Gillian Clarke †The Field Mouse Essay

In the prime(prenominal) verse, the convert cutting is depicted in a substantiating light the hay is cut Down at the end of the meadow, / far from the radios fantastic news. The distance from the terrible news leads us to expect a peaceful description of a harmless farming activity exempt from the violence happening in the outside world. The opening blood line of the rime sets up this expectation Summer, and the long grass is a sn ar drum. There are some considers inserted into the scene here that add a subtle feeling of discomfort or unease, the starting line of which is the sound of the jets in line 2.It is a sound one hears particularly if you live in Wales, the Lake order or Norfolk and Suffolk. The next is, of course, the terrible news of the radio, which, although we are removed from it, is still mentioned and therefore forms part of an untoward backdrop, along with the jets, to the hay cutting. The image of the relentless hay cutting is in like manner unsettling A ll afternoon / its shiver breaks before the tractor blade. The blade of the tractor will be shown to be the instrument of death later on in the poem.Lastly we hear about the populate who is spreading lime over his fields. Here the neighbour is unintentionally drifting our land / with a chance gift of sweetness. The lime he spreads over his fields inadvertently drifts to adjacent land and so the poets land also benefits. Lime reduces the acidity of the soil, hence the use of the phrase gift of sweetness. The poem focus ones now on the unforeseen misemploy to tone that results in the hay cutting. We are made to experience the activity of hay cutting from other perspective as the first line talks of the killed flowers.The damage do is extended to include the creatures of the field. Our first image of the subject in the poems title, the field pinch, is one that evokes pity. Clarke uses synecdoche and metaphor to create the image of the dying mouse. The childs hands have beco me a nest of quivering mouse as substitute for the nest destroyed by the blade. The mouse is described in toll of its eyes its black eyes 2 sparks burning. The burning is here suggestive of fear, fuss in the neck and also of life the two sparks as points of animation, the seat of the life spark.This combined image of pain and life continues in lines 14 and 15 as the mouse curls in agony as big as itself / and the star goes out in its eye. A strong sense of empathy is evoked in us as the poet reveals a compassion many of us feel when confronted with an tool in mortal pain We know it will die and ought to finish it off. The farthermost lines of the second verse widen our focus to the entire field, which is hurt and bleeding after the relentless blade.It is the children who witness the damage and destruction caused by the hay cutting the children kneel in long grass, / staring at what we have crushed. Line 16 connects this specific localised agricultural incident to the war in E urope, the subject of the terrible news on the radio in the first verse. Summer in Europe, the fields hurt links the two events, which the poet will connect in greater detail in the last verse. The opening line of the last verse evokes the carnage that one expects on a battlefield Before the days done the field lies bleeding.This serves to emphasise the connection between the war that has shimmered as a backdrop to the poem so far and the inherent destruction of hay cutting. The dusk garden becomes a refugee camp live by the saved, voles, / frogs, a nest of mice. These different creatures are unified by their shared trauma, as are human beings of different nationalities and cultures who are victims of war. This association is underlined by what follows in lines 21-22 The wrong that woke / from a rumour of pain wont heal.The poet now consciously connects all she has seen from the hay cutting with the war in Europe. She cant face the newspapers and yet in her dreams she faces childr en who dance in grass just as the helpless creatures of the field. She sees their bones brittle as mouse-ribs, a realisation of the frailty and vulnerability of human and animal to destructive forces of people. The hum of the jets described in the first verse now becomes a stammering with gunfire.The rattling last image in the poem refers more explicitly to the civil conflict of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, where the neighbour has become a stranger. She realises how easily her neighbour could become hostile my neighbour turned / stranger, wounding my land with stones. The land referred to here has a wider significance in that it can be read to mean both the ground and any nation. The final lines suggest the territorial nature of the Bosnian war. Making land unfit for farming by spreading stones around (described in the Old Testament) is also a throwback to ancient times.