Summary
"Lunchtime Lecture" depicts the speaker's encounter with the unearthed bones of a woman from the Stone Age. This occurs during the speaker's lunch hour as she attends a museum archeological lecture. The speaker learns that the woman lived to be around twenty-two years old. The woman's skull is white and fine, and the speaker compares the way it filled with darkness while buried underground to a shell filled with seawater. It is "drowned" in the thousands of years that have passed (4).
The skull itself is small and perfect, capable of fitting into a man's palm. The speaker states that either sickness or conflict killed the woman, and her remains lay preserved in her grave for centuries. A farmer unwittingly came upon the remains while digging for stone. The speaker compares the light that shines in upon the grave's opening to a "crowd" that disturbs the safe darkness where the woman lay for centuries (11). The speaker imagines this woman staring back at the crowd of light.
Because the speaker sees the skull in the context of a museum exhibit, she does not share the farmer's initial shock upon finding the bones. This is due to the neat explaining, labeling, and cataloging done at museums. The visceral experience of death (such as its smell) has since diminished. What is left behind is the "purity" of the woman's bone—which, the speaker imagines, any possible past partner was unlikely to see (18).
The speaker compares the woman's remaining bones to a tree stripped of leaves in winter. The essence of the trunk and branches are thrown into relief against the stormy sky, and made all the more stark because of the lack of leaves. Meanwhile, the speaker notes that she is still in the season of life, and proceeds to imagine the woman as she must have been in life.
In the final lines, the speaker returns to the image of dark seawater. She stares at the skull, feels the woman's gaze in return, and reflects on the immensity of time.
Analysis
"Lunchtime Lecture" was originally published in Clarke's 1978 collection The Sundial. Written in the first-person perspective, the poem expresses the speaker's engagement with a skeleton shown at a museum archeological lecture. The speaker dramatizes the known details of the woman's life, and imagines a connection between them. This ultimately leads the speaker to reflect on the vast ocean of time, of which she, the long-dead Stone Age woman, and all other humans can only experience a drop.
Because the speaker attends this lecture on her lunch hour, it comes across as a hiatus from the ordinary. The opening words of the poem consist of the conjunction "and" and the determiner "this," giving an immersive feeling of continuity (1). This relates not only to the speaker beginning the poem in perhaps what is the middle of the lunchtime lecture, but it also gestures toward the ephemerality of human life in comparison to the vastness of time. The overall tone of the poem conveys fascination, imagination, and connection.
The poem is composed of three stanzas written in free verse. The first stanza is twelve lines, and the second two are each octets. There is no regular meter, but the speaker's use of elevated language gives the impression of an epic. This can be seen in words like "drowned in the centuries," "plague," and "destroyed" (4, 6, and 7). The speaker also uses ambitious and abstract metaphors such as comparing time to dark water in order to communicate mystery and fascination.
In the first two stanzas, Clarke juxtaposes scientific language with the speaker's imagined dramatization and feeling of connection. The first two lines exhibit an impersonal perspective by describing the bones as belonging to "a female, aged about twenty-two" "from the second or third millennium / B.C." (2 and 1-2). Later in the second stanza, the speaker compares the museum's sterile environment to "death in hospital," and describes how "Reasons are given, labels, causes, catalogues" (15 and 16). Meanwhile, the speaker conceptualizes the bones as pure and delicate. This is shown when the speaker calls the skull "white, fine" and later describes the bone as "Purity, the light and shade beauty" (3 and 18).
Light, darkness, and water take on meaningful roles in the poem. Overall, the speaker characterizes the Stone Age woman's bones in terms of lightness (as opposed to darkness). This relates to the speaker's pure image of the woman. Over time, darkness filled the skull "As a shell with sea," construing time as a dark, watery substance (4). The bones remained "safe in a shroud / Of silence, undisturbed, unrained on, dark / For four thousand years (7-9). Here, darkness provides a sense of safety. When a farmer digging for stone accidentally finds the woman, the speaker personifies light as a crowd that stares at the bones (11). This slightly unsettling image is tempered by the fact that the Stone Age woman stares back.
The speaker gives the Stone Age woman an active and natural presence in the poem, beginning with the image of the woman staring back at a crowd of light (12). Later in the third stanza, the speaker calls the woman a "tree in winter, stripped white on a black sky" (21). This comparison again brings forth the light and dark palette introduced earlier. From here, the speaker chooses to "illustrate the tree / Fleshed, with woman's hair and colours and the rustling / Blood" (23-25). As blood does not typically rustle, this unusual comparison perhaps evokes leaves on a tree. The speaker feels an intimate connection with this woman, whom she dignifies through her imagination.
In the final lines, the speaker returns to the metaphorical dark water of time. The ambiguous final lines relate to the earlier description of darkness filling up the skull "as a shell with sea" (4). They read, "We stare at each other, dark into sightless / Dark, seeing only ourselves in the black pools, / Gulping the risen sea that booms in the shell" (26-28). One interpretation is that humans will only get to experience a minuscule amount of time in their lives. Rather than experience the whole ocean, they hear only the sound of the sea inside a shell and try to drink as much as possible in the short time given.
