A father describes his three-year-old son falling into a nettle bed, his own furious attack on the nettles, and their return within weeks, knowing he cannot protect his son from future pain.
How Scannell's military metaphor turns the nettles into an army of spears, regiments and recruits, and how the father's violent response shows love, anger and helplessness.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'My son aged three fell in the nettle bed', 'those green spears', 'That regiment of spite behind the shed', 'It was no place for rest', 'White blisters beaded on his tender skin', 'a watery grin', 'slashed in fury', 'A funeral pyre to burn the fallen dead', 'Had called up tall recruits behind the shed', 'My son would often feel sharp wounds again'.
Form: a single sixteen-line stanza in iambic pentameter with alternate rhyme, enjambment that rushes the father's anger, and a final line that turns to the son's future.
Context: Vernon Scannell (1922–2007), a former boxer who served in the Second World War with the Gordon Highlanders and fought at El Alamein, whose war shapes one reading of the poem's military language; the poem was published in 1980.
Compares well with: A Child to his Sick Grandfather (care between generations), My Father Would Not Show Us (fathers and children), The Manhunt (wounds and the language of war) and One Flesh (family seen from inside).
