Most of the poem is spent upon the two young people because if we had been watching they would have been the main object of our attention and the first thing we saw. We do not see the crime from the very beginning but from after the glass smashes because we, like the narrator, would probably have turned on hearing the breaking of glass to see the scene described. I imagined these young people perhaps planning a wedding or choosing rings as they wandered through Sauchiehall Street, unsuspecting of the danger that awaited them outside the jeweller's shop. Here, Edwin Morgan makes excellent use of imagery and exceptional word choice. Our attention is caught by the words:
`With a ragged diamond of shattered plate glass'
This is a good phrase to begin with because we immediately think of something sharp, sparkling and dangerously beautiful; when the words diamond and shop window are put together like this we imagine the shards of glass as small sparkling diamonds and even though the writer has said nothing of what sort of shop it is we subconsciously imagine a jeweller's shop. This is a very strong beginning and ties in with the next two lines to give a very explicit view of what's happening. When we are told that `a young man and his girl are falling backwards through a shop window' we know what the first two lines are about but it would not sound so affective the other way round.
The use of the word `bristling', in the next couple of lines, suggests that the young man has a short beard of splintered glass and would not have been so effective if it had been the woman's face because the growth of beards is usually associated with men. It is also awful to think that the he may have to live the rest of his life, if he survives his injuries, with a face covered in scars. In the next few lines Morgan uses sickening irony to show how the girl's `wet-look white coat' is no longer wet-look but literally wet; no longer pure white but with splashes of contrasting red like blood on snow. The word `spurts' also gives a much greater effect than any other word he could have used because it is so specific in its meaning. Here are its relevant definitions according to the `Encarta World English Dictionary':
`jet of liquid or gas: a sudden stream of liquid or gas, forced out under pressure; make something gush out: to cause a liquid or gas to gush out in a pressurized stream or jet'
The word `spurts' is perfect to describe the periodic gushing of pressurized blood as it pumped out by the heart. It makes the incident much more graphic.
When Morgan writes `starfished' we see the couple falling into the shattering window with the automatic reaction that will not save them this time because they are falling backwards and onto the remnants of the broken window.
The action of falling is totally involuntary so we immediately wonder what has happened; our questions are answered in the following lines.
This section is about the two `youths' who have attacked them.
