In love’s dear chain so strong and bright a link,
Thou idol of thy parents – (Drat the boy!
There goes my ink!)
As you can see, the boy interrupts the father midway through, which shows that the boy is becoming even more of a nuisance than before. This shows even more of an exaggeration and contrast between the heavenly description of the son and the actual behaviour the boy chooses to act like.
A lot of metaphors have been used in this poem, mostly of fictional fantasy creatures such as ‘domestic dove’, ‘cherub’, ‘human humming-bee’, and ‘elfin’. There are so many metaphors because this also adds to the mocking of the Victorian style of poetry. The metaphors help to create this style and it would sound very poetic, but when you read all the phrases in the brackets (the real behaviour of the boy) you see that it is in fact just mocking the metaphors. T. Hood, as I have already said, is using humour to mock the Victorian poets of his time, but he is also mocking the way father’s idolize their son as perfect children and ignore the reality behind it. He does this by using fictional characters and images, which he contrasts with reality. A line, which truly shows how much respect and pride a father would have for his child can be found in the poem, which says ‘Thy father’s pride and hope’. This line is showing how much of a perfect creature his son is, epitomising the fathers dream of his sons future. The father does love his son and is reflected in the affection he expresses, ‘My elfin John!’. ‘Thou darling of thy sire!’ and ‘Thou imp of mirth and joy’. These words do express the love that he has for his child, even if it is mocking the Victorian style of poetry, he is not mocking the love he has for his son; even if he is a brat. All the things in the brackets; ‘(Are those torn clothes his best?)’, ‘(He’s got a knife)’ and ‘(I knew so many cakes would make him sick!)’ just show how hard it is to raise a child. In this sense the poet is making a valid statement on parenting and how hard it is, but he does love his child no matter what he does.
On a final note about the poem, the ending just shows how ironic this poem is with a perfect example, which finishes the poem off. In the last stanza you find this sentence:
Bold as the hawk, yet gentle as the dove
(I’ll tell you what, my love,
I cannot write, unless he’s sent above).
Basically the father is saying that he cannot concentrate with his son being there, so he is asking his wife to send him upstairs. What makes this line so ironic is that he is writing a poem idolizing his son, yet he doesn’t even want him there. Again this shows that a lot of fantasy and ‘make-believe’ is being produced from his father’s writing because you cannot write about your son without him being there.
‘Catrin’ on the other hand is a lot darker than ‘A Parental Ode…’ and certainly quite depressing. G. Clarke has written a poem through the eyes of a mother viewing her daughter. Already it has the same characteristics as ‘A Parental Ode…’ In the first stanza the mother talks about the time when she gave birth to Catrin and how she has developed, which is described in the present day. On the whole, the mother doesn’t give very good judgement to Catrin. The poem is structured at two different periods of time. The first stanza is in the past and the secant stanza is in the present. The first stanza is set in a hospital, which isn’t told to you directly, it has to figured out through the words used within the poem. The line goes ‘As I stood in a hot, white room’; I figured this out as I associated ‘white room’ with a hospital, as that is the traditional colour that they use, white, disinfected. I think that the mother said ‘hot, white room’ because she was too frustrated to actually think where she was while giving birth, and this leads on to my next point. How did I know she was giving birth? Well we have already learnt that she was in hospital from the second line of the poem, but as you reach the seventh line it says ‘our fierce confrontation, the tight red rope of love which we both fought over’. The ‘tight red rope of love’ is a metaphor for the umbilical cord that both, at this point, Catrin and her mother are attached to while giving birth. After the birth, she and Catrin were left alone and the writer starts using words of shapes in the poem. Here is a portion of the poem, which demonstrates the use of shapes:
Fought over, it was a square
Environmental blank, disinfected
Of paintings or toys. I wrote
All over the walls with my
Words, coloured the clean squares
With the wild, tender circles
I think G. Clarke has used these as metaphors to express the mixed emotions being felt, squares being very plain, boring, rigid, basic, clear and sharp. That other shape used was a circle demonstrating smoothness, warmth, happiness and simplicity. With the example I gave above there is also something else that G. Clarke has hidden from the audience that you have to figure out for yourself. When the mother says ‘I wrote all over the walls with my words, coloured the clean squares’, I think that she is not ‘colouring’ but rather swearing as she is giving birth, shouting certain swear words from all the pain and frustration. There is also some repetition in the poem; for example, ‘I can remember you’ is said twice. This is telling the reader that it is a strong memory, but not just for the mother, but also for every mother that has given birth, a universal message that an experience like that is never forgotten. G. Clarke has written a poem in how a mother feels towards her daughter and how a strong a memory of childbirth can be. Many metaphors have been used in what I feel isn’t used to make it sound very poetic, but rather to hide certain factors. All these metaphors, ‘hot, white room’, ‘red rope of love’, ‘tender circles of our struggle’, and ‘that old rope’ are used to hide her feelings or that she might be embarrassed to say directly that she was in a hospital giving birth to a baby. Why might that be? Is her baby from an unwanted pregnancy, the result of rape? The metaphors used before can be linked with ‘A Parental Ode…’ with metaphors like ‘cherub’, ‘elf’, and ‘domestic dove’ which hides what the child is really like, a bit of a naughty child. This can be linked with the metaphors previously said with ‘Catrin’ as they can be metaphors hiding the real truth about the mother’s feeling. In the last stanza of ‘Catrin’ the mother says ‘still I am fighting you off’. To me this sounds like a negative thing to say? Why would you be fighting your own daughter off, and more to the point, ‘still’ fighting her off? This is very rude to say, since as she gave birth to Catrin, after ‘fighting’ over that ‘red rope of love’ that they are still fighting. The mother then makes another bad mannered statement about her daughter making her sound very plain and detached:
…still I am fighting
You off, as you stand there
With your straight, strong, long
Brown hair and your rosy
Defiant glare…
All that the mother describes is her physical appearance, not what’s really important like her daughters feelings and personality which makes the daughter sound plain and as if she has no soul, or personality to her, no structure. It makes her sound hideous. A very strong line in this piece is ‘defiant glare’. The word defiant is very strong, which makes her daughter sound strong, almost dominant over the mother. This could suggest why her mother dislikes her so, because she is aggressive and controlling over the things she wants. As you can see the poem is very serious and powerful, filled with emotions, anger and sorrow; very much unlike ‘A Parental Ode…’ that is light and humorous.
‘For Heidi With Blue Hair’ is a poem in between ‘Catrin’ and ‘A Parental Ode…’ It is a poem written by F. Adcock about a simple story of a girl who has dyed her hair blue, which I informed in the title. She gets sent home and the whole poem is based around this and the opinions of that people think of this. The poem also briefly talks about her mother, who is dead. The poem has been written for someone, as mentioned in the title, so the poet must be writing about something that actually happened with someone that she knows. This poem has no rhyming like ‘Catrin’ does, and each stanza is split into different sections, about different things that are going on, revolving around Heidi’s blue hair. Two of the stanzas are quite different from the rest. Stanza one and two are linked as stanza one lead on from stanza two like this:
…You were sent home from school
because as the headmistress put it…
I think F. Adcock does this because, as I said, each stanza is about different things and she wanted to keep this pattern. The first stanza is about Heidi’s blue hair and that she got sent home from it and the second stanza is what the headmistress thought of it, so you get two different sections, which in the poets mind need to be split apart. Throughout the poem it has a sense of irony especially when it is about her hair colour. Here is an example of irony:
Although dyed was not
Specifically forbidden, yours
Was, apart from anything else,
Not done in the school colours.
It is ridiculous for someone to say that ‘it wouldn’t be that bad if you had done it in the school colours’. I think this has been written to make it sound more witty and light, and that you can just make a mockery out of the situation instead of becoming mad about it. The colour of Heidi’s hair is really emphasized in the first couple of lines by saying ‘when you died your hair blue (or at least, ultramarine…’ They didn’t need to say ‘ultramarine’, blue was fair enough to know, but they have exaggerated it. I think F. Adcock wanted to embarrass Heidi and really embellish on how bad her hair was. You find out in the poem that Heidi isn’t such a rebellious teenager as she looks to be. This is because a rebel would not cry because she got into trouble like Heidi does, ‘Tears in the kitchen, telephone calls’ show this. If Heidi weren’t rebellious then why would she do this act? You find out that her mother is dead and this is what the teachers try to blame for her act. This is from one of the stanzas which talks about this:
It would be unfair to mention
Your mother’s death, but that
Shimmered behind the arguments.
The school had nothing else against you;
The teachers twittered and gave in.
So the teachers weren’t trying to blame her outburst because of her mother’s death but as they say, it would be unfair to. Something that is not like ‘A Parental Ode…’ and ‘Catrin’ is that ‘For Heidi With Blue Hair’ is written as though it is a story. By this I mean that each of the other poems are more of an account, whereas this one is telling an event. It is also structured differently as the poem starts off without a capital letter, whereas most poems do. Again F. Adcock might be showing that she doesn’t want this piece to be a poem, as she has not structured it like one, so this is something she wants the audience to grasp and understand.
I feel that this poem is all about differences, as it makes some reference to the subject. First off. The blue hair and the way people respond to it, in this case they don’t seem to take it too well. The most surprising one that is mentioned is in the last stanza. ‘Next day your black friend…’ This was not needed to be mentioned, that her friend was black, but the poet still put it in. This adds to show difference and how easily we can see them. I think the poet is showing that even putting in ‘black friend’ can really stand out. As mentioned before, F. Adcock likes to be ironic but I think that she is trying to make a statement that we shouldn’t take a problem like Heidi’s hair and be so serious about it. Instead, we sho0uld take light of the situation.
I feel that out of the three poems, ‘For Heidi With Blue Hair’ is the one that has the least amount of similarity. I feel that this one is talking about differences and the way we perceive them, even with the tiniest detail of differences. It does have some characteristics as ‘A Parental Ode…’ by being humorous, using irony to achieve this effect. The content, however, isn’t so much the same. ‘Catrin’ has a stronger bond with ‘A Parental Ode…’ as it shares the characteristics of the parent-child situation. What I like about these two is that they are touching on a similar subject but have been approached in completely different ways and style. The structure of the language defines its differences, with ‘A Parental Ode…’ using punctuation and structured sentences to achieve a sense of irony, which can be then shown as humour. Catrin, on the other hand, is a lot more serious and goes to great lengths to us metaphors to hide certain emotions from the mother about her daughter. We can also find the use of metaphors in ‘A Parental Ode’, using words such as ‘elfin’ and ‘cherub’ to describe a perfect portrait of the writer’s son, but in reality it is not true. The main difference to both of these poems lies within the story itself; in ‘A Parental Ode…’, even though the father’s son is a bratty, misbehaving child, it is still clear that ™he father does love his son. After all, why would you take all the trouble to write how wonderful he is? However when we look at ‘Catrin’, you seem to get a sense that the mother doesn’t love her child at all. Using very strong, emotional language, (still I am fighting you off,), (defiant glare), and (trailing love and conflict) is showing that there seems to be a clash between the mother and daughter. I feel that there seems to be a lack of love between the two and from these examples above, it is clear that the mother has a negative impact on her daughter that isn’t explained. The most that we can do is guess. By looking back through the poem we can spot certain factors; we can see that there is no mention of the father I did question earlier about the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy. I could back this up by saying that because there is no mention of the father, maybe something must have happened to her to be in a situation where the child cannot be fathered. This had lead the mother to not want the baby, however the pregnancy continued. As the child grew up, which is described in the last stanza, we see this conflict between the two, and after enough time to get to know her daughter, the mother has decided to lose her love for Catrin. I think she even makes her sound bad to the audience, using phrases like ‘still I am fighting you off’ and ‘defiant glare’. It makes Catrin sound like she is a problem child, and with the mother describing this to us, it’s as if she is trying to win a claim over the audience and push them onto her side. With ‘Catrin’ you have to fully understand and explore the poem to understand what is going on. I think this has been structured this way, using more difficult language and metaphors, to show the frustration and anxiety that the mother is feeling. The mother wanted us to feel the same frustration, so she makes the poem more difficult to understand which ash been cleverly done with the metaphors. I feel that by using such words about the birth and the child like ‘ a struggle and saying that she wanted ‘to be two’, I come to feel that Catrin was an accidental baby and the mother didn’t want her but now she is stuck with her daughter.
So to conclude, I would say that all three poems are about viewing a child, but it depends on who is viewing them; whether it is the father in ‘A Parental Ode…’ the mother in ‘Catrin’ or actually the poet in ‘For Heidi With Blue Hair’. Different people are perceiving all these, but I wouldn’t go on what they say, it’s just their opinion, not what the child actually is like.
