‘We are Seven’ is a comparison of two views which challenge the idea death as a loss. The second poem ‘Book Ends’ by Tony Harrison is example of different responses towards death, which is visibly interpreted as loss by Harrison. ‘Book Ends’ is an autobiographical poem about the death of his mother and how it affected himself and his father. Part I depicts the relationship Harrison had with his father. As with many of his poems there is a tension between the two classes Harrison feels he represents; the working class he was born into represented by the character of his father, and the middle class he feels he was educated into represented by himself. Harrison notes that it was the education that put a greater distance between him and his father ‘what’s still between’s / not the thirty years or so, but books, book, books’. Yet there is an interesting inversion of the ideas about the working class and the middle class in Part II. The second part describes Harrison and his father thinking of an epitaph for the gravestone. Whilst it would be expected that Harrison, the educated one, would be the one to write the words, he finds himself feeling unexplainably tongue-tied through his feelings of loss. However, his uneducated father is the one who is able to express his feelings of love towards his deceased wife, ‘I’ve got the envelope that he’d been scrawling, / mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling / but I can’t squeeze more love into their stone’. This is a poignant depiction of two reactions to death as a loss.
However, loss of a person doesn’t necessarily have to be interpreted as death. As in poem three from the anthology, ‘Nightshift’ by Simon Armitage, the narrator feels a loss of contact from his partner due to working different shifts. In this poem there is a tension between the benefits gained from working long and difficult hours, such as their home, and the losses incurred as a result ‘in this space we have worked and paid for / we have found ourselves, but lost each other’. ‘Night Shift’ seriously puts into question the importance of material wealth versus the wealth of love. The characters in this poem have worked hard for a better lifestyle by working, yet have found themselves drift apart despite their attempts to remain close, for example leaving ‘lipstick love-notes on the bathroom mirror’.
‘Night Shift’ depicts the loss as something spatial. Armitage draws upon the physical loss of a person in his images to emphasise the emotional loss, for example ‘woken / in acres of empty bedding’. This is an interesting contrast to Wordsworth’s ‘We are Seven’ where the young girl says ‘Their graves are green, they may be seen’. Although her siblings are dead their graves act as a presence for the young girl. However, in ‘Night Shift’ the narrator feels an absence even though his partner is still very much alive. Like the narrator’s views in ‘We are Seven’ there is very much the feeling of an irreconcilable force being acted out in ‘Night Shift’ shown through the descriptions of the everyday objects, for instance ‘body-heat stowed in the crumpled duvet’.
The fourth poem, ‘Monkeys’ by Selima Hill, demonstrates the loss of something both emotional and physical; a girl’s virginity. Unlike the other three poems discussed so far, which all centre on the loss of another person, ‘Monkeys’ is centred around the loss of something that is part of the narrator. However, like the other poems, particularly ‘Night Shift’, there is a tension between the ideas of loss and gain. In many ways the girl losing her virginity can be said to be the loss of her innocence; she no longer possesses the ideals of a girl. On the other hand, the loss of her virginity could be said to be the transitional point at which the narrator becomes a woman and gains sexual experience. Like the other poems, the interpretations of loss are difficult to outline definitely, but some of the clues for the poem ‘Monkeys’ can be found in the language Hill uses. The narrator identifies the sexual experience as the point where she ‘became a woman’, indicating that the she does not see losing her virginity as a loss, but as a gain. However, the way in which she describes the sexual experience does put to question the manner in which she lost her virginity. The depiction of the man, her ‘grandmother’s scaly-fingered gardener’, does not sound like the sort of man a young girl would willingly give herself to. Moreover the description of his actions gives the incident a sinister mood; he ‘half-marches, half creeps’ into her bedroom with an ‘excited reluctance’. Such descriptions could then be said to be alluding to images of rape, not consented sexual activity. This is further emphasised by the girl’s attitude towards her virginity, referring to the man as having ‘mended it’. This is a very detached view of something that is often seen as being fundamental to a girl and does not give the impression of the loving relationship between two people usually associated with the loss of virginity. However, the second stanza does give the impression that the girl has tried to romanticise the experience through her sensual references to ‘distant land[s]’. Yet these are quickly undermined later in the verse with the grotesque images of a farm, such as the reference to ‘chickens…. Without their heads’. From these descriptions it could then be said that although the girl’s first sexual experience may not have necessarily have been rape, it is not the idealistic image of sex that many young girls would have, and therefore the loss of her virginity can be seen as a loss, and not the gain of becoming a woman.
None of the poems so far have shown loss as something materialistic. The word materialistic has connotations of superficiality, and to feel mournful for the loss of a material item may be seen to be shallow. However, a material possession may well stand for something much more than simply its surface value. This is the case for the subject of the fifth poem, ‘Lament for the Subotica-Palic Tramway’ by John Hartley Williams. Williams’s poem is, as suggested in the title, a lamentation for the tram and the people it stood for at the time it was in use. The poems focus isn’t on the feeling of loss so much as retelling the story of the tramway and its importance to the public before buses came into use. The narrator uses everyday images, such as ‘fat ladies… with their bags’ and ‘school-children’, giving the poem a nostalgic sense of community. This sense is heightened by the description of peoples’ reactions to the tram derailing ‘And the occupants of each tram would step out / & conversation would flower under the plane trees / In the centre of town. And some would decide to walk, / But others would not be so pressed’. This image depicts a relaxed and friendly attitude towards life in a small town without the pressures of modern living. In contrast the next stanza describes the introduction of the buses ‘from Sweden’ which ruined the calm way of life for the people of the town ‘But it was not long before they appeared / dusty & grubby & somehow chewed up / And it seemed they were always late, or you had just missed one / Or they were impossibly crowed’.
The sense of loss in ‘Lament for the Subotica-Palic Tramway’ may at first seem to be about the loss of a mode of transport, but when studied closely it can be established that there is much more at work in the poem. Williams hints at a lost sense of community brought on by the introduction of modern transport from a foreign country. The poem is an emotional recollection for the tram and everything it stood for to the narrator; the people and the attitude from a time that has passed.
Whilst this anthology only draws upon a fraction of the poems throughout the time centred around the theme of ‘loss’ it nevertheless shows a broad view of the different interpretations of the word. Moreover the introduction shows how the word ‘loss’ can cause tensions between two poems, or solely the ideas in one poem itself. What all the poems do show, however, is that there is no set definition for the word ‘loss’, nor is there a set way to deal with the theme both in literature and reality.
