Hello everybody and welcome to this video where I'm going to analyse the Carol Rumens
poem ‘The Emigree’.
As always, let's start by looking at the poet. Carol Rumens was born in 1944 in London. She's
a poet, lecturer, and translator; has lived in Belfast and Wales and travelled widely
in Russia and Eastern Europe.
When you're reading this poem for the first time, you could be mistaken for thinking that
it was written by somebody who wasn't English. But, actually, that's the case with a lot
of the poetry of Carol Rumens. She often writes about foreign customs, cultures, and languages.
And we see that, in this poem.
Her poetry as a whole is filled with arresting imagery and symbolism. And we certainly see
that in ‘The Emigree’. And the critic Gerard Woodward described her as syntactically
complex. And that's another thing we see in this poem – very long sentences. The syntax
very, very complex.
So, this poem comes from the 1993 collection ‘Thinking of Skins: New & Selected Poems’.
This is a book filled with poems that are about political consciousness. And of course,
again, we see that in ‘The Emigree’.
So let's whiz through the poem. I'll give you my line-by-line translation just to make
it easy to understand. Some of this poem is ambiguous. And I think, probably, the power
and conflict cluster as a whole is filled with lots of ambiguity. There are lines that
you read and you think, “What does that mean?”
Now, the good thing about this is, we don't actually have to worry too much about what
the lines mean all of the time because it's not like we're just writing about a literal
translation in the poem. We're analysing the poet's use of language, structure, and form.
We don't just care what's the story of the poem. But, pretty much, this is what's going
on. There once was a country… I left it as a
child but my memory of it is sunlight-clear
for it seems I never saw it in that November which, I am told, comes to the mildest city.
The worst news I receive of it cannot break my original view, the bright, filled paperweight.
It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants, but I am branded by an impression of sunlight.
So, in this stanza, what's really being said is that there once was a country. I left it
when I was a child, but I still remember it really well. I never saw it in difficult times
– difficult times which every place experiences – and even the worst things I hear about
it now don't stop me thinking positively about it. There may be a war there. It might have
been invaded by evil people, but I cannot think of it as anything but positive.
Stanza two moves on. The white streets of that city, the graceful
slopes glow even clearer as time rolls its tanks
and the frontiers rise between us, close like waves.
That child's vocabulary I carried here like a hollow doll, opens and spills of grammar.
Soon I shall have every coloured molecule of it.
It may by now be a lie, banned by the state but I can't get it off my tongue. It tastes
of sunlight. So what's this saying? Well, the white streets
of that city, the slopes, they glow even brighter as time goes by and the divisions rise between
this place, where I currently am at, and that place. The childish vocabulary – the words
I learnt as a child – I've brought with me, and they come out at times. And that language
is banned there now, but I can't stop speaking it. It's an amazing place.
This final stanza really is where there's a lot of ambiguity. I have some ideas. You
put your own in the comment section if you have some other ideas.
I have no passport, there's no way back at all
but my city comes to me in its own white plane. It lies down in front of me, docile as paper;
I comb its hair and love it shining eyes. My city takes me dancing through the city
of walls. They accuse me of absence, they circle me.
They accuse me of being dark in their free city.
My city hides behind me. They mutter death, and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight.
So, again, like so many of the poems, it gets pretty ambiguous at the end. But you know
what? What we do know is that the speaker is saying, ‘I don't have a passport. I can't
go back. But my memories stay with me.’
Now, the ‘white plane’, I think that might be a newspaper. But it could be just the memories.
So I'm going to say – ‘I look at it in the paper. I dance through the city in my
mind. They – and we don't know who the ‘they’ is for sure – accuse me for not being there.
They persecute me. They want to kill me, but I still feel positively about the place.’
Now, one of the things we know about this poem is that neither the city nor the country
is ever named. And this lack of specific detail seems important. It seems intentional. It's
as if the poet wants her poem to be relevant to as many people who've left their homelands
as possible.
We know that, from the title, Emigree is a woman forced to leave her native country,
often for political reasons. So we know the topic of the poem, and the lack of specificity
means that it applies to everybody. Which we see in a number of poems; we see that in
‘Exposure’, don't we, as another example of a poem which refuses to be specific so
that, in its generality, it applies to many.
So what do we think of this poem as a power and conflict poem? I think it's one of the
trickiest poems. And there are a few different things you can think about, but I think the
best thing, in terms of power and conflict, is to think about the power of place. Despite
leaving a place which is dangerous, the speaker passionately loves it. So, it can be seen
as a poem about the power of place.
There are other things going on. The poem explores conflicting emotions between place
and people in a war zone. She loves the place, but she had to leave it because of the danger
of tyrants. And there are other interpretations, but I'm choosing this one – the power of
place – because there's a lot of contrast and juxtaposition of positive and negative
in the poem. And I think that reflects the power of the place, that the positive impact
of it overpowers the negative.
So let's start by looking at structure. Just a few general points that I want to make about
structure as a whole in the poem. The poem is written in free verse. There's no rhyme.
There's no regular rhythm. There's enjambment where the sentences carry over onto other
lines. And there’s caesura, lots of punctuation within the lines, mid-line, which makes you
stop and pause.
So, I would say that the free verse, the enjambment,
and the caesura altogether has a combined
effect of reflecting the chaos in the place that she loves, and, perhaps, the lack of
power the speaker has, in that she cannot go there. The place is at war, and the place
is dangerous. And that danger is shown through the chaotic, disorganised structural features
of the poem.
But, there is something to argue against that. There is a pretty regular stanza length. Stanzas
one and two have eight lines. Stanza three has nine lines. So, I actually think this
is the speaker's way of imposing order on the chaos, refusing to be overcome by the
negativity of the conflicts there or the power imposed on her. And, of course, the final
stanza, where she's in this loving dance with the city, is the longest one because it's
as if she doesn't want to leave. It goes on for longer than the other ones.
So, I think the structure as a whole can be seen as that contrast, that battle between
the chaos and disorder of the war zone but the love that she has for the place.
There are some specific examples to look at. There's a lot of caesura, particularly in
the final stanza. There are commas, and, of course, we see full stops as well within the
lines. And we have to think about why that is.
Now, I think, again, there's a sense of chaos and powerlessness. It's not organised. Everything
is chaotic. But, that is contrasted through
the deliberate use of positive imagery, particularly,
ending with the positive imagery of sunlight. That's a structural feature that the final
word in the poem is ‘sunlight’, and sunlight is a recurring image in this poem to do with
positivity. I'll talk about it in a second.
But if you just analyse ‘sunlight’, that's a language analysis point. But if you analyse
where the word ‘sunlight’ appears and why that's important, it becomes a structure
analysis point. And structure analysis, on the whole, is what most people aren't able
to do. Which is why I always try to make lots of examples for you to think about.
There's also the repetition of ‘they’ in this final stanza. Okay. So, we have – ‘they
accuse me of absence, they circle me. They accuse me of being dark… They mutter death.’
Now, it's unclear who the ‘they’ is, but the repetition makes it sound threatening.
And, again, we see the conflict between the place and the people. The people are threatening
and there’s danger, but the place wins, again, through ending with evidence of sunlight.
That shows that the final word is on the positivity
of the place as represented through the sunlight.
So, let's get into this idea of sunlight because I’ve talked about it a couple of times now.
Sunlight is an image we see throughout the poem – ‘sunlight-clear’, ‘branded
by an impression of sunlight’, ‘it tastes of sunlight’, ‘evidence of sunlight’.
Sunlight is a very simple image of happiness and positivity. But it's repeated a lot to
make the point that this is how she feels about the place. It's not just a one-off.
Continue throughout the poem, even when we read about tyrants and persecution and danger
and oppression and all the rest of it, repeated throughout the poem is this image of sunlight.
And the point being made is that she loves this place and her passion for it – the
place – overpowers the negativity.
Even an image like the second one here, ‘branded by an impression of sunlight’, we've got
the juxtaposition of negative and positive imagery. Branded is a painful, aggressive
image. But the impression of sunlight is a positive image. And, again, it goes to show
that there is negativity in this place, but the love for the place overpowers everything.
It's really about how a place can be so powerful. And you could argue that this is her childhood
memory of the place, and that childish impression of a place is hard to overcome. Even if somebody
tells you something later in life about something that you had an impression about as a child,
you can't be dissuaded about that impression.
One of the nice images is ‘the bright-filled paperweight’. And this, again, shows the
power of the place. What does a paperweight do? You might not know because it's not something
we see a lot of these days. But it's something like this on the screen. And the idea is that,
if you've got a lot of papers on your desk, you just put this paperweight on the papers
and it holds them down, keeps them steady. So if you open the window, it doesn't blow
the papers everywhere if you want to keep something in certain order.
So, why an image of a paperweight? Well, it's about stability. It holds her steady. It holds
her still.
There's some personification in the poem, which is quite interesting as well. The city
begins as ‘sick’; then, it ‘comes to me’; then, it ‘lies down’; then, it
‘takes me dancing’. And, if you think about it, this is almost like the personification
of the city as a lover. It's like a love relationship,
isn't it? ‘It comes to me’; ‘it lies
down’; ‘I brush its hair’; ‘it takes me dancing’.
And this personification – giving human attributes to something that isn't human;
because, obviously, a city cannot lie down, cannot take you dancing – the personification
of the city shows just how much she loves this place, the power of the place. Above
everything else that she knows about it, she is in love with this place. And it's like
a romance story, the imagery of romance.
So, the poem is about power – the power of a place. And, in that sense, it might compare
well with ‘Extract from The Prelude’, the ‘Boat-Stealing’ episode where we have
the mountain that is powerful and the power of nature which teaches the speaker a lesson.
But in this poem, we have a very childlike love of the place which, despite all negativity,
despite all messages to the contrary, cannot be downtrodden; cannot be defeated because
the place has power in the speaker's heart.
I hope you found this video useful. As I said, there's a lot of images in this poem which
are ambiguous. I would encourage you to put comments in the comment section to discuss.
Do check out my other videos and subscribe to the channel.