A mother remembers her daughter's birth as the first fight in their relationship, then faces the same daughter years later as a defiant teenager asking to skate in the dark for one more hour.
How Clarke's two stanzas, the image of the red rope of love, the bare hospital room and the language of fighting and struggle show a bond made of both love and conflict.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I can remember you, child', 'our first / Fierce confrontation', 'the tight / Red rope of love', 'the wild, tender circles', 'To be two, to be ourselves', 'Neither won nor lost the struggle', 'your rosy, / Defiant glare', 'Trailing love and conflict', 'In the dark, for one more hour'.
Form: free verse in two stanzas, the first in the past tense at the birth and the second in the present with the teenager, with heavy enjambment, direct address to the child, and the rope image linking the two.
Context: Gillian Clarke (born 1937 in Cardiff), National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016, who wrote the poem about her own daughter, Catrin; her account of it as an answer to why a beautiful baby has to become a teenager; and the familiar tension between a teenager's wish for freedom and a parent's protective love.
Compares well with: Poppies (a mother letting go of a child), Cousin Kate (a mother, a child and conflict in relationships) and A Poison Tree (conflict in a close relationship).
