Absence by Elizabeth Jennings (1958): a visit to the place where the speaker last met someone who is now gone, and how Jennings uses three tightly rhymed stanzas to hold grief back until it breaks through.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the collection it compares well with, and on which themes.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I visited the place where we last met.', 'Nothing was changed, the gardens were well-tended', 'The fountains sprayed their usual steady jet', 'There was no sign that anything had ended', 'The thoughtless birds that shook out of the trees', 'Singing an ecstasy I could not share', 'It was because the place was just the same', 'That made your absence seem a savage force', 'An earthquake tremor', 'Were shaken by my thinking of your name.'.
Form and structure: fifteen lines of iambic pentameter rhymed in three groups of five (ababa), calm control that holds the feeling in, and a turn in the last five lines when the grief breaks through.
Language: an orderly garden and steady fountain, 'thoughtless birds' whose joy the speaker cannot share, and the metaphor of an earthquake for the force of absence.
Context: Jennings (1926–2001), who lived in Oxford and was linked with the 1950s poets of the Movement, known for traditional metre and rhyme; her Roman Catholic faith; and her view that her poems drew on her life without being plainly autobiographical.
Compares well with: Where the Picnic was (returning to a place after a loss), Nothing's Changed (a place that is unchanged on the surface) and Hurricane Hits England (a force that shakes the speaker).
