Essay On 'Lament' By Gillian Clarke

Lament – Gillian Clarke

Explore the poem showing how the imagery conveys the poet’s feelings towards human action.

In the poem “Lament” by Gillian Clarke, the imagery conveys the poet’sfeelings towards human action by several ways. Firstly, the poet states the negativity of his feelings by intertwining beautiful, bright images with other ugly, dark and sad ones to highlight the latters.Secondly, he depicts a number of lives in their last breath, suffering, to show the harm human action can do to other forms of life. Finally, he adresses the poem to all of those ruined landscapes anddying creatures, making the reader feel emphatic due to the apology tone.

To begin with, the intertwined uglyness and beauty of the images used intensifies the way in which the second ones get tothe reader. The same happens with their brightness and darkness: having both on the same image gives it sort of a double polarity, and highlights the negative, shallow factor in it. For example,“(..)the veil of iridescence of the sand, the shadow on the sea.”: the stanza is clearly talking about an oil spill, but that light provided by the “iridescence” makes it beautiful in some way. Even though,the shadow which comes inmediatly after makes the reader get the negative connotation the whole idea has over the natural landscape that is been described. Besides, the use of the word “veil”, which iseasily connected with death and mourning, re-states that sense of loss which the reader is meant to feel both for the landscape and the living creatures in the place.

Also, the poet mentionsseveral creatures in compromising situations, most of them sick or about to die, if not dead already. Appart from that fact, they convey some kind of innocence, naivety, like they didn’t expect ending uplike they did, for which the reader is meant to feel sorry. A clear example is the following stanza: “For her eggs laid in their nest of sickness”. The eggs represent that innocence, as they haven’t...