Poetry, Year 11: Walking Away, Letters from Yorkshire and Eden Rock (Love and Relationships option)

The speaker's young son's first football match, after which the boy walked off

HintA fine day as summer was ending.

The whyThe poet dedicated it to his son Sean. The memory is a small, ordinary one, but it grows into a meditation on what it means for a child to grow up and leave.

1962

HintIn the early 1960s.

The whyThe poem was written by Cecil Day-Lewis, who became Poet Laureate in 1968. It looks back almost eighteen years to the day it describes.

5

HintThere are four of them.

The whyThe four stanzas mark four steps in the speaker's response to the memory, from recollection to resistance, acceptance and reflection. The rhyme scheme is steady, though the rhythm is irregular.

Children must leave their parents to grow, as seeds must travel away to find their own soil

HintA plant cannot flourish in the shade of the one it came from.

The whyThe poet also compares the hard tests of growing up to fire hardening clay. The images say that leaving, though it hurts, is how a child becomes a separate person.

Let them go: allow them to leave and become independent

HintLove shows itself by what it gives up.

The whyThe speaker reaches this idea slowly, and it costs him pain. The title names both what the child does and what the parent has to accept.

potatoes

HintA root crop that is a staple of the British diet.

The whyEveryone in the poem is shown through simple, physical details. The writer sees the first lapwings of the year return at the same time.

She works indoors, writing at a computer screen

HintHer working day does not involve soil or weather.

The whyThe contrast between outdoors and the screen drives the poem. The speaker is not criticising herself but wondering what her kind of life lacks.

3

HintShort stanzas of the same size, all through.

The whyThe steady stanzas give a feeling of measured pace, while thoughts flow on over the stanza breaks. The poem is both orderly and free.

A worry that life at a screen is emptier than work done outdoors with the hands

HintShe is not sure her own existence counts as fully real.

The whyThe poem does not simply say she is right. It also admits that outdoor work can be hard and unromantic, so she may be imagining an easier life than he has.

Through his letters, which bring the outdoor world to her

HintA very old way of keeping in touch, in a poem about modern life.

The whyEach letter brings a piece of the natural world into her day, and in the evening each of them follows the news alone, in a separate home. The poem finishes on this link across the cold distance.

When they are young, in their early twenties, much younger than he is now

HintLong before he was born.

The whyThe father is twenty-five and the mother twenty-three, with the father's dog, which is also young again. The vision is of a time before the speaker's own life began.

A piece of twisted paper

HintShe makes do with what she has.

The whyThe homely detail shows a thrifty, ordinary family. Its precision makes the vision feel remembered rather than invented.

The boundary between life and death

HintThink of what lies on the far bank.

The whyThe parents wait on the far side and tell him that crossing is easy. This is one reading: that the poem is about the poet's own approaching death.

They are a stanza of three lines and then a single line

HintThe pattern is steady up to the end.

The whyThe shorter last stanzas break the pattern at the moment of the call, and the single last line stands alone. The change in shape matches the change in mood.

1988

HintThe poet's last collection of new poems.

The whyCharles Causley died in 2003, and this collection was his last. Many of its poems deal with memory and death.