For A Child Born Dead Analysis

A further poem, “For a Child Born Dead,” also demonstrates the rich simplicity of Jennings’ best work. As she puts: “What ceremony can we fit/ You into now” If you had come/ Out of a warm and noisy room. To this, there’d be an opposite/ For us to know you by. We could/ Imagine you in lively mood.” (47) Once again a complete pattern of stanza and rhyme is achieved .The tone is completely controlled. Although it is less lyrical the poem’s control of grief makes the quiet tone more moving. The poem is spare with only two touches of metaphor in line three and in the verb “stride” with its adverb “Ambitiously” of the second stanza as though to lay bear her grief. In her good poems the pressure of emotions holds the weight of her telling, and metrical

The objectivity increases by use of the old woman’s thought as a dialogue with her self. The reader moves from third person viewing to first person for part of the first stanza and for the next stanza. The first two stanzas follow one slow rise from the quiet reflections of the opening sentence weighing causes, reckoning the reader watching the woman watch that beautifully turned image of “cool/ Walls of the house moving towards the sun”. The white space allows the growth of thought from flowers to children, the epiphany of an arrangement in a vase into a review of life. In the second stanza “flicker” quickens the abstract “memory,” and the almost aphoristic quality of the last clause performs the magic of making a place out of a leaving. “Yet,” as fulcrum word at the centre of the poem, begins the sharp upward turn of intensity, a packed accounting on the woman’s behalf by the poet, an inrush of the positive after the negative assertions earlier, together with a crush of alliteration which makes this stanza which make up the poem. The rise in temperature is nicely held by the juxtaposition of abstract “time” and the concrete flowers and old silver, the two verbs “warns” and “touching” making “time” quite personable, “residue “also catching the attention by a concrete modifying of the abstract “lives.” “Glance” and “printed” the noun gathering in all the hints of inheritance, and the verb actively placing the glance by the small stamp of its own character, charm by the promotion from use on material to use on