Inheritance Flashcards
What is the poem about?
About what he has gained from his parents. Stanza’s list things he has picked up: some biological, some things he has learned from his upbringing.
Stanza 1: “like a stick in the spokes of my speech”
- Sibilance - forces reader to slow down which illustrates how carefully a person who stammers must speak to ensure they don’t stumble.
- Simile = imagery of cyclist struggling because of external interference “stick in the spokes”. Image may reflect poet’s childhood when his father taught him to cycle, or his father used bicycle instead of car, highlighting slow pace of his life.
Stanza 1: “a tired blink”
Placing this on its own line exaggerates the impression of slowness because there is a pause before and after it, as we stop to imagine the gesture.
Stanza 1: “a need to have my bones/near the hill’s bare stone.”
All links to his father are outside.
- “the hill” - refers to Skirrid Hill.
- Rhymes “bones” with “stones” and they are scraped back to their solid essence: the solid bones (not skin or flesh or personality etc) link to the solid stones (not grass, mud, or beautiful shape etc).
- He and his father like order and solidarity of the earth, shown in unchanging maps. They are slow, careful men who feel connected to their home landscape.
Stanza 1: “and the chaos of bad weather.”
- Throws in an incongruous twist, contrasting to last lines: they also enjoy ‘the chaos of bad weather’. This may simply refer to stormy weather, but it could also imply that they have tempers, and relish the drama of life.
Stanza 2: “a sensitivity to the pain in the pleasure”
This stanza switches to thoughts of his mother. He, like her, is ‘sensitive to the pain in the pleasure’.
- This bittersweet sensation is revealed by the plosive alliteration and it expresses the poet’s ability to explore his feelings deeply to find a full spectrum of emotion in every event.
Stanza 2: “eye’s blue ore”
- The clarity of vision found in this stanza is emphasised by his mother’s eyes, which he has inherited.
- The metaphor linking her eyes to ore connects her to the landscape, and possibility specifically to the blue ore found in Welsh copper mines.
Stanza 2: “quiet moments beside a wet horse”
The other two images he associates with his mother are set in the farmyard, or workshop.
- She is more internal than his father, but still not based inside the house as one might expect.
- She and the poet enjoy ‘quiet moments beside a wet horse’. This evokes the warm steamy smell of a horse who has been working out in the rain and the intimate feeling of being quiet inside a dry stable as the rain batter on the roof outside. Like her husband, the mother enjoys a connection with nature, but she prefers the living horse to the cold dead rock of the hillside.
Stanza 2: “A jointer’s lathe/ turning fact into fable”
- Image of the joiner’s lathe makes you think of a block of wood on a lathe.
- To start with, it’s just a log (untainted “fact” of the natural world). But soon, it will take on new form, maybe a bowl or chair leg (“fable” or fiction created by skill and craft of the joiner).
- The value of traditional crafts is a major theme in the book as he watches the work of a farrier, a fishmonger, a sheep farmer and others with a sense of awe.
Stanza 3: “desire for what they forged/in their shared lives;/ testing it under the years’ hard hammer,”
Both parents linked to landscape through rock and ore and the industrial semantic field continues in the final stanza.
Stanza 3: “red hot at its core” and “cooled at its sides”
- Their relationship, like iron to a furnace, remains “red hot at its core”, suggesting a strong and deep love.
- But, it has “cooled at its sides” as they have grown older, implying there is less passion than when they were young. Sheers sees this enduring love and ‘desires’ the same for himself.
