Seamstress at St Leon

Notes about Seamstress at St Leon – (Poem is not on website)
(from ‘A Journal from France’)

A brief note appears below, to set the poem in context for A-level Literature students. I will add a Q & A section if suitable questions arise.

This is the second of three poems here included taken from a journal from France. It’s an attempt to capture the atmosphere of an afternoon using the details of what we saw, heard and sensed. We stopped to look at the river, and noticed a house where a seamstress lived. She was absent, but the signs of her recent presence and of her needlework were everywhere: her tea, her cloth, silks, sewing machines. Even her garden looked as though she had embroidered it. Flowers and greenery covered her little house. The Singers are her old, treadle sewing machines.