Storyteller This poem is a descriptive poem, which illustrates the effect of storytelling on the human mind.

The poet uses a metaphor to describe how in the act of sweeping, even the last rays of sunlight are cleared away. The daylight is compared to the last crumbs that are brushed off the floor.

The silence of the night is broken ‘as the tongue clacked’. This onomatopoeia could also suggest that there was perfect silence as the tales were told. We are also told that nobody could criticize these women for being lazy ‘slander her shiftless’. ‘To tell the stories was her work’. The poet uses a beautiful simile to describe the skill of storytelling. She says it is ‘like spinning’. The storyteller would stretch the strings of her imagination and create stories out of ‘thin air.’  Moreover, it wasn’t that these women were ignoring the housework. As the tales were being told they would stitch, grate corn from the husk, create patchwork quilts or finish the darning. The emphasis on the ‘f’ sound in ‘five or forty fingers stitched’ reflects the swiftness with which the fingers moved and tells us how adept these women were at their work. We can also relate the putting together of pieces to make a patchwork quilt to the art of storytelling where different elements of a story are arranged together to make a well-structured whole.

The audience for these women was usually children who waited ‘night in’, that is, every night, to hear the story. The poet says that they waited ‘held breath, for the ending we knew by heart. ‘Held breath’ suggests their eager anticipation. The ending we knew by heart’ takes one back to one’s own childhood. We remember the bedtime stories that our parents related to us and how we pestered them to relate the same old story every night.

Elaborate.

In the last stanza, the poet describes the effect of these stories on the minds of the little children. She begins by describing a typical dawn in the village. ‘At first light’ the women ‘stirred themselves to build the fire’. The word ‘stirred’ offers us a clear image of these women sleepily rousing themselves out of bed to begin the day’s chores. Another such image is that of the peasant whose ‘feet felt for clogs’. One can again imagine the heavy-eyed farmer drowsily feeling for his shoes under the bed. The use of such words as ‘clogs’ and ‘delft’ suggests that the poem has a Dutch setting. While the adults rise, the children are still fast asleep, lost in a dream world of their own. A world that is soaked in more colour and magic than the ‘grey’ and ‘flat’ world outside. The fantasy stories of the night before softly permeate into their dreams. They are ‘dissolved in the whorl of the ear’. The poet creates a striking visual image of the stories swirling in the coils of the ear. It also reminds us of the image of spinning that she has used earlier. Another unusual piece of visual imagery engages the reader when the poet uses a metaphor and compares the stories to bats. She says ‘they / hung themselves upside down / in the sleeping heads of the children’. The stories will lie dormant in the minds of the children, like bats in hibernation. They will be preserved ‘salted away’ for future generations and the oral art of storytelling will survive. The stories will then take flight again in the imagination of the children and be repeated at other ‘storytellers night’.