From Songs of Ourselves Volume 2, Part 2
1) ‘The Sea Eats the Land at Home’ by Kofi Awoonor
2) ‘London Snow’ by Robert Bridges
3) ‘Afternoon with Irish Cows’ by Billy Collins
4) ‘Watching for Dolphins’ by David Constantine
5) ‘The Poplar-Field’ by William Cowper
6) ‘You will Know When You Get There’ by Allen
Curnow
7) ‘The Caged Skylark’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins
8) ‘In Praise of Creation’ by Elizabeth Jennings
9) ‘Ode on Melancholy’ by John Keats
10) ‘Coming’ by Philip Larkin
11) ‘Stormcock in Elder’ by Ruth Pitter
12) ‘Cetacean’ by Peter Reading
13) ‘The Buck in the Snow’ by Edna St Vincent Millay
14) ‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’ by
Charlotte Smith
15) ‘The Kraken’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
‘The Sea Eats the Land at Home’
by Kofi Awoonor
‘The Sea Eats the Land at Home’ is a highly symbolic poem that uses an extended
metaphor to describe the coastal erosion of the city of Keta in Ghana, West Africa; built
by the Dutch in the 1780s, as a strategic trading post and port. The city was
devastated by severe sea erosion between the 1960s and 1980s. However, a political
reading might interpret the carnivorous sea as a metaphor for the violent effects of
colonialism on Africa’s primal innocence, beauty and grace. The poem’s form uses a
traditional African funeral dirge lamenting the loss of a peoples’ culture, a land gone
wrong, of desertion by indigenous gods, the disappearance of a nation’s men and the
compromise of its women. It is partly a response to another poem called ‘The Sea Eats
Our Lands’ by Kwesi Brew, which nostalgically describes a curse on the poet’s
ancestral home and the destruction of Africa’s once rich cultural treasures. In it, the
principal imagery of the “sea” symbolizes European colonialism, which, with its
characteristic force and raging power, swept away the sublimity of Keta, symbol
of Africa’s cultural values. The addition of ‘at Home’ in Awoonor’s title could be a
reference to the continued corruption by contemporary African leaders and contains a
more accusatory tone than the original.
The poem strikingly opens with ‘At home the sea is in town’, which foregrounds the
idea of ‘home’ and immediately disrupts the normal borders of sea and land.
Furthermore, and most obviously, the sea is instantly personified as ‘running’,
,‘collecting’ and ‘sending’ back the ‘firewood from the hearths’. Hearths are usually
associated with the heart of a home; they are the places that provide warmth, food and
sustenance for a family. Fire also symbolises the soul, but without the wood to keep it
burning, the soul, family and, by extension, the nation will die. As such, Awoonor
presents the sea as a stealthy thief. For example, ‘It came one day at the dead of
night’. Its presence continues to steal and destroy the city’s homes and source of food
and riches.
Moreover, by omission, the poet’s early focus on domestic objects also highlights the
absence of anyone, specifically men, to defend the feminised home and later explicitly
states ‘Her ancestors have neglected’. In addition, the first aural imagery heard in the
poem are the ‘wails,/And the mourning shouts of the women’. The poet laments the
futile women’s cries and calls for protection from the personified ‘angry sea’ and the
tone seems dejected, bereft of hope and accusatory, as if the gods have already
‘deserted’ the women villagers. The previous theft of ‘the fowls’ and drowning ‘goats…
struggling in the water’ may also imply the absence of the ability to make sacrifices to
appease the gods of the land.
The second half of the poem becomes more personalised and hence more tragic with
the introduction of two specific female characters: Aku and Adena. Aku’s traditional
gender role as a mother is emphasised as she stands in the hearth with ‘Her hands on
her breast’. The breast is similarly the seat the of the heart and Aku’s soul is ‘Weeping
mournfully’. The enjambment of this line and its very short description creates a sharp
and shocking effect. Next, the poet narrates ‘a cold Sunday morning’, ‘her two children
stand shivering from the cold’. Symbolically, the Sabbath is usually the Christian time
for worship and it appears deeply ironic that on this day, abandoned by the gods, the
future generation are left to starve and suffer. The ‘raging’ and criminal sea also takes
Adena’s ‘trinkets which/Were her dowry and her joy’. This suggests that the sea also
steals the treasures of the young girls in a final act that ends the future generations of
the indigenous culture, who will no longer be able to be marry and continue the family
line.
The poem draws to an end with further aural imagery. Awoonor uses onomatopoeia to
depict the ‘lap-lapping of the bark water at the shore’. This reminds the reader of the
theft of the highly symbolic firewood and further highlights the sense of loss, ruin and
destruction caused by the sea. Furthermore, ‘above the sobs and the deep and low
moans,/Was the eternal hum of the living sea.’ Here, the seemingly sublime and never-
ending power of the personified sea rises above and displaces the impersonalised
lamentations of the people to tragic effect. These sound effects create a hopeless and
almost hellish atmosphere. Finally, the poem ends with the refrain that has punctuated
the entire poem. However, the final line uses the addition of ‘Eats the whole land at
home’. The conclusion appears to be that the sea has permanently swallowed the
entire town so that nothing further survives.
In conclusion, Awoonor uses the personification of the carnivorous sea to deep tragic
effect. The destructive and criminal sea could stand for the sublime power of nature,
but the poem also points towards the recalling of precolonial era and into modern times
for this African homeland.
‘London Snow’
by Robert Bridges
‘London Snow’ (1890) depicts the sudden and miraculous event of an overnight
snowfall that transforms and defamiliarises the concrete powerhouse of the City of
, London into a simple yet sublime sight of natural ‘beauty’. The snow unexpectedness
surprises the slumbering inhabitants who upon waking, and for a fleeting moment, are
enchanted by the towns ‘veiling’ and ‘dazzling whiteness’, as if the city itself has
disappeared. The poem is full of allusions to religious epiphanies and contrasts the
weary ‘trains of sombre men’ and the routine of their daily ‘toil’ to the riotous school
boys. Yet, all of whom are momentarily connected and entranced by the spell of
nature’s ‘heavenly’ but transient gift of ‘crystal manna’. For this moment, time and
mundane routine has stopped and ‘no cares encumber’ neither young nor old. The
alternating rhyme scheme beautifully captures the poem’s majestic cadence and
lightness of touch.
The poem is presented as a single stanza of thirty-seven lines, which mirrors the
‘perpetually settling’ snow. Lines 1 to 9 present the first section and the initial
alliteration of ‘flakes falling’ and ‘loosely lying’ captures the ‘stealthily’ gentle and
secretive power of nature’s snow personified. The ‘city brown’ is transformed into a
‘white mossed-wonder’, where the former phrase’s inversion of word order invokes an
archaic nostalgia and the latter phrase’s alliteration and assonance conjures up a newly
born mystical setting over the personified and vulnerable ‘drowsy town’. The snow’s
spell continues to have an almost hypnotic effect where the sound imagery is
paradoxically ‘hushing…muffling, stifling…[and] silently sifting.’ The usual hustle of
‘busy morning cries’ in the streets of London are for a moment tranquil and peaceful
and the ‘incessantly’ repeated use of the present perfect progressive tense for a large
number of verbs (all ending in ‘ing’) suggests that the snow is unstoppable yet
somewhat soothing. The sibilance of the phrase ‘silently sifting’ also creates a sleepy,
sedative and soporific effect. Victorian London’s harsh faults and unnatural
‘differences’ and ‘angles’ are momentarily hidden ‘making unevenness even’ with a
liberating and almost democratic effect. Overall, in the first 9 lines, the personified
snow ‘lazily’ causes the snow to float ‘down and down’; heavy but paradoxically without
threat or fear in its ‘uncompacted lightness’. Furthermore, the sheer number of verbs
and adverbs in this sequences adds to the enchanting movement in the poem.
In lines 10 to 18, the persona narrates that when the snow reached a depth of ‘full
inches seven’ (note another use of archaic inversion), the sky cleared and ‘The clouds
blew off from a high and frosty heaven’, almost as if the magic spell had been cast and
was made to quickly disappear. At dawn the ‘unaccustomed brightness’ of the light
reflected by the snow made everyone wake earlier than usual and creates a sense of
heightened expectancy for the day. The repetition of how ‘The eye marvelled-
marvelled at the dazzling whiteness’ continues the sense of wonder created in the first
section, yet the earlier implication of its ‘strange unheavenly glare’ suggests that the
snow is not the God-send that it first appears; after all, it will soon disappear.
Nonetheless, the poem continues with a beautiful image of how the ‘ear hearkened to
the stillness of the solemn air’. The use of metonymy (‘ear’ for ‘people’), the archaic
use of ‘hearkened’ and the calming effect of the sibilance continues the transcendent if
wistful atmosphere of peaceful serenity.
However, the mellowness is slightly broken by the light-hearted pranks of schoolboys
‘snowballing’, ‘plunging up to the knees’ or ‘riot[ing] in a drift’. The Biblical allusion to
‘crystal manna’ playfully references the miraculous white food substance that appeared
every morning in the story of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness after leaving
Egypt with Moses and had to be gathered and eaten before the sun melted it.
Furthermore, when the boys repeatedly cry ‘O look at the trees!... ‘O look at the trees!’,
some suggest this was a references to the lines ‘Look at the stars!’ in ‘The Starlight
Night’ by a poet called Gerard Manley Hopkins. The connection is that both poems are
about people failing to notice things, and about the modern world’s indifference to
1) ‘The Sea Eats the Land at Home’ by Kofi Awoonor
2) ‘London Snow’ by Robert Bridges
3) ‘Afternoon with Irish Cows’ by Billy Collins
4) ‘Watching for Dolphins’ by David Constantine
5) ‘The Poplar-Field’ by William Cowper
6) ‘You will Know When You Get There’ by Allen
Curnow
7) ‘The Caged Skylark’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins
8) ‘In Praise of Creation’ by Elizabeth Jennings
9) ‘Ode on Melancholy’ by John Keats
10) ‘Coming’ by Philip Larkin
11) ‘Stormcock in Elder’ by Ruth Pitter
12) ‘Cetacean’ by Peter Reading
13) ‘The Buck in the Snow’ by Edna St Vincent Millay
14) ‘Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening’ by
Charlotte Smith
15) ‘The Kraken’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
‘The Sea Eats the Land at Home’
by Kofi Awoonor
‘The Sea Eats the Land at Home’ is a highly symbolic poem that uses an extended
metaphor to describe the coastal erosion of the city of Keta in Ghana, West Africa; built
by the Dutch in the 1780s, as a strategic trading post and port. The city was
devastated by severe sea erosion between the 1960s and 1980s. However, a political
reading might interpret the carnivorous sea as a metaphor for the violent effects of
colonialism on Africa’s primal innocence, beauty and grace. The poem’s form uses a
traditional African funeral dirge lamenting the loss of a peoples’ culture, a land gone
wrong, of desertion by indigenous gods, the disappearance of a nation’s men and the
compromise of its women. It is partly a response to another poem called ‘The Sea Eats
Our Lands’ by Kwesi Brew, which nostalgically describes a curse on the poet’s
ancestral home and the destruction of Africa’s once rich cultural treasures. In it, the
principal imagery of the “sea” symbolizes European colonialism, which, with its
characteristic force and raging power, swept away the sublimity of Keta, symbol
of Africa’s cultural values. The addition of ‘at Home’ in Awoonor’s title could be a
reference to the continued corruption by contemporary African leaders and contains a
more accusatory tone than the original.
The poem strikingly opens with ‘At home the sea is in town’, which foregrounds the
idea of ‘home’ and immediately disrupts the normal borders of sea and land.
Furthermore, and most obviously, the sea is instantly personified as ‘running’,
,‘collecting’ and ‘sending’ back the ‘firewood from the hearths’. Hearths are usually
associated with the heart of a home; they are the places that provide warmth, food and
sustenance for a family. Fire also symbolises the soul, but without the wood to keep it
burning, the soul, family and, by extension, the nation will die. As such, Awoonor
presents the sea as a stealthy thief. For example, ‘It came one day at the dead of
night’. Its presence continues to steal and destroy the city’s homes and source of food
and riches.
Moreover, by omission, the poet’s early focus on domestic objects also highlights the
absence of anyone, specifically men, to defend the feminised home and later explicitly
states ‘Her ancestors have neglected’. In addition, the first aural imagery heard in the
poem are the ‘wails,/And the mourning shouts of the women’. The poet laments the
futile women’s cries and calls for protection from the personified ‘angry sea’ and the
tone seems dejected, bereft of hope and accusatory, as if the gods have already
‘deserted’ the women villagers. The previous theft of ‘the fowls’ and drowning ‘goats…
struggling in the water’ may also imply the absence of the ability to make sacrifices to
appease the gods of the land.
The second half of the poem becomes more personalised and hence more tragic with
the introduction of two specific female characters: Aku and Adena. Aku’s traditional
gender role as a mother is emphasised as she stands in the hearth with ‘Her hands on
her breast’. The breast is similarly the seat the of the heart and Aku’s soul is ‘Weeping
mournfully’. The enjambment of this line and its very short description creates a sharp
and shocking effect. Next, the poet narrates ‘a cold Sunday morning’, ‘her two children
stand shivering from the cold’. Symbolically, the Sabbath is usually the Christian time
for worship and it appears deeply ironic that on this day, abandoned by the gods, the
future generation are left to starve and suffer. The ‘raging’ and criminal sea also takes
Adena’s ‘trinkets which/Were her dowry and her joy’. This suggests that the sea also
steals the treasures of the young girls in a final act that ends the future generations of
the indigenous culture, who will no longer be able to be marry and continue the family
line.
The poem draws to an end with further aural imagery. Awoonor uses onomatopoeia to
depict the ‘lap-lapping of the bark water at the shore’. This reminds the reader of the
theft of the highly symbolic firewood and further highlights the sense of loss, ruin and
destruction caused by the sea. Furthermore, ‘above the sobs and the deep and low
moans,/Was the eternal hum of the living sea.’ Here, the seemingly sublime and never-
ending power of the personified sea rises above and displaces the impersonalised
lamentations of the people to tragic effect. These sound effects create a hopeless and
almost hellish atmosphere. Finally, the poem ends with the refrain that has punctuated
the entire poem. However, the final line uses the addition of ‘Eats the whole land at
home’. The conclusion appears to be that the sea has permanently swallowed the
entire town so that nothing further survives.
In conclusion, Awoonor uses the personification of the carnivorous sea to deep tragic
effect. The destructive and criminal sea could stand for the sublime power of nature,
but the poem also points towards the recalling of precolonial era and into modern times
for this African homeland.
‘London Snow’
by Robert Bridges
‘London Snow’ (1890) depicts the sudden and miraculous event of an overnight
snowfall that transforms and defamiliarises the concrete powerhouse of the City of
, London into a simple yet sublime sight of natural ‘beauty’. The snow unexpectedness
surprises the slumbering inhabitants who upon waking, and for a fleeting moment, are
enchanted by the towns ‘veiling’ and ‘dazzling whiteness’, as if the city itself has
disappeared. The poem is full of allusions to religious epiphanies and contrasts the
weary ‘trains of sombre men’ and the routine of their daily ‘toil’ to the riotous school
boys. Yet, all of whom are momentarily connected and entranced by the spell of
nature’s ‘heavenly’ but transient gift of ‘crystal manna’. For this moment, time and
mundane routine has stopped and ‘no cares encumber’ neither young nor old. The
alternating rhyme scheme beautifully captures the poem’s majestic cadence and
lightness of touch.
The poem is presented as a single stanza of thirty-seven lines, which mirrors the
‘perpetually settling’ snow. Lines 1 to 9 present the first section and the initial
alliteration of ‘flakes falling’ and ‘loosely lying’ captures the ‘stealthily’ gentle and
secretive power of nature’s snow personified. The ‘city brown’ is transformed into a
‘white mossed-wonder’, where the former phrase’s inversion of word order invokes an
archaic nostalgia and the latter phrase’s alliteration and assonance conjures up a newly
born mystical setting over the personified and vulnerable ‘drowsy town’. The snow’s
spell continues to have an almost hypnotic effect where the sound imagery is
paradoxically ‘hushing…muffling, stifling…[and] silently sifting.’ The usual hustle of
‘busy morning cries’ in the streets of London are for a moment tranquil and peaceful
and the ‘incessantly’ repeated use of the present perfect progressive tense for a large
number of verbs (all ending in ‘ing’) suggests that the snow is unstoppable yet
somewhat soothing. The sibilance of the phrase ‘silently sifting’ also creates a sleepy,
sedative and soporific effect. Victorian London’s harsh faults and unnatural
‘differences’ and ‘angles’ are momentarily hidden ‘making unevenness even’ with a
liberating and almost democratic effect. Overall, in the first 9 lines, the personified
snow ‘lazily’ causes the snow to float ‘down and down’; heavy but paradoxically without
threat or fear in its ‘uncompacted lightness’. Furthermore, the sheer number of verbs
and adverbs in this sequences adds to the enchanting movement in the poem.
In lines 10 to 18, the persona narrates that when the snow reached a depth of ‘full
inches seven’ (note another use of archaic inversion), the sky cleared and ‘The clouds
blew off from a high and frosty heaven’, almost as if the magic spell had been cast and
was made to quickly disappear. At dawn the ‘unaccustomed brightness’ of the light
reflected by the snow made everyone wake earlier than usual and creates a sense of
heightened expectancy for the day. The repetition of how ‘The eye marvelled-
marvelled at the dazzling whiteness’ continues the sense of wonder created in the first
section, yet the earlier implication of its ‘strange unheavenly glare’ suggests that the
snow is not the God-send that it first appears; after all, it will soon disappear.
Nonetheless, the poem continues with a beautiful image of how the ‘ear hearkened to
the stillness of the solemn air’. The use of metonymy (‘ear’ for ‘people’), the archaic
use of ‘hearkened’ and the calming effect of the sibilance continues the transcendent if
wistful atmosphere of peaceful serenity.
However, the mellowness is slightly broken by the light-hearted pranks of schoolboys
‘snowballing’, ‘plunging up to the knees’ or ‘riot[ing] in a drift’. The Biblical allusion to
‘crystal manna’ playfully references the miraculous white food substance that appeared
every morning in the story of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness after leaving
Egypt with Moses and had to be gathered and eaten before the sun melted it.
Furthermore, when the boys repeatedly cry ‘O look at the trees!... ‘O look at the trees!’,
some suggest this was a references to the lines ‘Look at the stars!’ in ‘The Starlight
Night’ by a poet called Gerard Manley Hopkins. The connection is that both poems are
about people failing to notice things, and about the modern world’s indifference to
