Imagery and Sound

Drowned child

• The half-drowned child is "dressed in water's long green silk" (line 3). Clarke explains that this is "water weed, and streams of water falling from the child's clothes". It is a poignant imageimage: A visual representation of something; a mental picture; a persona that is presented to the world. because the clothes sound beautiful, but are really deadly.
• It is significant that her mother's hair was "red" (line 6): red is a colour that we associate with blood and life, in contrast [contrast: A description of all the differences between two things (in this case, two texts). ] to the deathly "Blue-lipped" (line 3) girl pulled from the water. The child becomes "rosy" (line 12) after receiving the kiss of life, as oxygen flows round her body again in her blood. Look at all the references to colour in the poem.
• The line "my mother gave a stranger's child her breath" (line 8) sounds miraculous: we are reminded of the first breath a new-born baby breathes, or a puppeteer in a fairy tale who makes his puppets come to life.
• "Satiny mud blooms in cloudiness" (line 18) is a beautiful way to describe how the mud is stirred up by the swans' feet. "Satiny" suggests a silky fabric and "blooms" suggests flowers - both at odds with the muddy water. Why did Clarke use these images?
• The swans are more threatening with their "treading, heavy webs" (line 19) and wings that "beat and whistle on the air" (line 20). Clarke explains, "Swans can be fierce, and pretty scary to a child who thinks they are beautiful beings out of legend. The little girl nearly drowned. Did the swans try to take her to their kingdom under the water? That's the kind of story that haunted me when I was a child."
• The silent crowd is drawn by the dread of it (line 10): they can't stop watching. The alliteration [alliteration: Words strung together with repeated (often initial) consonants, eg Max made many men mad. ] sounds heavy and creates a sense of doom.
• "The dipped fingers of willows" (line 17) personifies the weeping willow trees that are drooping over the water. Their lowest leaves are like fingers dabbling in the lake. Perhaps this is another idea from a fairy tale, where trees sometimes have magical powers ..

Picture courtesy of Zara Tcherneva

Sound

• Alliteration [alliteration: Words strung together with repeated (often initial) consonants, eg Max made many men mad. ] and assonance [assonance: Words that sound the same through the use of similar vowels or consonants, eg hot and slop or fold and filled. ] are used to make the description more vivid. Look at:

  after the treading, heavy webs of swansas their wings beat and whistle on the air.

  where the repeated e, i, b and s sounds imitate the sound and 'feel' of swans in flight.
• The stanzasstanzas: Lines of poetry that make up a unit; verses. include half rhyme [rhyme: In poetry, the use of words which have the same or a similar sound - eg 'flow' and 'bow' - to form a pattern of sound. ] (for example, earth/breath and bowed/soaked), which creates the effect of a distant echo.
• The fourth stanza contains one very long, sprawling sentence, broken over several line-ends: it's hard to grasp exactly what is being said, beyond the impressions of shadowy willows, murky water, and low-flying swans. This lends an obscure, dream-like feeling to the description.