Lament

There’s plenty of reasons to be sad – and angry – in Gillian Clarke’s poem based on the events of the first Gulf War

“Her poetry… looks beyond the regional to the wider world.”

Poetry International

A little bit of context might help with today’s poem. Lament was published in 1997 but had been several years in the writing, its inception going back to 1990/91 and the invasion of Kuwait by the Iraqi military, who were hoping to seize the prized oil fields of this small country. In response, the US led a counter-invasion, driving the Iraqi military out of Kuwait – but not before they had tried to sabotage the invasion by deliberately spilling oil into the sea and setting fire to over 700 oil wells, causing one of the most severe manmade natural disasters in history. This extraordinary act of vandalism is alluded to throughout the poem and nowhere more clearly than in the penultimate line: the scalded ocean and the burning wells. The Kuwaiti oil fires burned for months (some say the most serious fires took years to extinguish) and the resultant soil contamination, and pollution of the sea and air, was unbelievably tragic: the smoke plume from the fires was 800 miles long and 111m barrels of oil spilled into the sea, causing a 9 mile wide slick that suffocated ocean life, marine birds, and scarred the coastline irreparably:

For the green turtle with her pulsing burden,
in search of the breeding ground.
For her eggs laid in their nest of sickness.

For the cormorant in his funeral silk,
the veil of iridescence on the sand,
the shadow on the sea.

For the ocean’s lap with its mortal stain.
For Ahmed at the closed border. 
For the soldier in his uniform of fire.

For the gunsmith and the armourer,
the boy fusilier who joined for the company,
the farmer’s sons, in it for the music.

For the hook-beaked turtles,
the dugong and the dolphin, 
the whale struck dumb by the missile’s thunder.

For the tern, the gull and the restless wader,
The long migrations and the slow dying,
The veiled sun and the stink of anger.

For the burnt earth and the sun put out,
The scalded ocean and the blazing well.
For vengeance, and the ashes of language.

While it may seem hard to fathom the extent of such a catastrophe, and some might say there are no words equal to the task of describing the enormity of the devastation, this is the challenge that Clarke rises to in Lament. Her title is also the poem’s tradition; a lament is a song expressing grief for something lost or someone who has died. In an interview about this poem, Gillian Clarke clarifies that a lament is “an elegy… a sad military tune played on a bugle.” Perhaps the most famous lament is The Last Post, played especially in Commonwealth countries every Remembrance Day for soldiers killed in World War One, and for victims of conflicts elsewhere in the world.

Clarke puts a slight twist to the traditional lament by painting her sorrow onto a broader canvas, focusing as much on the environmental cost as on the human cost of the Kuwaiti oil disaster. Clarke herself clarifies that her poem is structured as a “list of lamented people, events, creatures, and other things hurt in the war”. Her theme, beyond the expression of sorrow at the scale of destruction, is that human wars waged against one another are also waged against the natural world. To overcome the challenge of expressing the inexpressible, she uses a technique related to symbolism called metonymy, by which she focuses on individual animals (and individual people) who represent one of many thousands and millions of others who suffered and died in this disaster. It’s an effective choice that allows the reader to connect with her subject matter in a concrete way. The statistics I gave you in the first paragraph are ginormous, so much so that my mind flails at the enormity of the destruction. A nine-mile-wide oil slick I struggle to encompass in my mind, let alone picture the suffering of the sheer number of creatures, not to mention the near-uncountable plant and other aquatic life caught up in such a spill. But an individual bird drowning in oil? This I can imagine. So too a single pregnant turtle, desperately trying to find a safe place to lay her eggs. Therefore, through metonymy, Clarke shows us individual creatures who symbolise countless others whose stories we will never know, but for whom we can lament nevertheless.

The structure of her poem is, by Clarke’s own description, a list. Each tercet (the name of stanzas of three lines each) and in total eleven lines in the poem begin with the phrase For… followed by an animal, person, or thing the loss of which Clarke grieves. The placement of repeated words and phrases at the beginning of lines of poetry has a technical name: anaphora. Written in free verse, so there is no pattern of rhythm or rhyme scheme, anaphora is what gives the poem its stately, hypnotic rhythm and helps control the pace. At the end of every line, Clarke punctuates each image with either a comma or a full stop, having us pause for a moment to digest the impact of what she’s described, to take a breath before her pen outlines the next horrific scene. The last line of each stanza is end-stopped, as if the poet is a photographer taking different shots before compiling them together. It’s quite easy to summarise the focus of each stanza: the first describes a pregnant turtle struggling to lay her eggs, the second seabirds trapped in the oil-slicked ocean, the third and fourth refugees and soldiers, the fifth sea mammals, the sixth migratory birds choked by plumes of smoke…. By the time we get to the last stanza the entire world – land, sea, and air – is aflame, choked by oil and clogged with acrid smoke, and there’s nowhere to escape to. Facing such horror, it’s tempting to want to gloss over graphic details, to look away in shame or fear. But Clarke’s meticulous control (similarity of line lengths, careful use of punctuation) forces us to read the poem slowly, to dwell on the suffering and feel the heartbreak of the scene. Yet no matter how lucid some of the horrific images become, the list-like structure and the stately anaphora, For… For… For…, returns dignity to those, whether man or beast, from whom it’s been stripped.

Speaking of the poem’s structure, I’m not sure about you, but I feel an intensification as I read down the poem, a hardening of tone, and a move from sadness and sympathy to more overt anger on the writer’s part. You can feel this hardening in the diction of the poem simply by comparing the words of the first stanza (green, pulsing, nest… only sickness really stands out) to the words from the penultimate stanza: stink, slow dying, anger. Further, this intensification is, in part, managed by the cumulative effect of anaphora; an effect of a reading a list is the sense that there are ever more items to come. As the poem progresses, as we read that repetitive For… For the… The…, as we read more examples of still more creatures mired in oil, choking in smoke, or deafened by the missiles of the war, we begin to feel that cumulative effect. Clarke adds nuance through her meticulous control of pace and line length again. At the start of the poem, lines and images matched up fairly evenly – one item or image to one line. You can see this most evidently in stanza four, which contains three lines, three images, three subjects, three full stops. Later, though, the little word and creeps in to the poem, connecting separate subjects in the same line. Go back and look carefully, you’ll find this in the first line of the fifth stanza: For the gunsmith and the armourer, then again in the dugong and the dolphin. By the time we get to the last couple of stanzas, this seemingly unimportant little word appears in almost every line! You probably won’t be surprised to discover there’s a cool-sounding name for the method of using ‘and’ as a connector in sentences like this: polysyndeton (using commas, on the other hand, is known as asyndeton). Clarke uses polysyndeton to effectively ramp up the emotion of her poem, overwhelming the readers with more and more animals, people, and events over which we should lament.

But, we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to the start and take a look more closely at some of the examples and images Clarke describes for us. In a poem about so much death and destruction, unexpectedly, the first image Clarke gives us is actually one of life: a green turtle and her pulsing burden in search of the breeding ground, for her eggs. Words suggest miracles of nature, associated through the colour green, and the encapsulation of life in words like pulsing, breeding, and eggs. Faint movement can be sensed in pulsing burden, a phrase that hints at tiny heartbeats, but also the difficulties and responsibilities of motherhood. The image of a pregnant turtle trying desperately to give birth is an easy one to get behind, eliciting the sympathy of readers who recognise the protective maternal instincts driving her on. Having seen my share of David Attenborough nature documentaries, I can feel myself silently cheering for her to find sanctuary so she can lay her eggs somewhere safe before it’s too late. Sadly, this story isn’t going to have a happy ending. Unable to swim clear of the disaster zone, the turtle, exhausted, has no choice but to dig herself out a den in the middle of an oil-soaked beach, laying her eggs in a nest of sickness, a metaphor that effectively implies the toxic pollution that’s going to contaminate her and her new babies.

Metaphor is a descriptive method that Clarke is going to use again and again throughout the poem. In essence, metaphors are transformational, taking one thing and changing them into something else (the etymology of the word metaphor is ‘to transfer’ a quality from one thing to another). Clarke’s metaphors transform things that were vividly alive into things that are suffocating, drowning, or burning. She lets her gaze roam around the scene like a wildlife photographer, zooming out from the turtle’s nest and finding more and more creatures suffering in terrible ways. We see a cormorant, a majestic sea bird, feathers clogged with oil described metaphorically as funeral silk, a shroud used to ritually wind around dead bodies before burial. We see a soldier in his uniform of fire, a whale whose beautiful song is silenced by a missile’s thunder. We frequently get metaphors for the oil slick itself, described variously as a stain, a sickness, and a shadow, all words that carry strong connotations of uncleanliness, unnaturalness, pollution, darkness, and danger. The word veil is repeated as veiled, first to describe the oil slicking across the surface of the beach (veil of iridescence) and later to describe how smoke blocks out the sun in the sky. As an item of clothing worn to a funeral, the veil takes on the symbolism of mourning and grieving too. By the time we get to the end of the poem, and the camera has pulled back to capture the whole of the scene (the burnt earth and the sun put out) Clarke’s apocalyptic imagery seems to encompass the death of the entire world.

Lament is a poem in which the boundaries between metaphor and imagery blur together. Clarke doesn’t just want us to know abstractly that the oil slick is killing these creatures, she wants to plunge us into the scene so we can feel something of being smothered in thick, black, tarry oil. Take the aforementioned nest of sickness as a prime example. Yes, the phrase is a metaphor for the oil-soaked beach, turned by human malice from a place of safety and refuge into a place of death. At the same time, olfactory imagery activates our sense of smell and gives us a whiff of oily fumes that suffocate the poor creature as she tries to lay her eggs. The same goes for the cormorant’s funeral silk; not only is this a metaphor for the oil that douses him from beak to tail-tip, but the imagery stimulates our tactile perception, letting us feel the clingy substance the way silk clings to the skin with a faint static electricity. Visually, when we look at the shoreline, the word iridescence lays over the top of the sand, giving the black slick a faint rainbow shimmer, a distinctive characteristic of oil on water. Even though Clarke never mentions the word ‘black’, words such as stain and shadow combine with the image of the sun put out to plunge the day into an artificial night. Whether by oil staining the sand and sea or palling smoke obscuring the sky, the prevalent visual imagery is of the world cast into darkness.

Above all, Clarke gives us a masterclass in using consonance and assonance to thicken the auditory dimension of her imagery. In the early parts of the poem, you can almost hear the rancid slickness of oil evoked by sibilance, a recurring sound made by S and Sh: nest of sickness, his funeral silk, iridescence on the sand, shadow on the sea. A stray missile exploding in the sea is conveyed through dull, percussive sounds such as D and hard G: dugong, dolphin, whale struck dumb. Occasional onomatopoeia brings to life the sea’s weak swell (the word lap contains the sound of water touching sand) against the slicked shore, or the concussive boom of munitions exploding underwater with a sound like thunder. Most effectively, underneath much of the poem you can hear a low, long vowel sound often made with the letter U (or O) in combination with M, N or other soft consonants. Struck dumb/thunder is an obvious example, but look elsewhere to see the same assonant sounds like the distant wailing of that mournful bugle: gunsmith and armourer… boy fusilier who joined for the company, farmer’s sons in it for the music, and, most powerfully: for the burnt earth and the sun put out. In this last example, Clarke shortens the vowel sound (put out) as life seems to be abruptly extinguished in a pall of darkness.

As the landscape transforms into hell-on-Earth, Clarke lights the darkness only with flame and fire, symbolic of a type of indiscriminate destruction of both the natural and human worlds. As the poem develops, words from a fiery lexical field (fire, burnt, scalded, blazing) accumulate until an inferno devours everything, burning up the landscape until only ashes remain. Nothing, whether animal or human, is spared. Just as she did with representatives of the natural world, Clarke uses metonymy to focus on a few of the human victims of this maelstrom. The most striking instance is probably the soldier in his uniform of fire from verse four, an allusion to a famous unpublished photograph of an Iraqi soldier burnt in his tank. The only person she chooses to name, Ahmed at the closed border, has a Middle Eastern name, making him most likely a refugee of the fighting. Just like the turtle stuck on an oil-slicked beach, he finds himself with nowhere to go and no way to escape.

While we’ve discussed how the poem alludes to a war between the US and Iraq, and while Clarke is a Welsh poet (and the United Kingdom allied with the US during this conflict), there’s no sense of us-and-them dividing the people in the poem. Clarke doesn’t ascribe blame for the violence, no more than she blames the cormorant or the turtle: her soldiers, whether Western or Middle Eastern, are just as much victims of the devastation as any of the creatures. Instead, Clarke wonders that young people don’t join the army to inflict hurt on others, but for more innocent reasons such as music and company. There’s something idealistic and naïve about these motivations; perhaps the farmer’s sons (implying they are poor, or from remote communities) are more easily swayed by the propaganda of government military recruitment campaigns? Or perhaps they have an old-fashioned view of comradeship, patriotism, and suchlike? Whatever their reasons, thrown into hellish warfare, they suffer the same fate as any other living thing in the poem. At one point Clarke uses the word fusiliers, a slightly old-fashioned word for ‘rifleman’, a choice of diction that suggests this story of war is an old tale that’s been told again and again throughout history. In Lament, war and destruction themselves are the enemy of all life, whether human or animal. Despite her vivid imagery, the scene is so abhorrent that Clarke uses one last metaphor to imply the impossibility of truly conveying everything in words: the ashes of language. Not only people, places, animals, birds, and all kinds of sea life are destroyed, but something of our essential humanity is lost when we insist on waging war against each other, and against the beauty of the natural world.

Suggested poems for comparison:

• The Field Mouse by Gillian Clarke

As in Lament, a war in Bosnia disrupts the peace of the world and destroys summer’s innocence.

• Sunday by Gillian Clarke

Clarke is so in touch with the world around us. In this brief poem, she wakes up on a Sunday morning determined to enjoy the day. But the distant troubles of the world intrude upon her, glimpsed in newspaper headlines and an unexplained feeling of dread.

• Environmental Awareness: The Right Whale by Claudia Emerson

Of course war isn’t the only threat to the natural world. In this brilliant modern poem, Emerson notes how, even after whales weren’t killed for their oil anymore, people still found reasons to hunt the world’s largest mammal.

• Lament by Thom Gunn

Another modern lament from British poet Thom Gunn, who wrote most of his poems while living in the US. When the AIDS epidemic struck in the 1980s, Gunn lost several of his friends to the disease. This poem laments the passing of one of his friends in piteous detail.

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Additional Resources

If you are teaching or studying Lament at school or college, or if you simply enjoyed this analysis of the poem and would like to discover more, you might like to purchase our bespoke study bundle for this poem. It costs only £2.50 and includes:

• Study questions with guidance on how to answer in full paragraphs. 
• A continuation exercise to help you practise analytical writing.
• An interactive and editable powerpoint, giving line-by-line analysis of all the poetic and technical features of the poem. 
• An in-depth worksheet with a focus on explaining figurative imagery.
• A fun crossword quiz, perfect for a starter activity, revision or a recap – now with answers provided separately.
• A four-page activity booklet that can be printed and folded into a handout – ideal for self study or revision.
• 4 practice Essay Questions – and one complete Model Essay for you to use as a style guide.

And… discuss! 

Did you enjoy this breakdown of Gillian Clarke’s poem? What do you find most moving about her poetic lament? Do you agree that the tone of her poem shifts and develops, from sympathy to anger? Why not share your ideas, ask a question, or leave a comment for others to read below.