Touch with Fire Notes

Refugee Mother and Child

• The poet describes for us a mother and child who are among the refugees fleeing from famine and war in Africa.
• They are gathered in a camp, all suffering from starvation and disease and most of the women have given up their hope but this mother still tries to take care of her child.
• Line 3 : painting of Madonna and Child show far less tenderness than this mother as she looks after her son who is soon to die
• In her face can be seen traces of the smile she used to have and the pride she used to feel as she combed his hair before he went to school; now she still combs it and carefully part it knowing that he is dying.
• The poet does not express any emotion or begs for our sympathy; he simply describes the scene and leaves us to draw our own conclusions.

Prayer before Birth

• The poet imagines what could happen to a person once they are born, and speaks this prayer almost like chanting a magic spell to ward off evil.
• First verse mentions evil creatures that may harm the unborn.
• Second verse speaks of evil men that will do harm with imprisonment, drugs, lies, torture and slaughter.
• Third verse prays for good things of nature to protect him, and for the power of thought to help him.
• Forth verse he asks for forgiveness for all the sins that he will be forced by the world to commit: words, thoughts, treachery, murder, death.
• He asks to be prepared for all the different experiences that he will have to live through, and he prays that he may not encounter a man who is like an animal or one who imagines himself all powerful.
• He pleads for strength to resist those who would take away his individual humanity and reduce him to an unthinking part of a machine with no will of his own so that he has no personality left. If this cannot be prevented, he says, it would be better not to be born.
• The poet wrote this during the rise of Hitler in 1930’s. This was a subject of great concern to the intellectual young people of the time.
• The verses begin simply and then build up to evermore elaborate lists of things, until the contrast of the final stark statement in the last line.

Poem in October

• The poet wrote this poem when he was 30 years old and he re-visited the seaside town in Wales where he lived as a boy
• Everything seemed to call him to set out, while the rest of the town was still asleep, and walk around the places he used to know as a child.
• The autumn was changeable, with showers of rain, and intervals of sunshine when the birds sang.
• The poet climbed the hill and looked down on the church which looked small, like a snail with its horns out.
• Then as the sun came out it seemed to transform the scene to a vision of summertime in the past, and he saw, as the weather changed, the memory of walking with his mother while she told him stories; he saw this so clearly that he felt again the tears and emotions of his boyhood.
• These were the same woods, river and sea but that boy who delighted in them was ‘dead’ ( he was no longer a boy); yet he still found the same magic there, the water and the birds still seemed to ‘sing’ to him.
• As he stood there it still seemed like summer to him, with the same joy he had felt as a child, even though the trees had leaves which had turned blood-red because it was October.
• He hoped that he would write poems as good as this one on the same hill in a year’s time.
• The length of the lines varies so that the pace o you reading will also change. There are no rhymes but you may find some vowel sounds which are repeated.
• This poem is to be read aloud to bring out its ‘ slow lyrical movement’

To autumn

• The poet is thinking of all the most beautiful aspects of autumn, its products, its occupations, its colors and sounds.
• First verse he thinks of the way that autumn seems to be joining with the sun in order to ripen more and more fruit and fill the trees with so many apples that the branches bend down under the load; nut shells are full and the flowers keep producing more blossom for the bees, until they think summer will never end because their honeycombs are so full.

Season

• This poem celebrates the ripening and harvesting of maize.
• The poet thinks of the early growth of the corn when swallows would dart between the tall stalks, and the pointed leaves seemed sharp as slices of bamboo; now the feathery tops have shriveled and turned the colour of rust, indicating that the corn is ripe. He says that now they will gather to harvest, the stalks full of ripe corn “ the promise of the rust”

Horses

• The poet is remembering his father’s farm on the bare Orkney Islands, off the north-east coast of Scotland.
• He is watching some huge cart horses pulling a plough and wonders why they even now seem to him to have some terrible and strange power. He is reminded of the times when he used to watch them as a child, fascinated by the steady movement of their hooves, going up and down like the pistons of an old piece of machinery. They used to plough up the stubble fields as if they were conquerors, turning over the earth so that it changed colour and became brown, while their huge bodies were like golden angels or triumphant monsters on the soft soil. When they turned at the end of the furrow and walked towards the sunset, the light gleamed on their sides and the ploughed earth behind them rolled over like snakes.
• When they went home with twilight, breathing steam from the nostrils in the cold air, they seemed huge, with an inner fire that made them glow with warmth on the muddy ground. He remembers their wild eyes, bright with a strange light as If of a revelation, and their manes tossing as if in fury.
• In the final verse the poet’s vision of the past is fading, but although the memories have a nightmare quality about them he still longs to feel again the vivid sensations of childhood which were so bright and clear, yet ‘fearful’

One Flesh

• The poet thinks of her elderly parents who once were passionate lovers but now lie in separate beds, forced by old age to remain innocent.
• Her father has a book but does not read it; her mother thinks of her childhood; it is as if they were waiting for something to happen.
• Although they lie apart and seldom touch, they still seem to be held together by something unspoken, unseen. Their physical passion created her; and now it is gone. She wonders if they realize that they are old.
• The poem expresses a single idea in simple words but the thought behind it tells us something true about life.

Diary of a Church Mouse

• This is a poem/diary about a mouse who lives in a church who exists by chewing discarded items left in the cleaner’s room.
• The only time he has any nourishing food is at Harvest Festival in the autumn when Fruit, vegetables, wheat and bread are brought to the church for a service of thanksgiving.
• But he is annoyed to find that other mice who don’t live in the church come in at this time to enjoy the good; they ‘have no proper business here’; two mice who live in the fields come in, and also a rat, they have no interest in religion and they come for what they can get. Even ‘prosperous’ mice come, pretending to hear the organ play but actually to eat the oats placed on the altar, and a mouse who disapproves of the services held in this church doesn’t mind coming in to eat the food.
• The church mouse thinks it very unfair that he who starves in the church all the year should have to share the food with these intruders.
• From line 51 onwards the poet writes sarcastically as the mouse says that human brings don’t behave like that, but actually they do. They come to church regularly and are truly religious, but it is very strange how many people appear at Harvest Festival who don’t come to church at other times.
• This poem gets its message across by making us smile.