Simon Armitage, 'Song'

Song

The bridle-path, the river bank,
and where they crossed I took a length
of hazel bark, and carved a boat
no bigger than a fish, a trout,
and set it down and saw it float,
then sink. And where it sank
an inch of silver flesh declared itself
against the sun. Then it was gone.

And further south, beyond the bridge,
I took a nest of cotton grass
and flint to make a fire. Then I watched
a thread of smoke unhook a pair
of seed propellers from a sycamore
which turned together and became
a dragonfly that drew the smoke
downstream. But the fire would not light.

Then at night, the house at the mouth
of the river. Inside, a fish,
a trout, the ounces of its soft
smoked meat prepared and on a plate.
I sat down there and ate. It is
the way of things, the taking shape
of things, beginning with their names;
secrets told in acts of sunlight,
promises kept by gifts of rain.


This poem, taken from 'Kid' (first published 1992) defies easy categorisation as a Simon Armitage poem. Its concentration upon and preoccupation with natural imagery is counter to the voice typically associated with Armitage - gone are the deliberately outmoded popular references and comic nouns - and the narrator takes a more reflective, and less imposing role within the three stanzas. Its most Armitage-esque quality is the emphasis upon childhood pursuits and childishness as a mechanism for interpreting the world around us; but even this is a toned-down version of the dry effervescence readers have come to expect.

It's a melancholy verse that is bridged by references to failure and absence. The carved wooden boat sinks, the fire will not light, the trout, 'an inch of silver flesh' that previously 'declared itself/ against the sun' becomes dead and consumed. Armitage's three stanzas present not only the cyclical realities of the natural world but more, a disharmonious push/pull between man and nature. The poem's narrator does not embody the role of Romantic poet, at one with his environment and open to receive the glories of elusive inspiration - instead, he encounters an inability to recreate the wonders he perceives in nature evidenced by a division between he and all that he observes. His hazel bark boat sinks where the trout can swim; his cotton grass and flint fire will not ignite, and his smoky failure merely draws the readers attention towards the sycamore seeds' successful beauty in flight. That the seeds 'turn together' and 'become a dragonfly' demonstrate the transformative power of the natural world to integrate and evolve, dwarfing the significance of the poet and making 'the house at the mouth of the river' feel small and rigid. The house is too small, the victory of the smoked fish is unprized and uncomfortable, because both things are bereft of larger, more divine importance; inconsequential compared to the overarching and unified natural schema surrounding them.

This disrupts the conventional relationship between poet and nature, where poet is held as the esteemed conduit through which inspiration is channelled. In 'Song', Armitage does not so much celebrate man's kinship with nature, as demonstrate an ability to temper and withhold nature, to overcome it, to shut it out with bricks and glass, to kill it, and trap it, to eat it. The closing stanza is unsatisfying and cloying, one in which the previous delicate descriptions of fleeting natural moments are replaced with examples of sturdier, more domestic language: 'I sat down and ate'. The plate off which the fish is eaten is made to seem preposterous - a formal and irrelevant detail - but Armitage deliberate calls our attention to it, placing it at the end of the line, then making it reverberate through the subsequent 'ate' and 'shape'. Dominance over nature is thereby made to feel petty and ugly, far removed from the elegant and mysterious evolutionary order of things: 'secrets told in acts of sunlight,/promises kept by acts of rain'. It's in this final clause that Armitage finally confers his trademark sense of childhood kinship with experiences of the everyday: he nudges his reader towards wanting to step outside, makes them feel trapped by the walls around them, encourages them to see gravity and significance and 'true' knowledge not in the limited achievements of man, but in the mystifying and unrivalled energies of nature.