Neil Bowen on
From an article first published in the E&MC magazine in 2015:
Initially the language of the poem is simple, unostentatious, spare. Rather than setting off any linguistic fireworks, the poet works with a quiet intensity, describing precisely and realistically. The first stanza is composed mainly of common monosyllables and there’s a high density of seemingly unpoetic function words, such as pronouns and prepositions. Metaphor only creeps in from the second stanza onwards. Even here it is low key, unshowy: The body’s ‘nipples’ are compared to ‘amber beads’, its ribs to ‘rigging’. Absence of aural imagery sustains the poem’s almost trance-like concentration.
A distinct pattern of imagery emerges, connecting the female body to objects – a ‘sapling’, ‘black corn’ and ‘combs’. The woman seems to be constructed from objects from an ancient culture and its landscape. Two kennings (a compounding device from Anglo-Saxon poetry) add to the distancing effect (both emotionally and in time): her body is ‘oak-bone, brain-firkin’.
Dehumanisation reduces our empathy. But working against the tendency to objectification is the carry-over of empathy, encouraged by the intimate opening stanza, with its emphasis on feeling, in both senses of that word. Sympathy is maintained through words such as ‘frail’, ‘sapling’, ‘shaved’ and ‘blindfold’ which emphasise the woman’s youth and her vulnerability.
The tension suggests the poet is unsure how to treat this subject: as an object to be observed or as a person to feel compassion for? As a phenomenon to be understood through rational observation or a life to be felt through imaginative identification? Perhaps he is trying to better understand what he is seeing by varying the perspective, getting close up inside the experience, but also pulling back to observe from the outside.
The metaphor of the noose as a ‘ring/to store/the memories of love’ is surely bitterly ironic as we discover the woman was hanged and drowned for adultery. It is also resonant and troubling. Implying that love was somehow preserved through the woman’s punishment, it fuses a disturbing semantic link between the connotations of the two loops, ‘ring’ and ‘noose’, implying they share similar significance in terms of control and marriage.