SIMON ARMITAGE

 

I am very bothered
 

 

 

I am very bothered when I think
of the bad things I have done in my life.
Not least that time in the chemistry lab
when I held a pair of scissors by the blades
and played the handles
in the naked lilac flame of the Bunsen burner;
then called your name, and handed them over.

O the unrivalled stench of branded skin
as you slipped your thumb and middle finger in,
then couldn't shake off the two burning rings. Marked,
the doctor said, for eternity.

Don't believe me, please, if I say
that was just my butterfingered way, at thirteen,
of asking you if you would marry me. 4)

 

 

Simon Armitage was born in 1963 and lives in West Yorkshire.

He has published nine volumes of poetry including Killing Time, 1999 (Faber & Faber) and Selected Poems, 2001 (Faber & Faber) His most recent collections are The Universal Home Doctor and Travelling Songs, both published by Faber & Faber in 2002. He has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Sunday Times Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes and a Lannan Award.

He writes for radio, television and film, and is the author of four stage plays,
including Mister Heracles, a version of the Euripides play The Madness of Heracles. His recent dramatisation of The Odyssey, commissioned by the BBC, was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2004 and is available through BBC Worldwide. He received an Ivor Novello Award for his song-lyrics in the Channel 4 film Feltham Sings, which also won a BAFTA.

His first novel, Little Green Man, was published by Penguin in 2001. His second novel The White Stuff was published in 2004.

Simon Armitage has taught at the University of Leeds and the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and currently teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University. With Robert Crawford he edited The Penguin Anthology of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945. Other anthologies include Short and Sweet – 101 Very Short Poems, and a selection of Ted Hughes’ poetry, both published by Faber & Faber.

The Shout, a book of new and selected poems will be published in the US in April 2005 by Harcourt. He is currently working on a translation of the middle English classic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, commissioned by Faber & Faber in the UK and Norton in the US.3)

 

 

 

 

This poem comes from Book of Matches, 1993. It appears to be based on memories of Armitage's schooldays.

 

The first two lines actually come from a probation service questionnaire, but Armitage has chosen to use them in a different context. Here he tells the story of a science lab prank that went wrong.

The person in the poem heated up a pair of tongs and then handed them to another person, presumably a girl. This girl innocently slipped them onto her fingers and was badly burnt. The doctor said that she would be “marked for eternity” by the ring-shaped scars.

The language in stanza two emphasises this idea of a marriage proposal with words such as “rings”, “branded” and “marked for eternity”.

Stanza two also departs from the more colloquial style of the rest of the poem by launching into a rather deliberate, self-conscious poetic style:

“O the unrivalled stench of branded skin”

This language is strong and vivid, and seems to imitate the style of earlier romantic poetry.

“Butterfingered” in line 13 is apt because of the clumsiness of the boy's attention seeking behaviour, but also because people used to put butter on burns to soothe the pain.

How seriously we take the narrator's feelings of guilt depends on the tone in which the first line of each stanza is read. “I am very bothered ” is not a particularly strong expression, and one that could be read in a variety of ways. The first line of stanza two is almost laughing at itself because of the exaggerated style.

The speaker also seems to want to distance himself from his feelings by saying, in stanza three, “Don't believe me, please”. This could be part of the awkwardness of a lad who feels he has to play a trick on a girl to get her attention, or it could be the shame or embarrassment of someone looking back on what he was like when he was younger.

 

STRUCTURE

The structure of the poem is important. It is written in fourteen lines and can be classed as a sonnet, which is a traditional form for love poetry. In one way this could be considered as making fun of this form because it is not a very romantic idea, but on the other hand it is about one person's attempt to attract another.

“Marked” and “at thirteen” are both separated from the rest of the lines by punctuation, thus giving more emphasis to them. The effect of the prank on the girl will be permanent, and yet the fact that the boy was only young might excuse what he did.

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.

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. ing very honest in the poem, when he confesses to his stupid action, which seriously hurt the girl. When he was thirteen, he thought that he loved the girl. He did not know how to show it then, so he tried to attract her attention by doing something outrageous. Now that he is grown up, he feels very guilty for the harm he did to the girl.2)

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”.1)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 1)http://www.newi.ac.uk/englishresources/workunits/ks4/poetry/verybother.html

2)http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/gcse/anthology.htm

3)http://www.smithylad.modwest.com/armo/armo_pages/biog.htm

4) http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1310.html