Topic 1- 6 Round-up and Self Assessment > Analysing a whole poem > Task G comments

Analysing a whole poem

Our comments for task G:

Line 2: 'talk on tiptoe'

To walk on tiptoe is normal, but you clearly can't talk on tiptoe. This leads us to infer a metaphorical meaning that relates the semantically deviant line with the normal expressionit is connected to (by the rhyme between 'talk' and 'walk' and the prepositional phrase, 'on tiptoe', which is common to both expressions). we walk on tiptoe when we are trying to be very quiet, so as not to disturb someone. Analogically, 'talk on tiptoe' suggests that the woman is whispering, or talking quietly, which increases the intimacy of the scene.

Lines 3-4: 'part of the darkness'

You can't literally be part of the darkness as human beings are physical objects and darkness is the abscence of light. This phrase is a fairly common expression, and so is not very heavily foregrounded. But like 'talk on tiptoe' which it is grammarically connected to, it increases the feeling of intimacy which the young woman appears to feel (note we are not actually told what she is thinking or how she feels, but are getting her reactions as seen from the man's viewpoint - indeed this is true for the whole poem and helps us towards the idea that we should be criticl of him - he assumes things about her with no real evidence).

These are lines which we have already noticed as idicating, via parallelism, an 'authority figure' status for the mother as well as the policeman. If we take the first clause, the one involving the policeman, we can notice two important semantic deviations. First of all, the policeman is disguised as the sun. But it is very dificult to see how a policeman could possibly disguise himself as a star 93 million miles away from the earth. Secondly, in situational terms, it is difficult to believe that a policeman will creep into the room the next day. After all, as far as we know the two lovers have not committed a crime. Indeed, it is much more plausible schematically, given the time of day, that the sun will (using a pretty dead metaphor!) creep into the room.

Once we have noticed this about the clause with the 'policeman' phrase as its subject, we can see that there are parallel oddities in the coordinated clause with the 'mother' phrase as its subject. The postmodifying relative clause has the same predicator, and the content of the 'as' phrase is also deviant in relation to the headword. It is almost as difficult to see how a mother could diguise herself as a flock of birds as it is to imagine how a policeman could disguise himself as the sun. and agian, the headword-modifier relation seems to be the wrong way around. It is situationally unlikely that the young woman's mother will be calling from the trees, but prototypically birds do enage in such behaviour at dawn (the dawn chorus).

Clearly, then, we need an interpretation that satisfies both the paralellisms already noticed and the semantic deviations pointed out here. In our view, a good way of satisfying all these dictates interpretatively will be to notice that, when the young woman wakes at dawn, the sun and birds will remind her of her 'misdeed' and invoke fear of how others, particularly those she sees as authority figures (the police, her parents) will now regard her.

'Dress of guilt' and 'shoes with broken high ideals' are both deviant semantically, and in a way which is reminiscent of the 'talk on tiptoe' deviation we noticed in line 2. Let's take the 'shoes' phrase first, as this is the easiest to work with. Shoes can't have broken high ideals as they are inanimate and so can't indulge in abstract thought. But you can have shoes with broken high heels, and like the 'talk'/'walk' rhyme relation we noticed in line 2, 'heels' and 'ideals' also rhyme, linking 'shoes with broken high ideals' to the clichéd phrase 'shoes with broken high heels'. This gives rise to the idea that the young woman may indeed have shoes with broken heels (and so have difficulty in running home, even though she is so determined), and also that the broken heels symbolise the broken ideal (to stay chaste).

What about the 'dress of guilt'? Can you think of a material dresses can be made from which has a rhyme relation with 'guilt'? Note that 'dress of silk' is a good candidate. It shares the same vowel phoneme, and the final consonant cluster of both words contain an /l/ which is followed by consonants which, although they are not the same, are very similar phonetically. They are both unvioced stop consonants.

The parallel deviations we have noticed here give rise to the idea that the young woman's feelings of guilt, already awakened by the dawn, are increased as she gets dressed, thus motivating the helter-skelter run for home described in the last lines of the poem. Note that these aspects of the meaning of the poem are not stated in the poem. Instead, we have inferred the meaning via the parallelisms and deviations we have pointed out.

Note also that we appear to have isolated some common features in different parts of this poem which could, if found elsewhere in Roger McGough's writing, be good candidates as markers of a distinctive poetic style. In this poem, at least, grammatical parallelism and parallel semantic deviations occur in the same structures and are also marked by rhyme connections (a form of phonemic parallelism) with the words outside the poem which they need to be compared with in order to infer the intended meaning or effect.

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