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What is the poem?
The poem is Vernon Scannell documentation of a Nettles injury his son was inflicted with. At the start the Nettles are personified as a ''regiment of spite'' a very militaristic use of language, chosen as Scannell was soldier. The use of this is to make the Nettles seem like enemy soldiers harming a child, the effect to the reader is sympathy for both Scannell as it seems like he is suffering from PTSD and also for his son due to his injury. This is later supported with ''fierce parade'' and also ''funeral pyre'' again this shows Scannell's militaristic background and again the reader can perceive the stress he is under after he returned from war. The connotations of ''pyre'' are Fire, Death and Pain, from these connotations we can perceive the poet's pain from the war and also his intentions to show us that he is overprotective of his son, because of his military background, shown through ''pyre''.
My son aged three fell in the nettle bed.
'Bed' seemed a curious name for those green spears,
That regiment of spite behind the shed:
It was no place for rest. With sobs and tears
The boy came seeking comfort and I saw
White blisters beaded on his tender skin.
We soothed him till his pain was not so raw.
At last he offered us a watery grin,
And then I took my billhook, honed the blade
And went outside and slashed in fury with it
Till not a nettle in that fierce parade
Stood upright any more. And then I lit
A funeral pyre to burn the fallen dead,
But in two weeks the busy sun and rain
Had called up tall recruits behind the shed:
My son would often feel sharp wounds again.
After the first phase,
after passionate nights and intimate days,
only then would he let me trace
the frozen river which ran through his face,
only then would he let me explore
the blown hinge of his lower jaw
and handle and hold
the damaged, porcelain collar bone,
and mind and attend
the fractured rudder of shoulder-blade,
and finger and thumb
the parachute silk of his punctured lung.
Only then could I bind the struts
and climb the rungs of his broken ribs,
and feel the hurt
of his grazed heart.
Skirting along,
only then could I picture the scan,
the foetus of metal beneath his chest
where the bullet had come to rest.
Then I widened the search,
traced the scarring back to its source
to a sweating, unexploded mine
buried deep in his mind, around which
every nerve in his body had tightened and closed.
Then, and only then, did I come close.
The speaker refers to parts of the husband's body metaphorically, comparing them to inanimate objects rather than to living things. His jaw is a "blown hinge" this is a metaphor for a broken door, like a broken door into his mind, the connotations of this are that he is not open to her anymore, and that she cannot read him like she used to, shown through ''blown hinge''. The reader can perceive that after the war there has been some irreversible done to the husband after the war. Another metaphor is ''porecelain collar-bone'' a metaphor that the man is cold, fragile and hard to approach, so Simon Armitage's purpose for this is that the war has inflicted so much damage that he has gone from bone to porcelain. So the reader can perceive that he has been damaged to the point where he cant recognize it, only his wife.
Vernon Scannell's son is presented through Emotive Language, used to represent the fathers compassion for his son, for example ''tender'' is used, the connotations of this are Soft, Sensitive and sometimes Weak, this is compassion as we can see the father is saying his son is soft and sensitive, by this he means that his son is young and needs protection from the world, and in this case Nettles. The writer's ideas are that a child is something a parental figure must take care of, and in this case the father hasn't protected his son, and now he is beating himself up over it, the reader can perceive that the father is protective, but maybe a bit overprotective as his son has just had a nettle sting, this has the impact on the reader that Vernon Scannell is a good father and the nettle sting is not his fault.