The Poetry of Simon Armitage Essay -- Papers

The Poetry of Simon Armitage Simon Armitage was born in Marsden, West Yorkshire in 1963. He studied Geography at Portsmouth, and Psychology at Manchester, qualified as a social worker and worked for six years as a probation officer. He has also worked as a shelf stacker, disc jockey and lathe operator. He is now a freelance writer and broadcaster. His work includes song lyrics, plays and scripts for TV and radio. Armitage's first collection, Zoom, was published by Bloodaxe in 1989. Subsequent poetry books, all published by Faber, include Kid (1992), Book of Matches (1993), The Dead Sea Poems (1995), Moon Country (1996) and CloudCuckooLand(1997). Untitled Poem: "I am very bothered when I think..." This poem comes from Book of Matches, 1993. It appears to be based on memories of Armitage's schooldays. He says that: "most poetry has to come from personal experience of one kind or another." The first two lines actually come from a probation service questionnaire, but Armitage has chosen to use them in a different context. Here he tells the story of a science lab prank that went wrong. The person in the poem heated up a pair of tongs and then handed them to another person, presumably a girl. This girl innocently slipped them onto her fingers and was badly burnt. The doctor said that she would be "marked for eternity" by the ring-shaped scars. The narrator claims now that he was using this as a way of attracting her attention: "that was just my butterfingered way, at thirteen, of asking you if you would marry me." The language in stanza two emphasises this idea of a marriage proposal with words such as ... ... * What was the final demand? * What did the note of explanation say? From all these details we can guess what might have happened, but we cannot know for certain. But this does not matter: it's the thought processes involved that are more important. The structure of the poem is a series of rhyming couplets, although some of them are not complete rhymes. The opening couplet sets up a steady, regular rhythm. This is orderly and satisfying and perhaps suggests the "regularity of police methods". The longer lines have four beats and the shorter ones have two beats, until the last two lines, where the regular rhythm seems to break down. "That was everything" is ambiguous: it could mean that the list has finished, or it could mean that the ring is the item that was most important. It finishes off the poem.