In the first stanza, "name" and "flame" are positioned under each other. These make an internal rhyme and link the girl's name to a flame, perhaps suggesting a metaphorical flame of love.
The poem is addressed directly to the girl who was hurt. We have to decide how the narrator feels about her now. Is this a love poem?
Poem
This poem comes from Kid, 1992. It is all written in the past tense as though the poet is looking back on this man's life and assessing it.
He appeared to have two very different sides to him. He was a good neighbour, a loving father, a thoughtful husband and a dutiful son. However, as soon as he is shown in one of these roles, the image is destroyed by a glimpse of a darker side to him. He was violent to his daughter and his wife, and twice he stole from his mother.
Stanza one shows him as a neighbour shovelling snow from his drive, and as a loving father who "always" tucked his daughter up at night. Then the last line tells us that he "slippered" her when she lied. Stanza two shows him as a husband who automatically gave up half of his wages each week for housekeeping. Anything that he didn't spend, he would save. After "every meal" he praised his wife. This all sounds very good until "once" when he punched her because she laughed.
Stanza three shows him in his role as a son who hired a private nurse for his mother, regularly drove her to church, and cried when her condition worsened. Then we hear that twice he stole from her.
The final couplet finishes off the poem in a fairly casual way, as if "they" were not particularly interested in judging him and his life. The title "Poem" is also fairly casual, as if Simon Armitage was not particularly interested or involved.
Simon Armitage asks: "How can you judge this person? Here's somebody who for three-quarters of his life, or for three lines in every quatrain, did something good and then he did something bad and in one case, something that would be seen as unforgivable; so how do we judge him in the end? I'm declaring the right not to answer that question, just to ask it."
The form of the poem is an imperfect sonnet. It has fourteen lines, which are divided up into three quatrains (four line verses), followed by a couplet. However, it does not have a strict rhyme scheme but instead uses assonance. Each stanza has a distinct vowel sound that is deliberately repeated for effect.
The rhymes are imperfect, the sonnet is imperfect (because it fails to rhyme and perhaps also because it is not a traditional love poem), and this helps us to see that this man is not perfect either.
Out of the fourteen lines, we also notice that eleven of them begin with "and". This breaks a traditional rule of grammar and creates repetition. Perhaps this makes us consider the repetitive nature of the man's life. He seems to have been a creature of habit, always doing the same thing, week after week -except for when he did the bad things.
You may think about how the form and structure affect the meaning of the poem.
The language is probably that of the man himself. Most of it is colloquial in style, using everyday terms such as the verbs "slippered", "blubbed", and "lifted". The words are short and simple and there are no metaphors at all. In lots of ways, it is not very (conventionally) "poetic". Again, perhaps this reflects the man himself?
It Ain't What You Do
It's What It Does To You
This poem comes from Zoom, 1989. The title plays on the words of an old song called, "It Ain't What You Do, It's the Way That You Do It". The poem seems to be saying that it doesn't matter what you do, whether you have ordinary or exotic experiences. It's the way that these experiences make you feel that really matters.
Armitage believes that you do not need to travel or do exciting things in order to be able to write poetry. He writes about his own experiences: "Black Moss is a very lonely place, on the border between Yorkshire and Lancashire. It's on top of a hill and all you can see is the sky and the water. The boy at the day centre was part of my work. Through looking closely at detail, you can go on to elaborate about the world, the universe, the cosmos. This poem is about the sheer enjoyment of being alive."
Simon Armitage tells us of three things that he has not done: bumming across America, padding through the Taj Mahal and parachuting.
He repeats the words "I have not", which make it sound positive and assertive. He then goes on to explain his own experiences which are not as exciting, and yet there are parallels to be drawn between them. He has "lived with thieves in Manchester" which was surely dangerous and a sort of "living on the edge" equivalent to "bumming across America". Skimming stones across Black Moss gave him a similar silence and tranquillity to that in the Taj Mahal. Dealing with disabled children can be every bit as scary as getting ready to jump out of a plane, but in a different way.
Structure: The poem is divided up into five regular four line stanzas. However, there is no full stop between stanzas two and three, and the sense runs on. In stanza two there is a slight gap between the end of one line and the beginning of the next, even though the meaning runs on:
"listening to the space between
each footfall picking up and putting down
its print against the marble floor."
This is called enjambement (French for spanning). We can hear/imagine the pause between each footstep. This is an example of form helping us to understand the meaning of the poem.
Language: Much of the poem is written in colloquial language: "bummed" and "busted", as Armitage tries to explain in real language what the experiences were like. In the first stanza he brings to life the thrill of surviving in America with virtually no resources except a Bowie knife (a large hunting knife, named for its inventor, the American hero, Colonel Jim Bowie, who died in the Alamo with Davey Crockett). Then he helps us imagine the absolute silence of the Taj Mahal, and the movement of the stones he skims across the water at Black Moss. Finally we see the "wobbly head" of the boy, and hear how Armitage "stroked his fat hands"; details which help us visualise this scene.
The soft “s” sounds of stanza three help us imagine the stone skimming over the water. It first bounces across the surface and then sinks.(This technique is called onomatopoeia.)
The last stanza struggles to put into words the message of the poem. It is hard to describe feelings in words, so Armitage has been using experiences as metaphors to help us understand what he is trying to say. He describes the "tightness in the throat" and the "tiny cascading sensation" as "that sense of something else". When he finishes by saying, "That feeling, I mean," he is drawing us into the poem and siding with us. He wants us to understand what he means.
Cataract Operation
This poem comes from Book of Matches, 1993. It does not really tell a story but instead describes what the poet can see out of his window. Everything is described in terms of similes or metaphors. Nothing is as it seems to be.
Simon Armitage seems to be using this poem to think about writing poetry. He asks,
"Is it cleverness or is it just showing off? You can bedazzle yourself to the point where you stop seeing the world, and poetry for me is a way of seeing the world. It's a way of making sense of the world and connecting with it."
He continues,
"in the end I 'drop the blind'; I stop being silly; I stop showing off...if I stop blinding myself with all these ridiculous images, I can go back to writing the poems I really want to write."
The title of the poem is itself a metaphor. We have no reason to believe that Armitage has actually undergone this operation himself. A cataract is a film that gradually grows across an eye and hardens until it makes it difficult to see. It can be removed by surgery, thus restoring the sight. There are two possibilities here:
- that Armitage is “removing a film” from his eyes and seeing things more clearly (i.e. using clever metaphors), or
- that Armitage needs some sort of treatment in order to make him stop seeing the world through a film of metaphors until he can see the real world clearly again.
Another possibility could be in the double meaning of the title, since “cataract” can also refer to a waterfall. His clever ideas come tumbling out and cannot be stopped .
What Armitage really sees through his window is a washing line full of damp clothes that are being moved by the breeze. After the first simile describing the sun as a head coming through “last night's turtleneck” he chooses to describe the items in terms of entertainment. This perhaps makes us think again about “showing off” or “performing”, which is what he is doing in this poem.
The pigeon seems to offer a card like a magician doing a card trick. We have a “pantomime” of washing. The towel's shape and colour reminds him of a bull fighter, and the ra ra skirt suggests the cancan. The shirt is hanging by one sleeve like a monkey, perhaps in a zoo, and in the final image the company of hens is described as “strutting”.
Although not perhaps performing, the handkerchief seems to be waving a farewell in a dramatic way. Because all the items are blowing in the breeze, all the images involve movements. For example, the “olé” of the crimson towel suggests it is being swished backwards and forwards. Another example is the hens at the end who appear to be looking “for a contact lens”. This suggests a short sighted peering at the ground, when really the hens are pecking at anything they see, hoping it's edible.
The language of the poems is relatively natural in style, but is packed with double meanings, as in About His Person:
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cataract is the cloudy film and also the waterfall;
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operation could be the medical procedure, the working action or the movement;
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turns tail is the pigeon's turning round and showing off its feathers, but can also carry the meaning of turning your back on someone deliberately, or even running away;
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monkey business usually suggests mischievous behaviour of some sort.
These ideas could be applied to what Armitage is doing in this poem.
When the blind is dropped in line 15, is Armitage literally shutting out the world and trying to stop seeing things that will tempt him to write in this fanciful way, or is he stopping the pretence?
The poem is written in ten pairs of lines which do not rhyme. However, there is an internal rhyme in "yard" and "card", and there are some rhymes that do not happen within a pair, such as "skirt" and "shirt" and then in "hens" and "lens". There is also assonance in "breeze" and "sleeve".
Alliteration is used in "From pillar to post, a pantomime" which picks up a cliché that means to look everywhere for something. The “p” sounds perhaps could suggest the slight noises made by wet washing flapping about on the washing line.
“Pantomime” might also be there because in pantomime, things are not always what they seem.
A rhythm seems to be established in the middle with “the cancan of a ra ra skirt/the monkey business of a shirt”, and then is broken again. “I drop the blind” is a definite break or pause, but Armitage cannot resist temptation and launches into his last metaphor of the hens which ends with a final rhyme.
The poem as a whole can be read in a light hearted tone, and does not have to taken seriously. You can compare this poem with It Ain't What You Do... to write about Armitage's views about making poetry.
About His Person
This poem comes from Kid, 1992. The title is a police phrase used when they list all the items found on a body. This, and the fact that this is all written in the past tense, tells us that someone has died. There may have to be some investigation into the cause of death.
Simon Armitage says,
"Part of the point of the poem is that we are constructing somebody from the things which they carried with them."
He also says that the poem is
"entirely substantiated with puns; nearly every word has a double meaning."
The language of the poem is interesting. Some of the words are used as metaphors for death or violence. For example, the library card is "on its date of expiry", the diary has been "slashed", the watch has "stopped" and the shopping list has been "beheaded".
Other words suggest love or marriage, such as the "brace" of keys, the "spray carnation", the "photograph", the "keepsake banked in the heart of a locket" and especially the "ring of white unweathered skin" that tells us that this man has worn a ring (perhaps a wedding ring) for a considerable time.
There are several intriguing mysteries:
- Where is that ring now?
- Why is he no longer wearing it?
- Why was the postcard sent to him without any writing on it?
- Who sent it?
- Why were those dates crossed out so violently in his diary?
- What was the final demand?
- What did the note of explanation say?
From all these details we can guess what might have happened, but we cannot know for certain. But this does not matter: it's the thought processes involved that are more important.
The structure of the poem is a series of rhyming couplets, although some of them are not complete rhymes. The opening couplet sets up a steady, regular rhythm. This is orderly and satisfying and perhaps suggests the “regularity of police methods”. The longer lines have four beats and the shorter ones have two beats, until the last two lines, where the regular rhythm seems to break down. “That was everything” is ambiguous: it could mean that the list has finished, or it could mean that the ring is the item that was most important. It finishes off the poem.
