It has 14 lines, and although it has not got all the traditional features of a sonnet, such as a complex rhyming scheme, or lines of iambic pentameter, it has other features that suggest that it could be classed as a poem in this form. Most strikingly, there is the sense of a turn in lines 9-10, and also the ways in which it appears to investigate a problem or an issue – in this case, the emotions and thoughts that the butchers shop summons up for the poet. The poem seems close to – but is not quite – iambic pentameter.
In fact the meter is uneven throughout, with varying numbers of syllables, from six (in nine ID) to 15 (in line 9), and a shift between iambic (the pigs are strung’) to trochaic (dignified in martyr’s deaths’) from line to line, suggesting a calm but conversational tone. The final line of iambic pentameter suggests the completion of an idea, as does the assonance between ‘meat’ in line 12 and ‘bleeds’ in line 14, suggesting a half-rhyme at the end of the poem. As the first and last lines are metrically even, this gives the poem overall the crafted appearance which is typical of the sonnet form.
Although there is little end rhyme, there are several internal rhymes, generally built on assonance, which elf to hold the verse together, such as ‘deaths… Heads… Rosettes’, ‘smile… Tiles’, ‘clog… Soggy and the final ‘meat… Bleeds’. The poem is in the present tense throughout, implying the ways in which the action is continuous – this is not just a butcher’s shop, but the butcher’s shop – a representative, perhaps of all such shops, and of the eternal issues of eating animals that we anthropomorphism for meat.
The initial description of the pigs is given dignity by the use of a long, metrically even line, the iambic meter of the first syllables suggesting a long pause at the caesura after ‘rows’, adding to the impact Of ‘open-mouthed’. This word suggests astonishment or surprise, though it is also a simple description of the physical appearance of the pigs, and so sets up the duality through the poem, between the physical description of the shop and the associations and connotations that are summoned up by each element of it.
The pigs are personified as ‘dignified’, ‘martyrs’, ‘voting Tory’, described in terms of ‘stiff… Sunday manners’ in a way which associates them strongly with conservative humans. The anthropomorphism of the animals accentuates their status as living beings; it is as though the poet is suggesting hat were people hung in the butchers shop we would find it horrific and medieval – why then should it be acceptable to have animals hung up on display in this way?
There is an element of sly comedy in the ‘porky heads / voting Tory’ all their lives’, the blue rosettes (presumably a reference to the rosettes that butchers sometimes display to indicate that an animal has been a prize-winning creature at a show) aligning the ‘successes’ of the pigs with the ‘successes’ of human politicians in a vivid memento moor, something also emphasized by the internal rhyme ‘deaths… Dads’, where the rhyme itself creates a phrase which is associated with the realization of mortality (a death’s head is a skull used as a reminder of humankind’s mortality; they were much used in the Renaissance as symbols in plays, pictures and poetry). To emphasis this link between animal and human, the butcher’s smile is described as ‘meaty, and his fingers ‘fat as sausages’, the metaphor and simile in turn both accentuate a certain repulsion towards the processes of the butcher’s shop.
The mildly sinister suggestion that his apron is stained with ‘who knows what’ obliquely refers to blood and emphasizes the sense that the butcher, though smiling, is threatening character. The butcher’s ‘meaty’ smile also gives a sense that he is heavy, fleshy, well fed, and this aligns with the description of the images in his shop as ‘smug’. The cattle and sheep that ‘prance’ on his tiles are images that suggest a deeply conventional way of looking at animals.
They are ‘woolly’ and ‘snowy’ (unlike the blood-stained whiteness of the butchers apron) and so distanced from the brutal reality of the processes of butchering. These representations of animals are ‘grazing / on eternity’ in much the same way as Keats describes action as being frozen in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. They are unable to change, and so are safe, immortal as ‘cute illustrations in a children’s book’.
The use of the word ‘cute’ here brings a deliberate touch of bathos to the idea of ‘eternity, suggesting, as it does, a failure to address reality in the illustrations. The irony of the tiles representing happy, healthy animals, contrasting with the reality of the dead corpses in the shop is clarified by the emphasis on ‘smug’ and ‘cute’ and the contrast between these adjectives and the initial ‘open-mouthed’, ‘dignified’, ‘stiff, ‘porky’ and ‘martyrs’.
The long line 9 dwells on the idea of the idealized illustrations of the sheep ND cows, and the poem is given a strong suggestion Of sonnet form by the sharp turn into the short line 1 0: ‘what does the sheep say now? ‘ The contrast between the longest and shortest line in the poem emphasizes the sharp question. The question both imitates what an adult might say to a child when reading a picture book with farm animals in it (with the expected answer being ‘baa baa’), and addresses the reader directly with the pointed irony that the sheep can now say nothing of the kind, as it is dead.
The short line allows a long pause after the question before leading into the immediately physical tacky sawdust clogs your shoes’. This line both offers a connection to what the sheep might say now (nothing, it is simply bleeding on to the ‘tacky sawdust’ that is placed on the floors of butchers’ shops) and also draws the reader back from the contemplative, open question (can we ever know what a sheep really says? ) to the immediacy of the surroundings of the butchers shop.
The word ‘clogs’ both puns on the wooden shoe that protects against the sort of dirt implied, and reminds us of Owens vivid use of the word in ‘Strange Meeting’, which speaks of blood: ‘Then, when much blood had logged their chariot-wheels, / I would go up and wash them from sweet wells’. To clog something is to fill it with wet or sticky matter. The shoes of the speaker are ‘clogged’, made heavy and unwieldy, but the blood which implicitly makes the sawdust ‘tacky, or sticky, is never explicitly mentioned, like the ‘who knows what of line 6.
There is, of course, a further implicit wordplay here, with the more colloquial sense of ‘tacky’ meaning distasteful. The final three lines solidify the central contrast within the poem with a vivid opposition. On the one hand, the ‘little plastic hedges… Playing farms’ remind s of the word of the child’s picture-book, the world of the happy animals on the tiles, ‘grazing in eternity, sheep and cows, as it were, in heaven. Animals here are toys, illustrations, objects that signify the pastoral and the beautiful.
In some ways all adults ‘play’ at farms in that we fail to always acknowledge the significance of the animal deaths that lie behind the meat that we eat. There is a painful juxtaposition of the image of the ‘plastic hedges’ – a piercingly accurate piece of observation of the artificial garnishes used in butchers’ shops – with the ‘trays of meat’ they separate (rather than the fields f pretend animals of a toy farm). On the other hand, We have the vivid image of the parcel bleeding ‘all the way home’.
The phrase ‘all the way home’ may remind the reader of the rhyme of the ‘five little pigs’ played when counting baa bikes’ toes: This little pig went to market This little pig stayed at home This little pig ate roast beef This little pig had none And this little pig went ‘wee wee wee’ all the way home. Inside the parcel is presumably meat purchased at the shop, but this meat is not seen as attractive or tasty but as ‘cold and soggy, words which act against any idea Of the meat as appetizing food.
The use Of ‘bleeds’ suggests wounds and life (the dead do not bleed), an active verb that implies again the pain of the ‘martyred’ pigs of the first line. The central division of the poem – the idea of animals, and the reality of their death so that we may eat meat -? is beautifully juxtaposed as the powerful monosyllabic verb ‘bleeds’ holds us in a continuous present that seems to damp the playfulness of the earlier lines. Text 2: ‘Eating Out’ This poem is by IS A Panthers, and is one of the poems that she lists as being ‘about my mother (see the interview at http://Lithuanian. Criminal. Mom/ AU_panthers. HTML) thus reflecting to some extent an autobiographical experience. The poem is reminiscent, thoughtful, recalling different attitudes to ‘eating out’, that is, dining in restaurants, the title a loaded phrase that holds within it a great deal of the symbolic significance of such an event. The awkward and discomforting subject matter is matched by the awkward prosody. The poet has chosen not to use an obvious set stanza form or a clear rhyme scheme.
The meter is unusual – not the standard iambic pentameter line, but the 1 2-syllable alexandrine – though it is used very regularly. The poem is written in unrushed couplets, 14 lines with an extra last line, giving something of the effect of a sonnet possessing an extra line, a final explanation or coda. It goes through a series of different experiences in restaurants, recalling visits taking the form of an initiation, or an education in fine dining apparently experienced in the poets childhood as her father rehearsed with her the processes of ‘grown-up’ eating out.
From the first couplet, there is a tension between the familiarity of eating a meal and the ‘adventure’ of eating it somewhere unfamiliar, summed up in he juxtaposition of opposites in the phrase ‘rehearsed but unknown’. The idea of a child is strongly presented with the image of the ‘table napkin tucked conscientiously under chin’, the neatness echoing the neat couplets of the poem. This poem might appear to be about ‘eating out’; going to restaurants and tea shops and so on – but in fact it is about the poets relationship with her parents. Eating out’, that is, eating together, should be an affirming experience; here it is not. In these brief 15 lines the poem charts a lifetime of experience, from childhood through the time of her parents’ deaths. There is no real rhyme scheme, but there is the chiming of the dead rhyme ‘later… Later… Later’ at the end Of lines 5, 8 and 13. This word moves us on from the poet’s childhood (lines 2-5) to her teenage years (lines 6-8), to young adulthood perhaps (lines 9-10), through to maturity (lines 1 1-12).
Apart from the irregular line lengths, what stops the poem settling into an obvious iambic rhythm is the number of lines that begin with a trochee or dactyl, I. E. A strong beat followed by a weak beat(s): see lines 2-7, 9-10, 15. This gives a flat conversational air to the poem which goes with its sad, even oppressive, subject matter. None of these experiences of eating out are positive or happy.
In the first childhood experience (lines 2-?5), the poet as a child feels so inhibited and confused by the experience of the restaurant that she feels sick; the behavior expected of her is monotonically associated with the food – it is ‘indigestible’. In the next experience, presumably in her teenage years (lines 6-8) the child is intimidated by going up to London and experiencing ‘London cuisine’, which is in fact French cooking. The rather innocent French phrases ‘moulds marinare’ and ‘petit four’ are here heartening. We should remember that the poet, born in 1 929, is referring to the sass or ass, when ‘foreign’ food was much less well known in insular Britain. ) The French phrases suggest that the teenager feels out of her depth, having to eat mussels in a particular way – ‘How to handle moulds marinare’, and then having her spontaneity abruptly curbed in relation to the after-meal treats, the little, sweet-like petit fours. The next meal is also awkward: ‘he initiated me / Into the ritual consumption of lobster’. The formal lexis suggests that nothing is allowed to be straightforward or simple.
Of course, not everyone eats these kinds of foods at restaurants: this is a particular kind of middle-class eating out which the poet now feels was unsatisfactory. Most of the poem is built on specifics, on particular incidents and memories. The first line, however, has more abstract vocabulary which encapsulates the whole meaning of the poem: Adventures into rehearsed but unknown living… There is a strong sense Of paradox here. ‘Adventures’ should be spontaneous and exciting, but here they are initiations into set patterns of idealized middle-class behavior, set ideas about what makes for good restaurant inning: ‘rehearsed… Paving’. They are only really adventures in the sense that for the child they are initiations into previously ‘unknown’ experiences. Throughout the poem, the gradually maturing poet feels dominated by her parents, in clearly Freudian terms. Even as a grown-up woman, when ordering food at a restaurant with her ageing and widowed mother, she is disconcerted by her mother saying ‘I’ll have whatever you’re having dear’. Perhaps she Will choose something her mother doesn’t really like or that will disagree with her.
We have to look carefully at the vocabulary being used about eating. None of his vocabulary suggests joy, gusto, or spontaneity: ‘conscientiously’ (line 2), ‘supervised’, ‘explained’ (line 3), ‘proper’ (line 9). It is all about control and what is appropriate. We move from the first experience of eating out – where the child simply feels sick because of the strangeness and the pressure to behave properly – through to the final memory of her widowed mother, giving the poet the awkward responsibility of choosing for her from the menu.
This poem starts with an initial piece of wordplay in the title – ‘the sweet menu’ playing on the dual senses of the word ‘sweet’ as an adjective meaning sugary to the taste’, with the related extended sense of ‘pleasant, enjoyable’, and the noun ‘sweet’ (and its related adjective) referring to the final course of a meal. There is some dispute as to the etymology’ of the word ‘sweet’ in this latter sense. It probably comes ultimately from the use of the word ‘sweetmeat’, current in English as ‘sweetmeat’ before 1 150. This word was formed from joining ‘sweet’, meaning sugary, and ‘mete’, meaning food of any kind (compare ‘mincemeat’).
It was first used to refer to cakes and sweet pastries, as well as candied fruit, or fruit in syrup, or marzipan. Generally such food as served as the final course of a meal. In the US, Ireland and some former Commonwealth countries, the word ‘dessert’ is often used for all final courses, but in higher register English, ‘pudding’ is generally used to refer to the final course of a meal – technically, ‘dessert’ should only be used when fruit or sweetmeats are included in this course, and this tradition is held in some social contexts.
As a result, in England, the use of the word ‘sweet’ to refer to pudding has been seen to be a lower register or northern usage. The poem is in unrushed couplets with one final single line which acts as a odd to the poem, emphasizing the wordplay throughout. It describes a solitary meal in a restaurant in simple and direct language, the use of anaphora (There is… There monosyllabic words, and simple clauses emphasizing the limpidity of the language. The first couplet sets up the scene.
The speaker is essentially a passive observer, the syntax and choice of verb emphasizing this role (I’m shown… ‘) who is placed, presumably by the waitress, at a table designed for two people, in that it has two chairs. The rest of the poem meditates upon this matter, allowing the poet to range around the social and cultural expectations that people should be in couples, or in groups. Dining at a restaurant alone is a solitary experience in a context which seems designed for company, and this is something that the poem reflects on throughout.
It might seem tempting to assume that the speaker is female, and that the poem is reflecting upon the often observed awkwardness of a woman dining alone in a public place, but as it is by a male poet, in a collection which often draws upon observational scenes of everyday life from a personal perspective, it seems more likely that the solitary diner is echoing the poet’s own experience. The ‘other chair’ of the table is significant even in its placing ‘pulled back as if someone will corn?.
It seems as though the restaurant staff are anticipating that the speaker will have company, that the solitary meal will become a ‘date’, a social occasion that signifies a potential relationship. It is tempting to wonder if there is ‘someone’ expected, or whether this is just a societal expectation – perhaps the speaker means to point out that there IS no reason to have two chairs at a table when only one person is eating there. In either case, it emphasizes that the table is designed for ‘two’ and there is only one errors there. As though to emphasis the speakers aloneness, other people inhabit the next couplets: ‘families… Baby… A small boy, with active verbs ‘digs’, ‘taught’, ‘clap’ suggesting how their interactions are positive and enjoyable ones (and of course, that they are part of relationships which have proved productive in terms of having children). In line 6, it is stated there is a flower in a bottle on my table’. This flower develops in significance throughout the poem, but here seems a small enlivening touch, part of the attractiveness Of the restaurant, until the next line points out the strange anomaly that the flower is artificial, though it is placed in water.
This immediately makes the flower take on a wider symbolic significance, and suggests that it echoes in some way the mood of the speaker. At its simplest, it is out of place; to develop the image, it is being offered nourishment that it does not need. The word ‘plastic’ is placed at the end of the line, and is emphasized by this position. The flower could be any number of things (including, as it says on the next line, ‘a lily) but its artificial nature is what dominates, and to an extent shocks.
It suggests that the restaurant is not as attractive as it might at first have seemed, that there is something ‘fake’ about it, just as there is falsity in the apparent lily which is simply a piece of plastic. (It would be tempting to further develop this sense of how a lily is a flower with certain connotations Of innocence, purity, and so on – even perhaps that it is often seen as a funeral flower, or indeed to link the sterility of a plastic flower to the single diner, as contrasted with the fecund ‘families’ that surround him. The poet italics those parts of the poem where it is indicated that someone s speaking, emphasizing the ways in which the rest of the poem appears to be an interior monologue, The bland statement made to the waitress, simply naming the food ordered, is developed in the following lines ‘the juice is cool, / the pizza hot and peppery, suggesting the ways in which this interior monologue is richer and more detailed than the surface that the speaker shows to the world – suggesting the depth of thoughts and ideas that lie behind a quiet person eating alone in a noisy restaurant.
The image of the waitresses as dancers, who ‘spin’, ‘pirouette’ and ‘flip’ adds o the sense that they are both absorbed in a demanding job, and also that they enjoy what they are doing, are focused on it, in a way which excludes the speaker. As the speaker observes the simple details around, the wood of the chair (which must be faced as though it were a person throughout the meal), the glass of the ceiling, the faces of the other diners, the solitary nature of eating alone seems emphasized.
Finally, in line 19, it becomes explicit: ‘I’d like to talk to someone… ‘ The speaker wishes to share the experience – the little comic detail Of the plastic flower in Water, for instance – with another person, UT is unable to do this. The italicized line 21 represents the waitress interrupting these thoughts with a standard query. The irony and wordplay of ‘the sweet menu’ is contrasted with the bald statement ‘facing me is the chair’.
Implicitly, were the speaker not alone, there would be more ‘sweetness’ in the meal, more point in having some more food. The speaker fantasists about possibly choosing some more food, the idea of choice This one’ or ‘That one’ emphasized by the italics that represent speech, and the capitalization and alliteration of ‘this’ and ‘that’. Instead, the speaker refuses more food, and allows through the social conventions of asking for the bill and tipping the waitress. Again, the private thoughts of the speaker form a contrast to the bland speech.
As well as the imaginative extended metaphor Of the waitresses as ballerinas, we see the sense of disappointment – that a solitary meal is functional rather than pleasurable. The choice of ‘This one’ or That one’ may be extended here to suggest that the speaker wishes to choose a companion – perhaps from the graceful waitresses? – but has been disappointed. The final line of the poem again suggests a double meaning with the expression ‘it hasn’t come to much’. The amount of the bill is not very much money, but also, perhaps, the experience has not amounted to much.
The experience of solitary dining, where you are unable to share either the unsatisfactory elements of the experience (such as the plastic flower) or the potentially satisfying elements (the lingering over the choice of a dessert) has left the speaker feeling unsatisfied. This is another poem where there is explicit and implicit subject matter, I. E. The poem foregrounds the way the poet likes her grandfather’s soup, but it is as much about her love for this grandfather as it is about the actual soup.
