a.m. 5 miles easy along the canal. Everything fine and dan-day.
Last night, I was doing a bit of the old English Lit. teaching stuff and I covered the 'unseen poem'. We went over the poem, Cold. I thought I'd share it with you as it is a beautiful poem that I suspect all of you will be able to tune into...
Carol Ann Duffy
Cold
It felt so cold, the snowball which wept in my hands,
and when I rolled it along in the snow, it grew
till I could sit on it, looking back at the house,
where it was cold when I woke in my room, the windows
blind with ice, my breath undressing itself on the air.
Cold, too, embracing the torso of snow which I lifted up
in my arms to build a snowman, my toes, burning, cold
in my winter boots; my mother’s voice calling me in
from the cold. And her hands were cold from peeling
then dipping potatoes into a bowl, stopping to cup
her daughter’s face, a kiss for both cold cheeks, my cold nose.
But nothing so cold as the February night I opened the door
in the Chapel of Rest where my mother lay, neither young, nor old,
where my lips, returning her kiss to her brow, knew the meaning of cold.
A simple sonnet with a majestical volte that comes in as late as the 12th line. But let's pick a random line. Ok, let's see - ah yes, line 6:
'Cold, too, embracing the torso of snow which I lifted up'
There's a kinaesthetic strain to this line that mimics the physicality of lifting the torso of snow. 'Cold, too,' - here, Duffy enacts, through the employment of two perfectly placed commas, the effort the child uses to lift the snow. The polysyllabic, 'embracing' simulates the arms wrapping around the snow, while the iambic syllables which follow, draw us into the energy of the line, as our eyes lift the snow with the child. But here's the spellbinding brilliancy of the poem: 'which I lifted up'. The enjambed line leaves our eyes straining at the end of the line with the snow in the air. We struggle under the weight as our eyes stare out across the cold, white, artic expanse of the page, looking for somewhere to plonk the snow. I could go on and on...
I wonder if Carol Anne Duffy could break 4hrs for the marathon. I very much doubt it:)
