The title of “Crabbed Age and Youth” is important because it gives us an idea of Deloney’s view of age or the view of the persona he plays immediately. One could argue that the word ‘crabbed’ is being used to describe both ‘age and youth’, but in my opinion, once reading the whole poem through, I believe that Deloney is only talking about ‘age’. The word crabbed actually means complicated, or someone who complains a lot, and this is how he presents ‘age’ to us by using imagery ‘age like winter’, and by describing age to be ‘weak and cold’. After all judging by how stereotypical the poet is it would be absurd to believe that the composer is talking about youth after praising them so dearly. Although the poet is describing age to be ‘crabbed’, I think that this is not really thought through very well, because to be honest children are more demanding, and when they do not get something they want, they cry or get in a bad mood, or you could say become ‘crabbed youth’.
The word ‘age’ is also paired with the adjective ‘crabbed’, however the word ’youth’ is not attached to any word and seems almost completely separate. Youth seems quite isolated from the word ‘age’ and could represent how nowadays parents and children are quite segregated from each other. As well as the word being isolated, it seems to be independent, as it is not relying on an adjective to describe itself.
Following onto the point of where I had written that parents and children are isolated from one another, this is clearly demonstrated to us in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, throughout the play, as well as in ‘crabbed age and youth’, when it is written that they ‘cannot live together’. The isolation between a parent and child, can be expressed due to the fact that these two humans are both from different generations, and have been brought up to have different opinions, or in some cases, completely contrasting opinions and as a consequence have little or nothing in common. For example in ‘Follower’ we are not informed of any similarities between the father and son, however the fact that the verb stumble appears twice and that both the father and the son have experienced it, suggests that this is the only thing of which they have in common. Another example is in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ where we see at the beginning of the play Capulet displaying a willingness to become a better parent as he attempts to understand Juliet’s thoughts and emotions by saying to Paris that Juliet is too “ripe to be a bride”. This portrays to us a parent who is willing to change their own opinion in a matter. in the Elizabethan era it was considered normal for a 14 year old to be married and expecting children, which is made clear to us when Paris says to Capulet ‘younger than she (Juliet) are happy mothers made’, to which Capulet answers by saying that young mothers are ‘too soon marr’d’. By defending his and his daughter’s actions, shows him to be a protective father.
There is no doubt that along the path of parenthood there will be clashes between a parent and child, of which the child or parent feels that they ‘cannot live together’, due to different factors, the most prominent of which is a severe clash of opinions. We know not to take the line ‘cannot live together’ literally, because Deloney is talking about the two opinions of the youth and the old and how they are so severely differentiated, almost contradictory. I translate this stanza to mean that the two opinions are so contradictory that neither can win the argument. I can refer this to the poem ‘Catrin’, in which Gillian Clarke talks about a ‘red rope of love’ which represents the bond that a parent and child have. To demonstrate how contradictory these 2 opinions are, Deloney offers us a variety of antithesis, such as “Youth like summer… Age like winter”, “Youth is hot… Age is...Cold”.
The roles in this parent child relationship are clear to us; Capulet even tells us that he thinks of Juliet as a ‘whining mammet’. A mammet is a puppet, and so obviously a puppet needs a puppeteer, and due to how Capulet acts in this scene, it is evident that he is the puppeteer. This hierarchy of a parent and child is also shown in ‘Follower’, when Heaney describes his father to be a ‘full sail strung’ and that ‘horses strained at his clicking tongue’. By saying that even ‘horses strained at his clicking tongue’ shows how much power and authority his father had; he had to do such little, to get the horses to do a lot of work. The fact that an animal listens to him, demonstrates just how powerful he is.
Deloney also thinks that age and youth are completely opposite by saying ‘age like winter weather; Youth like summer brave’. By using two completely opposite seasons of the year, Deloney is also pointing out that parents and children are also completely opposite. For example it is hot in summer and cold in winter, it cannot be hot in winter and cold in summer, however when we get too hot, we wish for it to be cooler and when we are cold, we wish for it to be hot. Similarly, when we are old we desire to be young, and when we are young we wish to be older or you could say when children are in need of parents, they may not be here, but that when they are here, you do not need them vice versa. If we were to interpret this to fit the role of a parent child relationship then we would say that when as children we become older and our parents eventually die, suddenly we seem to miss them immensely. So by using antithesis, the poet is basically telling us that once a parent or child is deceased, we learn how much we appreciated them. I feel it is a shame that we only realise things like this once it has been taken from us. This is shown in Romeo and Juliet when Capulet discovers that his daughter has apparently died from depression, he feels overwhelmed and his true feelings for Juliet are revealed as he says ‘with my child are my joys buried’, however when she was alive (in act 3 scene 5), he did not seem to care if she were to ‘die in the streets’.
Personally I think it was a good choice of the poet to use the contrasting events of winter and summer because everyone has experienced it which makes the poem easy to relate to, just as many people have experienced being a parent and as everyone has experienced being a child.
The poet of ‘Crabbed age and youth’ links age with ‘winter bare’, winter weather’. When I think of winter, immediately I think of the coldness and snow. When it snows or rains, occasionally the coldness can be of such an amount that it freezes and causes ice. As ice is slippery, we can assume that Deloney is saying that being a parent is difficult or hard to get a grip of. Ice is transparent, invisible almost. Similarly we could presume that Deloney is telling us that he feels that parents are invisible and hard to notice, which translates into me thinking that he feels parents are under appreciated.
Ice is also quite fragile and easy to break, so the poet could be saying that a parent child relationship can be easily broken. However, In addition to this winter occurs ever year and cannot be prevented, just as the addition of the cold, frosty weather in which ice can reappear. Similarly you could say the bond between a parent and child may have cracks in it, but the bond between they have will always be there, despite any pressures which may cause friction or ‘cracks’. We could link this to ‘Romeo and Juliet’, as Juliet’s relationship with her father is fragile, and that the only things keeping the cracks together are the fact that Juliet obeys Capulet’s orders.
When the composer of the poem says ‘O sweet shepherd, hie thee’, we can instantly see that the shepherd represents a parent. Shepherds guide and look after sheep, just as parents’ guide and look after their children. Consequently the line translates into, ‘sweet parent, go quickly’. I think that here a young adult is trying to become an adult very suddenly and so is asking the parent(s) for more independence, by asking them to, to blatantly put it, go away. The word ‘sweet’ here makes the plea of independence seem desperate, because it seems as if the child is trying to compliment and flatter the parent)s) into letting them become more independent, which is quite cunning. We can compare this to ‘Catrin’, in which Gillian says her daughter looks innocent, yet has a ‘Defiant glare.’ This ‘defiant glare’ shows how her daughter is no longer obedient and is starting to want more independence. The word ‘defiant’ makes the mood seem quite hostile, because it seems as if the daughter is challenging her mother, being confrontational and quite openly disobedient. The words ‘defiant glare’ makes me feel quite uneasy and as if the daughter has done something terribly wrong just by asking if she ‘may skate…. For one more hour’. We could also compare this to ‘Follower’ in which the boy’s father is ‘mapping the furrow exactly’, and so we can that the father is a perfectionist and perhaps controlling due to the word ‘mapping’. He is carefully thinking about what he is about to do and so controlling the situation. We could also interpret this to mean that the father is guiding the boy to become a ploughman just as his father is.
