?) is left 'just alive' but without memory. So lost is she that she 'fears and cries Ah me why am I here?', the lack of speech marks here emphasising how we are seeing into Vaudevue's thoughts in a form of free indirect speech.The repetition of 'sitting alone on a round flat stone' emphasises how she is static, the rhyme 'here/there' reinforcing this idea of stillness and inactivity. Her loss of memory, as the third stanza makes clear, has reduced her to the status of 'a child, an idiot'.

Vaudevue's activity in the third stanza thus initially appears to be a positive thing--though the nightmarish travel 'over the seeming miles of rutted meadow' suggest how the peaceful land has been damaged, 'rutted', by the battle, and also emphasises her loneliness. The normality of 'the sand beneath her feet...firm' seems a healing thing in comparison, and we can readily understand why the lake, though 'cold...damp...icy' might seem 'adorable' in comparison with the battlefield. Her dive into the lake becomes something both adventurous and beautiful, emphasised by the metaphor of the 'ribbon of white moonlight' that might remind us of poems such as Alfred Noyes's 'The Highwayman' where the line 'the moon was a ribbon of moonlight/over the purple moor' has connotations of romance, adventure and tragedy. The metaphor is matched by a progression of similes that builds up to a final climax: 'black as her mind...as secret from her / as the water', 'as secret as profound as ominous'.

The fifth stanza is linked to the fourth by the repeat of 'ominous', its first line reiterating Vaudevue's 'plight'. She swims, apparently without motivation other than to travel in the 'river of white moonlight' which seems to represent a symbolic light in that it is not the black of her mind. The personification of the 'swift and subtle' drowning undercurrent that 'dives with her' with an 'icy-amorous embrace' makes it seem almost as though she has been rescued by a lover, and the following stanzas reflect the ways in which she has indeed been rescued by its 'close embrace', though the words 'treacherous',and  'seizing' here  foreshadow the darker end of the poem.

The 'enemy sentinel' who discovers Vaudevue's clothes in stanza 6 waits for her, something which might be seen as threatening were he not described as 'whittling a shepherd's pipe...whiling away the hours'. This peaceful activity makes him seem unthreatening, despite his enemy status, something suggested also by the refrain of the song, here heard for the first time, which makes him sound like a lover yearning for the return of his beloved. As he finishes making the pipe, he whistles out the notes of the tune and they become an imperative summons to Vaudevue, almost a promise of a happy ending, given that the song is 'favourite of Vaudevue' and 'favourite of all the troops', implying a sympathy even between enemies.

The final stanza describes how Vaudevue--whose fate was uncertain earlier--is 'asleep' in the lake. The image of her drowning is peaceful, she 'sleeps on, stirs not' in the 'embrace' of the current--the implication being that she is now safe from the distress she experienced earlier in the poem. Her failure to recognise the song is, of course, because she is dead--but also because she has lost her memory--here death is seen to be almost kinder than the kind of weapon that could destroy someone's mind. This final line 'Come on, come back' now has a deeper resonance, as an epitaph for the young soldier.

Imagery of water is strong throughout the poem. At the start, Vaudevue is described as being 'left by the ebbing tide of battle', and her mind, which has been wiped of memory, is described as black as the waters of the moonlit lake. Her plunge into the waters of this lake is clearly symbolic as well as actual, with the direct comparison 'her mind is as secret from her / As the water on which she swims'. The refrain of the song is presented as poignant--there are, it is implied, many ways in which people can be lost through warfare, not all of them obvious. In some ways, then, Vaudevue stands for all vulnerable victims damaged by war--and also for all soldiers wounded in ways beyond the obvious.

You can find out more about Smith's life and work at The Poetry Archive, which also has a recording of her reading some of her poems.

It's EASTER SUNDAY!!!

So no post today.

Bayonet Charge

Ted Hughes once said in an interview 'when I first started writing I wrote again and again and again about the first world war', an engagement shaped partly by his admiration for poets like Wilfred Owen, partly by his father's experiences in the war at Gallipoli, and partly, according to his own report, by the West Yorkshire countryside of his childhood, which he reported as 'in mourning for the first world war'. You can read a fuller account of Hughes's engagement with the war in Fighting Back Over The Same Ground: Ted Hughes and War, but for the moment it is enough to know just that at the start of his writing career, he experimented a lot with this kind of pseudo war-poetry, living himself into the role of a WW1 soldier. I call it pseudo war poetry because although it imitates quite well the poetry of masters like Owen and Sassoon, it does not have that edge that the poetry borne out of real experience seems to have--something Hughes himself later came to admit.

The poem is in three stanzas, the first and last of eight lines, and the second of seven. This unevenness is emphasised by the enjambement between stanzas, which the punctuation (particularly the parenthetical dashes of lines 8 and 9) emphasises. The lines vary in length but are about ten syllables long, with little regularity of metre or length, something that adds to the colloquial feel of the speaking voice, the poet seeming to recount a dream or a nightmare-like experience, as though caught in mid-account.

Just like 'Belfast Confetti', this poem starts with the adverb 'suddenly'--and in the same way, this gives us the impression that we are plunged into the middle of the action that it describes. The poem is full of participles: 'running.. stumbling... hearing... smacking... sweating' that give it a sense of pace and purpose. we are dragged out of the past tense 'awoke.. was running' into what seems like the present action 'stumbling', enacting the confusion of the central character in the poem.

The 'raw' experience of the protagonist and the 'raw-seamed hot khaki' link together the new recruit and his uncomfortable clothes and the sharpness of his awakening until we are uncertain as to whether this is a real experience or not. The enjambement between line 1 and 2 emphasises the word 'raw' and brings to it the added sense of hurt or vulnerability. He seem literally weighed down by sweat, the wordplay here on 'heavy' suggesting that his fear and effort is a physical weight upon him. The object of the charge is paradoxically pictured as beautiful-'a green hedge / that dazzled'  suggests that he is attracted to it, the following 'with rifle fire' almost creating a sense of bathos as we--with him--realise the danger it represents.

The semantic field of the body resonates throughout the poem, but it is represented by inanimate things that are personified--the 'bullets smacking the belly out of the air', the rifle 'numb as a smashed arm', these imagined injuries making the man in the midst of it seem almost invulnerable by comparison, though the wounds suggested do present a dark threat of what may be in store for him. The 'patriotic tear' of line 7 might remind us of the patriotism in 'Flag' or perhaps 'next to of course god america i' or 'the Charge of the Light Brigade'. Here, it is transformed into an industrial weight of 'molten iron', the machine-like image reinforcing the unnaturalness of the experience of the charge, and the effort it represents. The 'catch in the throat' of tears here becomes the real pain of breathing heavily when running, the pain 'like molten iron' as Hughes uses hyperbole to get his point across.

In stanza two, the transformation of patriotism to pain seems to impel the hesitation of the man 'in bewilderment then'. The forces propelling him--presumably states, government--are seen as 'cold clockwork'; both fate and powers simply beyond his control. He is seen as the moving hand that the clockwork causes to act 'pointing that second', but the self-questioning causes him (unlike the soldiers Tennyson describes) to pause. He seems to see himself at this moment, running like someone who has been awakened out of fear, 'jumped up in the dark' (here surely a symbolic dark--he has run into the battle without questioning what he is fighting for) and is 'listening between his footfalls for the reason'. The image suggests someone who is being chased, and of course he is not being chased, but has simply started to charge, he is the one running towards the guns--and this makes him pause. again he seems like something inanimate, a statue, frozen in movement while he thinks about what he is doing. The strong caesura in the middle of line 15 emphasises this pause, as does the shorter stanza.

The poem sets off again with the strongly sibilant line 'then the shot-slashed furrows/ threw up a yellow hare'. The hare--traditionally a swift-moving animal who could easily outrun a man--is here passive, 'thrown up' by the earth, and instead of running, it 'rolled like a flame / And crawled in a threshing circle'. Against the 'clods' of the field across which the soldier runs, it seems brightly coloured (like the green hedge--or like the flame it resembles in movement?) and yellow (Hares are usually a light brown colour--but this hare may be more the colour of a golden Labrador) It seems to be clearly injured, the word 'threshing' particularly suggesting its pain, but it is silent, and the horrible silent scream suggested by 'its mouth wide/ Open silent' seems to foretell the soldier's fate if he stays still. Hares often rely on their colour to camouflage them against predators, and will therefore lie still in fields unless disturbed,when they run in their characteristically zig-zag fashion to elude pursuit (like a soldier trying to dodge bullets, one might think). Have a look at this clip of hares being hunted by golden eagles (don't worry, the hares escape) to get an idea of how fast they can go. For Hughes (and more importantly, for the soldier he is writing about ) a running hare like this would have been a familiar sight--the hare wounded and thrashing about on the ground, would have been a very vivid reminder of what injury you could get by staying still.

In the final stanza, the soldier moves again: 'plunged past' the hare. The very 'plunged' here reminds us perhaps of the gassed soldier in 'Dulce and Decorum Est'-- 'he plunges at me', but more powerfully--as does this whole poem--reminds me of Owen's poem 'Spring Offensive'.  This poem has also the grass and the attractiveness of the green along which men race 'exposed'--and also describes how they 'plunged' toward death and how they 'crawled' back--well worth a read to really see where Hughes was coming from.
Hughes here describes how the soldier drops everything--like someone running for their life would drop 'luxuries', he here drops 'King, honour, human dignity'--in other words, drops that 'brimming tear' of patriotism. Abstractions here seem like real possessions, abandoned in the face of reality. Here, finally, only 'alarm' fuels his run, like the hare running from hounds. The final image of the poem suggesting how the air becomes electric, his terror like a bomb about to explode, the vivid 'blue' like the earlier 'yellow' and 'green' seeming to sharpen the image.

The poem actually ends with this panic, the 'terror's touchy dynamite' crackling and about to go off--like the start of the poem, it seems abrupt, as though we have seen just a section of an experience, perhaps only partly understood. For an interesting reading of the poem, look at Tim Kendall's War Poetry blog. Despite his unkind words about the anthology, or perhaps because of them, he makes some good points about this poem.

Hawk Roosting

At first glance, you might wonder what this poem is doing in the 'conflict' section of the anthology--in fact, you might wonder about that at second glance as well. It might be suspected that the compilers of the anthology have not read Ted Hughes's 1970 interview when he commented on the poem:
'The poem of mine usually cited for violence  is the one about the Hawk Roosting, this drowsy hawk sitting in a wood and talking to itself. That bird is accused of being a fascist...the symbol of some horrible genocidal dictator. Actually what I had in mind was that in this hawk Nature was thinking. Simply Nature. ..." (from The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes  By Terry Giffor, p.30).


What Hughes points out here is that the apparent viciousness of the hawk has in it a kind of innocence that is quite removed from the ways in which mankind approaches violence. the hawk is no more in conflict with the animals that he hunts than he is with the tree he roosts in--he simply does what he was created to do, and in this sense is not something that is good or evil, even if, as Hughes admits later in the same interview"he sounds like Hitler's familiar spirit". The point is, as he says when discussing his poem 'Thrushes', (which also deals with birds killing) that these animals who kill are innocent: "Their energy affirms the divine law that created them as they are" (p.31). The poem seems to be longing for a moral clarity that relies on the simplicity of knowing who we are and why we do what we do. As opposed to the soldier in 'Bayonet Charge' who pauses precisely because he does not know or remember why he is fighting, the hawk has 'no falsifying dream' of patriotism to rationalise its violence. For those of you who have never seen a hawk catch its prey, here is a clip of a goshawk pursuing and killing a pigeon, which you might find helpful in understanding Ted Hughes and his response to the bird. (this always reminds me of those wildlife commentaries where you can feel either sorry for the pigeon or the hawk depending on how it is filmed--here the commentary suggests that the hawk is desperate for a meal, if that makes you feel any better).


The poem is framed as six stanzas of four lines each, with the end-thyme in ll 3-4 of the first stanza (feet/eat) the only clear end-rhyme in the poem. It is a kind of loose free verse, and suggests a stream-of-consciousness style, the hawk's thoughts eavesdropped upon by the poet. There are a lot of end-stopped lines, which give the impression that the hawk is coming out with a series of simple but definitive layered statements, each of which adds something to the picture of the hawk's mind; something accentuated by the often monosyllabic language and the strong verbs: 'I sit...I hold...fly...I kill... I began..I am'. 


Although the hawk represents Nature (with a capital N--the personified force of life rather than just the idea of natural things), there is also a strong sense of personal identity in the poem, with the use of the first person personal pronouns: 'I..my....me....mine helping to structure the poem and hold it together with a constant reminder of the voice of the hawk, and its arrogant, unthinking selfishness (selfishness is the wrong word, because it implies the possibility of unselfishness--the hawk is just being what it is). If you actually count the uses of the personal pronouns in the poem there are an amazing number-- 21 in 24 lines, and if you look at their frequency in each stanza there seems to be a kind of acceleration of their use towards the climactic line 16: 'my manners are tearing off heads': In stanza 1 there are three: 'I...my...my', in stanza 2, there are two: 'me...my', in stanza 3, five: 'My..my..my..I..my', in stanza 4, five: 'I..I..mine..my..my', in stanza 5, two: 'my...my' and in stanza 6 four: 'me..I..my..I'. This use of pronouns makes the poem seem to focus sharply on the hawk and on its interests all the way through--we see the world through its eyes, and although they may provide a distorted mirror, they also make perfect sense.


The poem presents the hawk as apparently passive in the first stanza, 'eyes closed', and so not a threat. The second line suggests how it is not dreaming as people do (how people do dream of things--and how people follow dreams--is something other poems in 'conflict' explore), with the suggested pun on 'inaction' (in-action) making it appear as thought the hawk has two modes of existing--in action or not in action--and doesn't waste time debating between the two. Between the two deadly ends of the hawk described metonymically as  'hooked head....hooked feet' there is nothing other than simple hunger. Hughes speculates that the hawk may only 'rehearse perfect kills and eat' in its dreams, in other words that its dreams are simply an extension of its waking life and not an enlargement of it.


The hawk seems to have a sense of pleasure and joy, of entitlement in its life, suggested by the exclamation mark at the end of line 5. Its sense of power is reminiscent of the ways in which Hughes describes other animals in his poetry--like pike 'stunned by their own grandeur' or thrushes with 'bullet and automatic purpose'. Here, though, the world seems arranged to please the hawk, centred around it, the language here is almost that of the estate agent: 'convenience...advantage...inspection', as though the wood has been created simply to be a perfect home for hawks. This semantic field recurs throughout the poem: 'where I please... it is all mine.. my right'


This thought in enlarged on in stanza 3, where the idea that Creation (that is, all created things in evolution, or the act of creation itself) exists only to produce the hawk as it now is. Though of course in one sense it is true that the whole working of creation has resulted in the hawk's present form (and in everything else), the idea that this was its primary purpose seems naively arrogant--as humans here, we might almost smile at the hawk's unthinking mind, focused only on itself, and refusing to speculate on any wider purpose, or wider application. In another sense of creation the hawk does 'hold creation in my foot', as when it kills its prey it holds the prey with its hooked claws. The hawk's sense of ownership of the world is enhanced int he next stanza, when its birds-eye view of the world suggests the power it has. The hawk, not understanding anything of the rotation of the earth (or of the mechanisms of its own flight) is portrayed as seeing itself as having the power to turn the earth beneath it as it flies (the word revolve also having the connotations of thought suggests a thoughtfulness in this observation).


The Hawk's lack of sophisticated thought is presented here as directness: 'there is no sophistry in my body' which translates into violence. The apparent antithesis between 'manners' and 'tearing off heads' actually reminds us of the hawk as an animal (rather than a personified force of nature), as literally the idea of a hawk having 'manners' is absurd--as an animal, its only good behaviour is to be a good animal--in this case a good hawk, which does entail the tearing off  of animal heads (and be grateful here that I have not appended a short film to demonstrate).

As Hughes says in 'Thrushes' "With a man it is otherwise. Heroisms on horseback". Nature is brutal, selfish, beautiful and single-minded for him--you could make comparisons to 'Bayonet Charge' where the man is emphatically not single-minded (and his moment of communion with the injured hare seems to suggest he is potentially prey) or 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' which certainly celebrates 'heroism on horseback', the irrationality that goes ahead 'though the soldier knew/ someone had blundered', and is therefore quite the reverse of the hawk's clearly focused mind.

'next to of course god america i' by ee cummings

This interesting poem was--amazingly--written in 1926, but its cynicism is still fresh today. As Brian Docherty says, it is 'a satire on both the cliché-spouting patriot and the gullibility of his audience'. Most of the poem is in inverted commas, and is clearly to be taken as spoken in a voice not the poet's own--the framing device (you could actually call this poem a single-ended frame narrative if you were so inclined!) makes clear this intention in the last line.

Cummings was a poet who had experienced war at first hand in World War 1, having served as a volunteer in the Ambulance corps in 1917, as well as being drafted into the regular army in 1918. While working in Paris in 1917, Cummings (with his friend John Dos Passos) was accused of espionage and imprisoned by the French authorities because of his freely expressed anti-war views, and what was seen to be his suspiciously friendly relationships with German soldiers. This poem reflects some of the views that Cummings held on jingoistic speechmaking--though it's hard to tie it down to a specific occasion. Some interesting critical views on the poem can be found at Modern American Poetry

The first thing you do when looking at a poem is, of course to count the lines--and lo! there are 14! Yes indeed, although at first sight this looks like an incoherent speech randomly broken up into lines (even in the middle of a word) it is, of course, a cunningly contrived sonnet. The rhyming scheme is that of a Petrarchan, or Italian sonnet, with an octet which rhymes ABABCDCD and a sestet which, unusually, rhymes EFGFEG. As does a traditional sonnet, you could say that this poem asks a question or proposed a problem--but in this case the problem is inherent in the attitude and in the voice of the speaker, and the solution is not obvious, except inasmuch as the final line distances the poet from the ideas and manner presented. When looking for a 'turn', it would be possible to say that there is one where you might expect it, at line 9, where the trivial jingoism takes on a more serious tone, or (as in a Shakespearean sonnet) at the very end, where the contrast between 'shall the voice of liberty be mute' and the speaker's stagy self-refreshment points up the artificiality and lack of authenticity of the views he expresses.

Cummings has actually created lines which are often--though not always--ten syllables long, as in a traditional sonnet (which should be in iambic pentameter) but because of the ways in which he plays with stress, this is not always immediately obvious. There are several completely iambic lines, such as line 6, lines 9-10, and lines 12-13, but their regularity is sometimes masked by the ways in which they are surrounded with less regular stresses, or broken in the middle of a word, as in ll 9-10. Often lines seem to have an extra beat, with eleven syllables, or sometimes they create a rhythm that seems hard to describe. The first line, for instance, sounds almost dactylic: 'next to of course god america i' with a strong beat followed by two weaker ones, though the stress on the last syllable makes you wonder if this is not instead  anapaestic, with two weak beats followed by a strong one. It all depends on whether you read the extra stress at the beginning of the line or the end--but the impression created is of a strong rhythmical (and slightly sing-song?) tone that is a long way from the dignity of ordinary iambic pentameter or blank verse --and the stress on the last word, 'i' emphasises the end-of-line pause, making almost nonsense of the phrase 'i love you'. Enjambement here is a key aspect of the poem, the run-on from line to line occasionally making the sense almost nonsensical, particularly when sentences or phrases are left unfinished.

Cumming's trademark lack of punctuation and capitalisation emphasises this sense that the poem is a stream-of-consciousness speech full of cliches. He juxtaposes phrases which have huge resonance for an American reader such as 'land of the pilgrims' with vague language such as 'and so forth', 'of course', 'what of it' which seem to undermine these powerful connotations, and make it seem as though the speaker thinks of them as meaningless. This is accentuated by the unfinished phrases. Cummings takes the starting line from the American National Anthem (the star-spangled banner), but leaves it unfinished, splicing it to the first line of the song 'My Country 'tis of thee', which was used as the unofficial national anthem before 'The Star-Spangled banner' was officially adopted, so that they become one less meaningful, vaguely patriotic jumble: 'oh say can you see by the dawn's early my/ country tis of', a jumble accentuated by the remembered rhyme between 'my' and the missing word 'light'.

Here is Arethra Franklin singing 'My country tis of thee' at President Obama's inauguration. Notice how the tune is derived from the British National anthem--one reason why it was perhaps not finally adopted as the official United states anthem.

The casual 'next to of course god' in the first line of the poem implies that God is taken for granted (though not, as is conventional, capitalised, any more than is the name of the apparently revered country) suggesting that both are tokens and not realities. The casual colloquialisms that litter the poem seem to imply a lack of precision and sincerity throughout (particularly notable in the run-together 'even deafanddumb'). The long list of euphemisms for the name of God used instead of 'swearing' become a jumble of insincerity, separated neither by commas nor by conjunctions:  'by gorry/ by jingo.by gee by gosh by gum'--a strategy you will remember which is called asyndeton. The effect created here is of someone trying to press all the right patriotic buttons, but not actually producing anything very convincing--either through laziness, or through underestimating the intelligence of his audience (which is us, dear reader). The tone is cynical, as though all these patriotic ideas are produced only for effect and are not believed in: 'what of it we should worry'--the epitome of the 'I'm all right Jack' philosophy

In line 9, there is something of a turn, as the speaker's rhetoric seems to become momentarily more coherent and more dangerous. The 'why talk of beauty' line seems to respond to an imagined audience response, and pulls out all the rhetorical stops in terms of cliche, referring to 'these heroic happy dead' in ways which might remind us of WW1 poets such as Rupert Brooke. Look for instance at Brooke's sonnet 'The Dead', which starts:  Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!/There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old, /But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold '. Other aspects of these sestet lines might remind us of WW1 as well--the image of lions 'who rushed...to the roaring slaughter' reminds me of this poster (see left) urging the colonial countries to come to England's aid: There is an ambiguity about the dead seen as lions--for as they have died, surely they have been slaughtered rather than slaughtered others (perhaps the image also owes something to big-game hunting which was popular at the time of writing with contemporary writers such as Hemingway).

The final message seems to be 'they did not stop to think they died instead'--like those in 'flag' who can 'blind their conscience', here lack or thought or reflection seems to be presented as something advantageous for a country in its soldiers. Reminds us also perhaps of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' with 'theirs not to reason why'. The ironic juxtaposition of this with 'then shall the voice of liberty be mute?' emphasises just how far the voice of liberty is smothered by this kind of rhetoric. Here the individual soldier is silenced in favour of the voice of the politician, who we are sharply reminded is on a podium, drinking a glass of water, a momentarily dry throat the only risk that his speech involves him in.

As refreshment after that poem, you should probably watch this video of the greatest speech ever made--by Charlie Chaplin in 'The Great Dictator'.

The Falling Leaves by Margaret Postgate Cole

Margaret Postgate Cole

Margaret Postgate Cole was a pacifist, and this poem seems to reflect something of her feelings towards the First World War. Written quite early in the war, it still reflects a sense of the trememdous waste of life in the trenches. Written and set in autumn, it parallels the death of the leaves on the trees to the deaths of the soldiers in war, both in quantity, and implicitly in the way in which they are now so common as to have become part of the landscape. The image of dead men falling as thick as 'snowflakes' should be shocking, but instead creates a powerful sense of the transience of life.

The poem's form is not quite a sonnet (glad you counted the lines anyway!) but has a two-part structure that might remind us in some ways of 'Futility'. In the same way as that poem, the two parts of the poem seem to echo each each other and develop the ideas within it. Here, there is a repeated rhyming scheme: ABCABC DEFDEF which accentuates the ways in which the two halves of the poem reflect on each other. The general metre is iambic, with some notable exceptions, such as the anapaestic dimeter of line 3 (in a still afternoon) and every second line is a pentameter, giving a hesitant, almost broken effect to the speaker's tone, as though ideas and lines are left incomplete, and as though there are long pauses for thought. The poem is actually one long sentence (might this remind us of the long, unbroken but jumbled speech of 'next to of course god america i'?), something which contributes to this sense of pensive, layered speech, as though each clause were an additional small thought added to the central idea.

The poem opens with a fairly jaunty iambic trimeter followed by a pentameter which seems to enact the steady beat of a walking horse introduced as an idea in the first line 'today as I rode by', with the internal rhyme between 'leaves' and 'tree' created by the assonance on those long vowels emphasizing the slow pace of the poem, further flowed by the anapaestic line 4 (interesting to note that this is the reverse of the fast dactylic rhythm of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', though it shares something of the same feel of hoofbeats). I'm suggesting that it is a horse here, partly because of the date--at this time, cars were not so common--and partly because the whole poem seems to me to have a slightly archaic feel in terms of language--even for the time of writing, the use of 'thence' or 'pestilence' or 'strewed' or 'slain' seems a little old-fashioned--and so 'riding' in a car or a bus would seem at odds with the mood of the poem. It would also make it more difficult to 'wander slowly themce' unless you got out of the vehicle but that's another story.

Line 4 introduces an interesting image, because its negation of the idea of the autumnal wind ('no wind whirled them') nonetheless vividly calls up the idea of the wind, the alliteration on 'w' turning the line almost into a tongue-twister which has to be spoken slowly. The idea that the leaves are not  'whirled..to the sky' may also be a subtle reference to Postgate Cole's atheism--she does not believe that the dead soldiers are going to be restored, or are going to heaven--once they fall, that is where they stay,'withering'. The 'dead rhyme' of 'afternoon' and 'noon' contributes to the deadening effect of this first part of the poem, the leaves falling 'thickly, silently' suggesting the numbers of fallen men and the ways in which their deaths seem to be unnoticed by most of the public.

This poem, as we discussed in class, plays with two semantic fields--one is the pastoral semantic field of autumn and nature, and is established in the first half of the poem, and the second is the semantic field of death and war, introduced in the second half of the poem. Particular words and phrases in the second part of the poem echo the first half, and make us look at it again perhaps in a different way, so the 'no wind' in l.4 is repeated as 'no wind of age or pestilence', and the simple simile 'like snowflakes' in l.6 becomes extended to 'like snowflakes falling on the Flemish clay' at the end of the poem. If you need reminding of how semantic field work, look again at Pink and her song 'Just Like a Pill' which creates its sometimes shocking effect by mingling the semantic fields of drug abuse, hospital care, and romantic love


The poem is deceptively simple. The analogy between the men and the leaves is so direct that the poet hardly needs to enlarge it--once the thought is introduced in line 8, with the mention of the 'gallant multitude', each succeeding line seems to layer more weight on the idea, until the men and the leaves become interchangeable in their 'beauty' both 'withering' alike in England or in Flanders. The trochee that starts line 10 emphasises the word 'slain' by stressing it, and also stresses that we never in this poem find out what it is that has 'slain' the men. There is no mention of bullets or bombs; they seem to die as naturally and inevitably as the falling leaves themselves. the poem is very different to those of Owen or Sassoon (though actually, not so different to 'Futility', which also doesn't go into gory detail), and reflects Postgate Cole's distance from the experience of the front lines. The soldiers who die here are seen in an almost Rupert Brooke-like way, as forever young and forever beautiful, 'like snowflakes'--perfect but transient as they 'melt' into the clay of Flanders. If you were being very attentive here, you might remember the idea of 'clay' in 'Futility' again, and think of this further connection between the two poems.

This poem is one of the few in the 'conflict' cluster that comes from a poet writing during The Great War that is, World War 1, from 1914-1918). As such, it is an interesting comparison  to Owen's perspective on death in 'Futility' (which might suggest that the death of soldiers in war is pointless), and the earlier writing of Tennyson in 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' (which might suggest that the death of soldiers in war is heroic). Postgate Cole seems to almost take a middle view--the poem suggests that the soldiers who die are 'gallant', and has none of the bitterness you occasionally get from Owen and Sassoon, but instead focuses on a simple image of falling leaves, through this image expressing a sense of sadness and loss at the deaths of the fallen