A Kumquat For John Keats 1981

Front 1

prosaic opening and wit

Back 1

Today I found the right fruit for my prime, / not orange, not tangelo, and not lime

-colloquialisms used in the opening stanza

Front 2

The interconnectedness of the natural world, each element within the natural world is inextricably linked and there is aesthetic beauty in this

Back 2

'moon-like globes of grapefruit' 'the tangible sunshine of the tangerine'

Front 3

Strangely honest, conspiratorial and intimate with the reader

Back 3

'last year full of bile and self-defeat / I wanted to believe no life was sweet'

Front 4

Joy's fruit

Back 4

'a fruit an older poet might substitute / for the grape John Keats thought fit to be Joy's fruit'

Front 5

Life

Back 5

'two years before he died, he tried to write / how Melancholy dwelled inside Delight'

Front 6

Informal mixed with the profound creates both a modern and classical resonance, fitting for the poem's association with Keats's poetry and in a post-Vietnam world

Back 6

'if he'd known the citrus that I mean' 'I'm pretty sure that Keats' would have 'plumped for mine' 'at 42 he'd help me celebrate / that Micanopy kumquat that I ate'

Front 7

The Garden of Eden has become a metaphor for human delight and human plight, though it perhaps was never a real, attainable place

Back 7

'the fruit had all the qualities of fruit before the Fall' compared with 'how Eve's apple tasted at the second better'

Front 8

Perhaps has connotations to the afterlife and death- his thoughts are symptoms of increasing old age

Back 8

'sweet pulp and sour skin - or was it sweet outside and sour within?'

Front 9

Desperation to solve life's questions, using nature as a guide and symbol, as an indication of and means of discovering the truth

Back 9

'being a man of doubt at life's mid-way / I'd offer Keats some kumquats and I'd say: / You'll find that one part's sweet and one part's tart: say where the sweetness or the sourness start.'

Front 10

tendency of man to create myth and philosophise and conflate all things in nature

Back 10

'I find I can't, as if one couldn't say / exactly where the night became the day, / which makes for me the kumquat taken whole / best fruit, and metaphor to fit the soul'

Front 11

After the serious and sombre nature and resonance of the previous line, Tony Harrison seems to revert to light humour and wit, as if trying himself to increase the sense of delight at the expense of melancholy and doubt, and drive out the darkness blocking the light. The poem itself flits between moments of extreme discord, disharmony, pain and unpleasantness and pleasantness and euphoria- itself symbolising what the Kumquat- and life itself- represents to the poet

Back 11

'one in Florida at 42 with Keats / crunching kumquats, thinking, as he eats / the flesh, the juice, the pith, the pips, the peel, / that is how a full life out to feel' He calls him, as if a close friend 'John, the fruit I'd love to have your verdict on'

Front 12

Nostalgia colours the poem

Back 12

'when the man who savours life's no longer young, / the fruits that were his futures far behind. Then its the kumquat fruit expresses best / how days have darkness round them like a rind, / life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.'- Every happy thought and feeling has a dark side, an alternate image of gloom behind it, and the kumquat symbolises this, much like the fruits in the 'Horticultural show' by U A Fanthorpe, like the carrots that have been 'at the heart of darkness' and 'utter where they have been, where we are going.'

Front 13

Cynical view of ageing and what it has to offer

Back 13

'he's granted days and kumquats to express / Man's Being ripened by his Nothingness.'

Front 14

Cruel reminder of the harsh world beyond this luxurious, idle holiday in Micanopy- the references to the horrors of Vietnam- human cruelty, destroying the aesthetic beauty of the natural world and causing the young to die, too early

Back 14

'years like an open crater, gory, grim, / with blody bubbles leering at the rim' 'Flora asphyxiated by foul air' 'dehydrated Naiads, Dryad amputees / dragging themselves through slagscapes with no trees, / a shirt of Nessus fire that gnaws and eats / children half the age of dying keats...'

Front 15

melancholy

Back 15

'dead men don't eat kumquats or drink wine, they shiver in the arms of Proserpine'

Front 16

sensual allusions: the pleasure inside the pain

Back 16

'warm in bed beside their Fanny Brawne' 'watch her pick ripe grapefruit in the dawn'

Front 17

The moon's wisdom reflected in the fruit and vice versa

Back 17

'the planet glow among the fruit, and its pale light / make each citrus on the tree its satellite'

Front 18

extends the metaphor beyond the kumquat to encompass all natural phenomenon

Back 18

'stars seem the light zest squeezed through night's black rind; / the night's peeled fruit the sun, juiced of its rays, first stains, then streaks, then floods the world with days'

Front 19

contrasting the pastoral myth of pathetic fallacy

Back 19

'days, when the very sunlight made me weep, / days, spent like the nights in deep, drugged sleep'

Front 20

image of beauty mixed with pain, suffering and loss

Back 20

'my mother's wreaths stacked next to Christmas fruit'

Front 21

jolting the reader into the present moment, having been taken on a journey through wider history and the poet's own intimate history (and the suggestion of what is to come in the future)

Back 21

'A strong sun burns away the dawn's grey haze'

Front 22

Awakening to the world around him, in accord with the natural world, too awakening from its sleep

Back 22

'The dawn's molasses make the citrus gleam, / still in the orchards of the groves of dream'- he too has been in contemplative, dream-like thought

Front 23

limes

Back 23

'glow with a greenness that is close to pain'- the intensity of beauty can sometimes make it painful, just as intense euphoria is close to pain.. This idea is further explored in the final stanza, the lack of separation between ecstasy and pain (both are intense emotions which feed off one another)

Front 24

assertion that he, unlike Keats, still has a future, attempting to 'seize the day' and live in the present, a popular theme of pastoral poetry

Back 24

'The new day dawns'

Front 25

Rallying himself to face up to the present moment, using the kumquat as his muse, trying to generate light and positivity (evident in the exclamations)

Back 25

'O days! My spirit greets / the kumquat with the spirit of John Keats. O kumquat, comfort for not dying young, / both sweet and bitter, bless the poet's tongue! / I burst the whole fruit chilled by morning dew / against my palate. Fine, for 42!'

Front 26

Melancholy dwells inside delight

Back 26

The buzzard's 'bleak cries were the first sound I could hear / when I stepped at the start of sunrise out of doors'

Front 27

Pain/pleasure inextricably linked

Back 27

'a noise like last night's bedsprings on our bed / from Mr Fowler sharpening farmers' saws.'

Front 28

context (premonition)

Back 28

He had a premonition he was going to die young

Front 29

form and structure

Back 29

until the final stanza the majority is written in rhyming couplets- again symbolising the inextricable links and interconnection the poem explores e.g. 'defeat' rhymes with 'sweet' and 'rain' with 'pain'. The typical positive connotations of 'rain' as in Shakespeare, (water often being a symbol of redemption, rebirth and new life) are subverted, and it is instead shown to be linked to pain. Similarly, 'write' is rhymed with 'delight' but also with 'bite' suggesting allusions to the fall and perhaps corruption, or suggesting a wealth of insight and knowledge, as can be obtained in eating a kumquat.

Front 30

worries about ageing, loss of youth and death

Back 30

emphasised by the rhyme of 'years' and 'fears'- subtly, Harrison uses a simple conventional rhyming scheme with quite simplistic language in order to express profound thought about how not everything can be defined as simply black or white. This poem pursues ambiguity and the grey area of consciousness, fostered by the unpredictability of 'days' and of the changing seasons and natural surroundings which mankind inhabits.

Front 31

When Harrison expresses the sombre and serious thought about how death defines life...

Back 31

the neat, conventional rhyming couplets are abandoned which emphasises the importance of this thought- the rhyme scheme becomes an alternate line rhyme scheme (ABAB structure)

'Then its the kumquat fruit expresses best / how days have darkness round them like a rind, / life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.'

Front 32

The final stanza abandons the generic AABB rhyme scheme structure all together, as the poem becomes less focused on Keats and dwelling on the past and instead becomes more colloquial again, and focused on the present moment.

Back 32

The first and third, second and fifth, and fourth and sixth lines rhyme.

Front 33

In the final stanza the present seems more hopeful than the past

Back 33

In contrast to the earlier 'foul air' recollecting the Vietnam conflict, the 'air grows clear'

Front 34

But there are still elements of discord

Back 34

'bed' in the final stanza allows the reader to recall the earlier painful and negative two lines of the fourth stanza: 'days in Newcastle by my daughter's bed, / wondering if she, or I, weren't better dead' The uneasy feeling of discord is further emphasised by the reference to the 'sharpening farmers' saws' which recall the 'slagscapes with no trees' of stanza two.

Front 35

Just like life is sweet encased in sour, or vice versa, the poem's tone comes full circle

Back 35

The poem opened with a prosaic tone and ends with it, though it starts with reflection and ends with present thought

Front 36

The dilemma he faces and wrestles with, is that one cannot decide what is sweet and what is sour

Back 36

what is sweet to some, may be sour to others and vice versa and this is evidence over-simplification of what nature means or represents is naive and narrow minded.

Front 37

It is unclear whether the repeated use of exclamation

Back 37

highlights joy, agitation, forced joy, relief at being alive- ambiguity is central to the poem. The poet wrestles with his emotions that are always changing. Harrison detaches himself from a frequent tendency in pastoral literature to simplify and conflate emotion and make it black and white in connection to the changing landscape.

Front 38

After the second last two stanzas ending with an exclamation mark ('Days!' and 'Fine, for 42!'

Back 38

The poem ending with a definitive full stop suggests Harrison is still wrestling with melancholy and he has not achieved the satisfaction of discovering where the sweetness starts and the sourness ends.

Front 39

The first part of the poem

Back 39

has more sweetness, light-heartedness and colloquial wit to it

Front 40

The second part of the poem (from stanza 3)

Back 40

takes on a darker, more 'sour' and sinister, contemplative and reflective tone- the structure of the poem itself symbolising the fruit.