Notes on Marged
\nTo read poem click the link at the bottom<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Marged \u2013 Welsh for Margaret \u2013 killed herself in 1930, in the house where I now live. She died as a result of poverty. In ‘Letter from a Far Country’ I imagine that tragic day,<\/p>\n
‘Middle\u2014aged, poor, isolated,
\nshe could not recover
\nfrom mourning an old parent’s death.
\nInfluenza brought an hour
\ntoo black, too narrow to escape.’
\nIn the same long poem I describe the little house as I found it, and bought it, 40 years after her death, a neglected ruin.<\/p>\n‘In that innocent smallholding
\nwhere the swallows live and field mice
\nwinter and the sheep barge in
\nunder the browbone, the windows
\nare blind, are doors for owls,
\nbolt\u2014holes for dreams. The thoughts have flown.
\nThe last death was a suicide.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n‘Marged’ is a sonnet. It has 14 lines, each with 5 strong beats, and a rhyme scheme that goes like this:<\/p>\n
a,b,a,b\/c,d,d,c\/e,f,e,f\/ g,g.<\/p>\n
The form came naturally, following the tune of the first two lines. I used the pattern of the sonnet to tell a simple story, enjoying the contrast between form and content. The rhyme too seemed to fall into place.<\/p>\n
‘Parlwr’ is Welsh \u2013 Marged’s language \u2013 the word for one of two main rooms in her simple, traditional longhouse. A longhouse is a two roomed croft, with sleeping space in the roof, a barn, cowshed and dairy all under one roof.<\/p>\n
In 1984, I moved from Cardiff to the countryside, to live alone, by choice, for one winter in Blaen Cwrt. The cottage was romantically primitive, with oil lamps, a wood-burning stove and spring water. It was far from romantic for Marged half a century earlier.<\/p>\n
The poem is prompted by my guilt about Marged’s life and death, my gratitude for our life today in her house, my sympathy for her, as a woman, the things we had in common, the differences between us, between women’s lives then and now. These differences lie in the poem’s language: contrast the pleasures of<\/p>\n
‘Lighting the lamps, November afternoons,
\na reading book, whisky gold in my glass.’
\nwith Marged’s isolation and poverty,<\/p>\n‘the old dark parlwr where she died
\nalone in winter, ill and penniless’<\/p><\/blockquote>\nRead the Poem<\/a><\/p>\n
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Notes on Marged To read poem click the link at the bottom 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. Marged \u2013 Welsh for Margaret \u2013 killed herself in 1930, in the house where I now… Continue reading Notes: Marged<\/span>