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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