Cold Knap Lake

COLD KNAP LAKE

The theme of death that informs ‘A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998’, ‘The Field-Mouse’, ‘October’ and ‘On the Train’ is dealt with in this poem but in it we see the thwarting of it and the reassertion of life. A young girl, thought to be drowned, is revived by the poet’s mother who gives her what we often call ‘the kiss of life’.

The opening of the poem presents the facts as they were. Any accident happening to a person is often attended by many. Any arrival of ambulance to someone in a crowded high street is enough to convince us of the accuracy of Clarke’s description. The reader is led to believe that the child is dead as she is describe in line two as “drowned”. This has the simultaneous effect of conveying to the reader the crowd’s belief that the child was dead. The fact that she was “Blue-lipped” and wearing weeds which are described as “water’s long green silk” presents her Ophelia-like. The final line in the stanza hints, though, that there might be hope we are told that “she lay for dead” (line 4).

The “heroine” described in the second stanza is “kneeling on the earth” which suggests a reverence for life. The poet’s mother’s head is “bowed” as she gives “a stranger’s child her breath” (line 8). She gives the gift of life to the child anew, almost a second mother – as the child’s mother first gave birth to the imperilled child. The crowd introduced in the first stanza is referred to again “silent” as they waited with their own bated breath and “drawn by the dread of it”. The word drawn means ‘attracted’ in the instinctive sense that we are all drawn to watch a dramatic happening of this nature but it also has the connotation of being emotionally drained. Certainly, the event is a taxing one for all concerned but mostly for the child and the poet’s mother.

The innocence and fragility of the child is conveyed in the word “bleating” to describe her cries after she has “breathed”. Her returned colour, “rosy” (line 12) contrasts to the deathly blue of stanza one.

The wonderful act of the poet’s mother is clearly a source of great joy but this is tempered by her father’s experience of the little girl’s parents’ (or the people who are supposed to look after her) reaction. She is “thrashed for almost drowning” (line 14). This seems an extraordinary reaction even if one can understand the parents’ shock and desire to impress upon the child that she should not have fallen into the lake. The reader wonders why the child was not being looked after by her parents in the first place. The fact that the child was taken “home to a poor house” suggests straitened circumstances. The last thing the poor girl needed was a “thrashing”. She needed love and attention but parents can sometimes react like this even if they are very relieved.

The short question opening stanza four, “Was I there?” presents the poet almost doubting memory or at least the memory of the real becomes fused with details of the imagined. To a child even a small lake can seem to have enormous depth and mystery. The “satiny mud” in line 18 recalls the “long green silk” of line 3 and the poet as child wondered if the swans had dragged anything into the lake. The “troubled surface” of the lake could well stand as a metaphor for the disturbed state of the child’s mind who witnessed the event and saw the whole scene as somehow enchanted or nightmarish like a Grimm’s fairy tale.  Swans are serene creatures but can be very violent, easily stirring up “mud blooms” and capable of breaking a man’s arm with their wings. The closing couplet that aligns, through rhyme, “water” and “daughter” unified the real and the imagined. To the child, all dark, sinister and “lost things” are lurking beneath the surface. This rather dark conclusion is in keeping with the remainder of the poem, notwithstanding the joyous revival of the child who was thought to be drowned. We all have a subconscious “lake” beneath the surface of which our worst fears lurk. This is a convincing insight into the ways in which a child’s imagination can work, as well as being a memorable chronicling of a traumatic event