A mother remembering her daughter's birth, and seeing the same struggle between closeness and independence in the teenager she is now.
How Clarke's experience as a mother shapes the poem, and how its two stanzas, the extended metaphor of the rope and its enjambment work.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I can remember you, child', 'As I stood in a hot, white / Room at the window watching', 'the tight / Red rope of love which we both / Fought over', 'the wild, tender circles / Of our struggle to become / Separate', 'We want, we shouted, / To be two, to be ourselves', 'Neither won nor lost the struggle', 'Still I am fighting / You off', 'From the heart’s pool that old rope', 'Trailing love and conflict', 'As you ask may you skate / In the dark, for one more hour'.
Form: two stanzas, the birth and the present, in free verse with heavy enjambment; the rope as an extended metaphor for the umbilical cord and the bond after it; the paradox of love and conflict, and the ending on her daughter's question.
Context: Clarke, born in Cardiff in 1937, wrote the poem about her daughter Catrin, born there; she was National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016.
Compares well with: Kamikaze and The Schoolboy on parents and children; Cousin Kate on a mother and her child; Origin Story on family; Disabled on growing up and independence.
