Catrin

CATRIN

This intensely personal poem is a mother’s reflection upon the changing relationship with her daughter. It does not shy away from talking about the tensions that can arise from time to time but at the same time affirms the permanence of unconditional maternal love. This is also a poem that simultaneously celebrates the individuality of mother and daughter and their shared characteristics.

The bipartite structure of this poem deftly signals the separation that occurs after the severing of the umbilical chord “the tight / Red rope of love” (lines 7-8). The structure of the poem also shares one of the features of the Petrarchan sonnet, although it is not a sonnet in form. This feature is a clear break between the two sections. The first verse paragraph is largely descriptive, whilst the second (not lacking descriptive detail in itself) has a more reflective tone and explores the implications of what has been established earlier in the poem.

The recurrent “I” and “you” throughout the poem help to frame the poem very clearly in terms of a relationship that changes and yet does not change.

The poem opens with a mild-toned reminiscence that seems quite ordinary. Clarke presents the reader with the sorts of detail that could easily attach to any number of ordinary experiences: “The people and cars taking / Turn at the traffic lights.” (lines 4-6). The very ordinariness of the scene is, however, that which provides a perfect introduction to the extraordinary nature of what erupts into the “hot, white / Room” (lines 2-3) of the hospital. The birth of the child is presented in very strong terms. Sound and sense fuse to emphasise the physical strain of childbirth and the idea of two strong personalities at loggerheads:

I can remember you, our first
Fierce confrontation, the tight
Red rope of love which we both
Fought over.

(lines 6-9)

The alliterated f’s and t’s create both tension and a sense of clinical precision. The umbilicus is the locus of both attachment and challenge. Clarke’s choice of the word “rope” suggests both a tug-of-war but also the tug of love. The choice of the adjective “red” is not only visually accurate in its context but reinforces the biological blood link between mother and child. The individual voices of mother and child are brilliantly presented by Clarke in her image of the mother’s words colouring the white tiles of the hospital room, almost as a child might colour squares in a book, but with the clear sense that the language of the mother may well be colourful because of the pain she is experiencing. The words “wild” and ”tender” (line 14) emphasise the mixture of experiences as a mother gives birth. There is an extraordinary self-awareness on the part of the mother but this is at least matched by the awareness of the child’s otherness and individuality. This idea is reinforced through Clarke’s choice of language in lines 15-17. The “I” and “you” that characterises the presentation of the relationship up to this point modulates into “our”, “we” and “ourselves”. However, mother and child are united in their “struggle to become / Separate.” The word “separate” that begins line 16 is followed by a full stop, leaving the next sentence as a concerted statement of individuality. The neat choice of the plural reflexive pronoun that concludes the first part of the poem paves the way for Clarke to explore the paradoxical nature of the mother-daughter relationship that is characterised by mixture of affinity and conflict.

The beauty of this second section lies, though, in the reality that her daughter’s defiance is for the poet an affirmative manifestation of her very being and a reminder that as a baby she seemed to hold on defiantly to life. The mother never forgets her attachment to the child: “that old rope” is actually ageless; it is both real and metaphorical. All the nuances of feeling a mother has for her child are wonderfully clinched in the conclusion of this beautiful poem. The metaphor of “the heart’s pool” and the idea of the umbilicus being that which signals attachment, inescapable responsibility, and the reality that the story of a mother and daughter’s life is patterned by “love and conflict”. Part of what makes this poem so successful is the direct simplicity of its language that is rooted in everyday language, something that is admirably suited to the task of charting the extraordinary miracle of birth and the growth of families that occurs as routinely as the procession of traffic but is also cosmic in its significance as that very procession continues, oblivious to the event.