Lament by Gillian Clarke

Lament by Gillian Clarke

For the green turtle with her pulsing burden,
in search of the breeding ground.
For her eggs laid in their nest of sickness.

For the cormorant in his funeral silk,
the veil of iridescence on the sand,
the shadow on the sea.

For the ocean’s lap with its mortal stain.
For Ahmed at the closed border.
For the soldier with his uniform of fire.

For the gunsmith and the armourer,
the boy fusilier who joined for the company,
the farmer’s sons, in it for the music.

For the hook-beaked turtles,
the dugong and the dolphin,
the whale struck dumb by the missile’s thunder.

For the tern, the gull and the restless wader,
the long migrations and the slow dying,
the veiled sun and the stink of anger.

For the burnt earth and the sun put out,
the scalded ocean and the blazing well.
For vengeance, and the ashes of language.

 Gillian Clarke

She is from Cardiff and lives in Ceredigion. She was born on 8^th June 1937.  She lived in Barry for few years. She graduated in English from university of Cardiff.  She is awarded the Queen’s Gold medal for her poetry in 2010.  She worked as an English teacher.  She has written radio and theatre drama, and translated poetry and prose from Welsh.  Her works have been translated into ten languages. After her graduation she worked for the BBC in London.  She was a co-founder of Ty Newydd in North Wales. She made a good collections of poetry for adults and children and dramas and number of articles which made a recognized writer among the literature world.  She was an editor of The Anglo-Welsh Review (1975 – 84). 

 Detail analysis of the poem

Lament is an elegy, it’s an outpouring of grief.  It says about the grief of people, destruction of creatures and everything in the Gulf war of 1991.  According to the poet the war destroy everything and her poem brings out the grief of everything from living to nonliving that are destroy by the war.  The poem does not follow any style but refers to the deepest sorrow and grief.  From the title one can understand on the surface or in general term of the word Lament.  But the word lament touches the readers as it brings out the pain of everything.  Many lines in the poem begins with word “for”.  The repetition does not refers merely the sadness. But it paints the pain and grief everyone and everything.  Eleven lines in the poem begin with “for” and nine lines with “the.”  The theme of remembrance makes the poem a significant one.

 The Nature laments

 “For the green turtle with her pulsing burden,
in search of the breeding ground.
For her eggs laid in their nest of sickness"

 “For the cormorant in his funeral silk,
the veil of iridescence on the sand,
the shadow on the sea.”

 The poet gives a significant place for the nature in the whole poem.  She starts with turtle and a Cormorant both looking for their habitats.  Because the turtle’s place is to lay her eggs and for the cormorant it is its place where the cormorant could find its prey easily.  But unfortunately both their places are destroyed. “For her eggs laid in their nest of sickness" is a good example for paradox (shows contradiction), for nest is a safe place to lay their eggs but here the war made it a dangerous place for the turtles and they feel and live in fear.

  The terms “burden”, “sickness”, “funeral” and “shadow” describe the condition of the place very clearly.  It is very striking to note how the nature is destroyed.  The lament starts with the nature’s destruction and gives a deeper thinking to the descriptions thereafter.  

 There is the usage of oxymoron in “pulsing burden”, pulsing means the energetic and activeness of the baby turtle and burden refers to the unpleasant feeling of the turtle.  The poet has used metaphor to give a deep feeling in “nest of sickness” for the turtles are suffering due to human’s action of destroying nature. 

 “The cormorant in his funeral silk” is a personification (the words used to bring out the human feelings to inanimate objects) to bring out the critical condition of the bird as if it has been under the clutches of death.

 Clarke describes the sun which is covered (veiled) with darkness and disappears is another natural imbalance.  So the birds who migrate are now dying slowly.   Readers could feel that they might run away in fear to another safe place. They search a safety place on Earth.  But they don’t find any safe place on Earth as it is collapsing and falling apart due to the darkness of the sun and the turmoil of the sea.  The main natural resources of the existence of life of all living, are in danger. The poem cries for the worst condition of the Planet Earth.  This stanza says about the how the Gulf war affected the environment, how the oil spill covered the birds and they are covered with its “funeral Silk” it refers to the dangerous they face and the dangers the oil spill caused. The oil spill covered the land and see. And it looks like “Shadow on the sea”.

  Cry of the Humankind

 “For the ocean’s lap with its mortal stain.
For Ahmed at the closed border.
For the soldier with his uniform of fire”.

“For the gunsmith and the armourer,
the boy fusilier who joined for the company,
the farmer’s sons, in it for the music”

 The third and fourth verses bring out many images related to its theme.  The poet brings another painful experience by a character Ahmed.  He stands at the closed border.  He tries to cross the border to reach his home but he is denied to cross as the border is closed due to war.  The second image is the soldier who is in his uniform burnt alive.  “The soldier in his uniform of fire” refers to the death of a solider due to the bomb blast is an interesting example of a metaphor (a comparison of one thing to another to make the description more vivid.) This too could be due to war or the war vehicles got crashed.

   “For the ocean’s lap with its mortal stain.  The poet uses onomatopoeia (the use of words whose sounds copes the thing or process they describe.) which shows the movement of the ocean as its natural course without any changes. (“Mortal stain”). 

 Gillian Clarke clearly says the grief and the painful struggle of the useless war.  How war could destroy the peace of the Earth.  She says the Gunsmiths and armorers make war weapons not to give lives but to kill lives.  They are for the purpose of destruction.  She describes the innocent people as “boys” and “sons”.  They would have loved the simple music and lived a simple peasant life and enjoyed the music.  But they volunteered to fight and sacrifice their life in vain. Now they lost all their smiles.

 “For the hook-beaked turtles,
the dugong and the dolphin,
the whale struck dumb by the missile’s thunder”.

 In the fifth verse the poet describes the how the Gulf war could interrupt and disturb the peaceful marine environment.  The action of the human collides with the natural world and collapses the balance of the nature.  Even the largest animal the Whale one of the wonders of the nature becomes speechless in fear by the sound of the missile which is launched by a nation on another nation to prove their nuclear power.

 “For the tern, the gull and the restless wader,
the long migrations and the slow dying,
the veiled sun and the stink of anger”.

This stanza says about the migration of the birds as they have no choices.  They migrate in pain as the human make their place no suitable for them to live in peace.  Their long migration would end in death as the new place may not be suitable for their survival.  It’s a slow death for them.  “Long migration and the slow dying” shows the destruction we have caused to destroy their peaceful life.  “Veiled sun” refers to the darkness which creates a fearful atmosphere.  The sun is covered due to the smoke or the pollution which we made to slaughter the nature.

  “For the burnt earth and the sun put out,
the scalded ocean and the blazing well.
For vengeance, and the ashes of language”.

 This refers to the biggest disastrous of the human activities.  It could be a bomb blast on the earth which could have brunt its surface and the smoke covers the sun and blocks the light.  …”the sun put out is a hyperbole (using exaggeration to intensify the feelings) this literary device is used to refer the smoke from bombing which covers the sun to create a darkness. “The scalded ocean and the blazing well” describes the extreme heat from missile fire which destroys wells and the surface of the vast ocean, because the war takes place on the shore of the Kuwait Bay.

“For vengeance, and the ashes of language”.  The concluding line brings out the anger and the sorrow of the poet.  She mourns for the loss of lives and voice and language, and culture.  The poet brings a different and complicated idea in this line.  She suggests metaphorically that humans have destroyed everything including language.  The ashes of language is nothing but complete destruction of human community.  Without human no language and culture would exist.  The hope is, at least the language could have made a word called “Peace” literarily to stop the war.  When the nature is lost by war, then the human world and its culture too lost beyond recovery.

 The poem is composed of seven stanzas of three lines.  It has an unrhymed structure. Each stanza says the pain of every living thing of the world.  There is a slight rhyme one can notice in “wader” and “anger”.   It is an elegy expressing grief.   

 Thus the poem of Gillian Clarke focuses on the message and its impact on the readers.  The message could not be neglected.  The poem doesn’t say a story to enjoy. It says the pain of each and every living organisms on earth who have the right to lead a peaceful life.  The poet has explored the feelings of great many who faces challenges of life every second on the Earth.

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