How Does Clarke Create Vivid Impressions Of The Bull In 'Friesian Bull'?

How does Clarke create such a vivid impression of the bull in 'Friesian Bull'? In ‘Friesian Bull’, Clarke uses alliteration, description of the bull’s body and vocabulary of rage and insanity to create a vivid impression of the bull. Throughout the poem, Clarke makes use of alliteration to create a vivid impression of the bull. Clarke uses sibilance multiple times: she mentions the ‘steel bars between [the heifer’s] trap and [the bull’s] small yard’ in the first stanza, and she describes the bull as knowing the ‘sweet smell’ of a heifer’s fear in the second. The repetition of an ‘s’ sound resembles the sound of hissing – although the bull cannot hiss, Clarke could be using sibilance to make references to the sense of threat, menace and …show more content…
In the first stanza, she mentions the bull’s ‘stippled muzzle’. The word ‘muzzle’ has connotations of violence: a muzzle is the open end of a firearm and the guard fitted over the mouth of some animals to prevent them from biting is also called a muzzle. By juxtaposing a word so often associated with violence with the word ‘stippled’ – a more ‘poetic’ word describing fine detail – I find that Clarke creates an odd sort of antithesis. The poet could be alluding to the fact that the bull isn’t entirely savage. Almost immediately after this, Clarke writes of the ‘slow/ Rolling mass’ of the bull’s skull. The long ‘o’ sound in the words ‘slow’ and ‘rolling’ could allude to the bull’s slowness, and how the bull may be intellectually obtuse due to its one-track mind: after all, the word ‘bovine’ can mean ‘sluggish’. The enjambment of the phrase creates a delay between the words ‘slow’ and ‘rolling’, thereby adding to the effect of slowness. At the end of the first stanza, the bull’s ‘eyes/ surface like fish bellies’. The undersides of fish only ever rise to the surface once they’re dead; by comparing the bull’s eyes to an image of death, Clarke depicts the bull as a decaying monster. This is somewhat ironic since the bull’s role in the farm is to create life. When Clarke writes of the bull’s eyes surfacing, she isolates the word ‘surface’ by introducing a line break before it. One could argue that …show more content…
In the first stanza, the poet mentions a ‘froth of slobbered hay’ drooping from the bull’s muzzle. The use of the word ‘froth’ is an interesting one; the word itself has connotations of illness (rabies) and madness (frothing at the mouth often happens during seizures). Clarke’s choice of the word somehow humanises and dehumanises the bull simultaneously: one could argue that madness is a human construct, and that by seeing the bull as mad we are, to an extent, seeing him as a being capable of emotion and thought; one could also argue, however, that associating the bull with rabies distances the bull from human experience, as it makes us see the bull as a deranged beast. Although this may be slightly far-fetched, Clarke could be playing upon the double meaning of the word ‘rabid’. In the second stanza, the bull’s stall ‘narrows to rage’. This phrase is linked to the bull’s perception of the stall being ‘narrow as a heifer’s haunches’ in the first stanza: could Clarke be insinuating that, in the eyes of the bull, rage and a heifer’s haunches are somewhat equivalent to each other? Clearly, the bull is only doing the deed out of a pure, driven rage. This leads the reader/ listener to wonder where this rage stems from – perhaps the bull is bitter about its separation from nature and the herd (the likes of which appear a few lines later), or about the fact that it’s being used as a bovine sex