Perhaps “the blood on the stubble” is that of the harvest mouse or a sacrifice to Ceres. Perhaps the foot is plunged under a cold waterfall to alleviate the pain. Stevenson’s omission of articles in these sentences abolishes the narrowness of individual experience, although we can still imagine the contemporary speaker’s accident – a fall, an ankle twisted and cut, the “needle of burning” that’s as painful as the sour plum in the child’s mouth. The “brown foot in sandal” and “burnt palm on flaked clay” suggest a Greek amphora and the ritualised figures depicted there. There’s also a wider, more general tradition of western pastoral misting through the tunnel, and now, in line two of that second block, it seems we’re sped directly into antiquity. Stevenson, writing in middle-age, chooses the distant but “key” ages - of “eight and eighteen and eighty”- as shorthand for the one magical, haunted tunnel, containing “all the Augusts of my day”.Īs those breakfast plums in the poem’s earlier lines recall William Carlos Williams’s immortal fridge-note, so the second block of verse, spurred by an ankle “hurting as harvest hurts / thistle and animal”, may well summon Robert Burns’s immortal mouse. ![]() Numbers in a poem, even when printed as words, ease the weight of language. The separate couplet following the stanza break prefigures the last two lines. Days are not all the same, but summer days tend to merge in the memory, seeded by “the broad light”, blurred through the sibilance of plural end-words: “fences”, “grasses”, “summers”, “senses”. Recurrence is often described as “day to day” and Stevenson’s tiny shift of preposition, “day into day”, promotes the movement forwards and the sense of evolution. The speaker knows herself to be travelling, “moving from day into day / I don’t know how” and her lines and syntax flow appropriately. Childhood plum-tasting briefly recalled, it absorbs itself in time- and grammar-defying luxuriance, an immediacy of rich and golden harvests. This first block of verse glides along through present participles. The tunnel vision is made of summers, compressed by time, compressed in spite of time, so that “eating these plums now” connects quickly with “childhood’s / mouth-pucker tartness” – a phrase which might not refer only to the child’s sensation on tasting the plums but to childhood itself, with its unexpected jolts of the actual against the expected. As a result, it looks like a tunnel that finally ends in an expanse of eye-blinking light. The rest of the poem is in dimeter and trimeter. Metrically, both lines are rough-hewn hexameters. ![]() The first of the paired lines is longer than any previous line, and the second spreads itself even wider, although it has the same number of syllables (13, if you pronounce “cemetery” informally, eliding the last “e”). This is sharpened by the contrasting final couplet. What first drew my eye to this poem, among the many attractions of Anne Stevenson’s posthumous Collected Poems was the tunnel-like shape. Where my granddaughter’s daughter has been born and buried. They are already building the long straw cemetery
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