Gillian Clarke: Poems Literary Elements

The first-person speakers in these poems make connections with family members, other humans across the long expanse of history, and animals.

All of the poems are written in free verse. "Neighbours" is written in tercets that echo the Welsh triad, a form of literary composition that arranged subjects or statements in groups of three.

Metaphors
-Lines 7-8 of "Catrin" compare an umbilical cord with a tight red rope of love.
-Lines 11-16 of "Catrin" compare giving birth with writing and coloring a blank surface.
-Line 19 of "Catrin" compares a hospital to a glass tank.
Line 25 of "Catrin" compares the mother-daughter bond to an old rope stemming from the heart.
-Line 3 of "Lunchtime Lecture" compares the passage of time to a skull filling with darkness.
-Line 11 of "Lunchtime Lecture" compares light to a staring crowd.
-Line 21 of "Lunchtime Lecture" compares the long-dead woman with a tree.
-Line 3 of "Heron at Port Talbot" compares the remains of machinery to bones.
-Line 12 of "Heron at Port Talbot" compares the speaker's near-collision with a heron to animal tracks that cross in snow.
-Line 23 of "Heron at Port Talbot" compares the heron to a divine messenger.
-Line 15 of "Neighbours" compares radiation poisoning to a poisoned arrow.
-Line 22 of "Musician" compares the soft movement of snow to a musical instruction to play softly.

Similes
-Line 4 of "Lunchtime Lecture" compares time with the ocean.
-Lines 17-18 of "Heron at Port Talbot" compare pollution to dirty laundry.
-Line 1 of "Musician" compares the messiness of the speaker's son's carpet to a Jackson Pollock painting.
-Line 3 of "Musician" compares musical notes to words.

"Room at the window watching" ("Catrin," Line 3): alliteration of /w/
"Red rope" ("Catrin," Line 8): alliteration of /r/
"All over the walls with my / Words, coloured the clean squares" ("Catrin," Lines 12-13): alliteration of /w/ and /c/
The title "Lunchtime Lecture" uses alliteration of /l/
"Leafless formality, brow, bough in fine relief" ("Lunchtime Lecture," Line 22): alliteration of /l/ and /b/
"I, at some other season, illustrate the tree" ("Lunchtime Lecture," Line 23): alliteration of /s/
"the cooling towers / delicately settling on cranes" ("Heron at Port Talbot," Lines 1-2): alliteration of /c/
"both braking flight, / bank on the air" ("Heron at Port Talbot," Lines 9-10): alliteration of /b/
"The sky stains with steely inks and fires" ("Heron at Port Talbot," Lines 18-19): alliteration of /s/
"Wing-beats failed over fjords" ("Neighbours," Line 7): alliteration of /f/
"glasnost. golau glas" ("Neighbours," Line 22): alliteration of /g/ and /l/
"suburbs hushed in wafery whiteness" ("Musician," Line 12): alliteration of /w/
"a first pianissimo slip of snow from the roof" ("Musician," Line 22): alliteration of /s/

"Turn at the traffic lights. / I can remember you, our first / Fierce confrontation, the tight / Red rope of love which we both / Fought over" ("Catrin," Lines 5-9): assonance of the long "-igh" sound
The words "sky" and "eye" from "Neighbours" are examples of assonance

The lines "Now we are all neighbourly, each little town / in Europe twinned to Chernobyl" from the poem "Neighbours" ironically expresse a cozy sense of connection that people feel in the aftermath of the explosion at Chernobyl (16-17).

Lyric, Welsh, Nature, Women's Poetry

"Catrin" takes place in the speaker's memory as she recounts giving birth at a hospital, and later in the speaker's home as she speaks with her adolescent daughter. "Lunchtime Lecture" also has different settings, including a museum and the speaker's imagination. "Heron at Port Talbot" takes place on the highway near the Port Talbot Steelworks. "Musician" takes place inside the speaker's house during a bitterly cold winter.

"Catrin" is both loving and conflicted. "Lunchtime Lecture" and "Musician" express reverence. "Heron at Port Talbot" is at once nostalgic and hopeful, while "Neighbours" is apocalyptic and optimistic..

The protagonists are the speaker in "Catrin" and "Musician," the speaker's imagined connection with the long-dead woman in "Lunchtime Lecture," the speaker and the heron in "Lunchtime Lecture," and the humans and animals impacted by the explosion at Chernobyl in "Neighbours." The antagonists are the speaker's sense of conflict as her daughter grows up in "Catrin," human mortality in "Lunchtime Lecture," and human-created pollution and hubris in "Heron at Port Talbot" and "Neighbours." "Musician" does not necessarily have an antagonist, though one could read the bitterly cold temperature as being the antagonist.

The conflict in "Catrin" concerns the push and pull of motherhood. The speaker struggles to hold tight to her daughter while also letting her out to experience the world. In "Lunchtime Lecture," the conflict could be considered as the speaker's understanding that human life is ephemeral, though this fact is also treated with awe and reverence. Similarly, the conflict of winter's difficulties in "Musician" becomes a holy experience for the speaker. The conflict in "Heron at Port Talbot" and "Neighbours" concerns the harmful effects of human actions (specifically, pollution and nuclear fallout).

The climax in "Catrin" occurs when the adolescent Catrin faces the speaker down in the poem's present, and asks defiantly if she can go out to skate in the dark.

In "Lunchtime Lecture," the climax happens close to the end of the poem when the speaker imagines staring into the eyes of the long-dead woman. In this moment, the speaker understands that she, too, will one day die.

The climax in "Heron at Port Talbot" occurs at the moment of near-collision between the speaker and the heron.

The climax in "Neighbours" is the stanza where the speaker describes a shared neighbourly connection with other European inhabitants as well as a link between different European towns and Chernobyl in the aftermath of the disaster.

The climax in "Musician" happens when the speaker dreams of the snow transforming her house into a holy place, and then wakes to "a first pianissimo slip of snow from the roof" (22).

In "Catrin," the "Red rope of love" (referring to the umbilical cord) foreshadows the bond that will forever connect the speaker and her daughter (8).

N/A

"Neighbours" makes a biblical allusion to bitterness when the birds take sips of gall as they fly in contaminated air. The most famous biblical use of the word gall is in reference to a drink given to Jesus on the cross in The Gospel of Matthew.

Clarke alludes to the myth of Pandora's Box in "Neighbours" to describe the horror unleashed on the world as a result of human curiosity. In other words, Clarke sees a parallel between this myth and what happened at Chernobyl.

In "Musician," "a Jackson Pollock" stands in for a Jackson Pollock painting (1).

The tractor that finds the skeletal remains of a long-dead woman in "Lunchtime Lecture" is personified when it bites its way through the longcairn.

Machinery is personified in "Heron at Port Talbot" as having bones.

N/A

Onomatopoeia occurs in the final line of "Lunchtime Lecture" with the words "Gulping" and "booms" (28).