Extract

And if it snowed and snow covered the drive
he took a spade and tossed it to one side.
And always tucked his daughter up at night.
And slippered her the one time that she lied.

Location

Armitage reads the poem from a taxi in front of a semi-detached house in the town of Marsden. Actors play the parts of some of the characters in the poem.

Summary

The structure of the poem is very simple. Three lines of each stanza deal with some fine things the man in the poem has done in his life, while the final line shows us his other side ('And twice he lifted ten quid from her purse'). The repetition of the word 'And' at the beginning of every line makes the poem feel like a soothing chant or nursery rhyme - an effect which the final line of each stanza violently shatters ('And once, for laughing, punched her in the face'). The final couplet of the poem characteristically refuses to judge the man, leaving the reader with 'the question, not the answer'.

'Poem', like '*', plays with the sonnet form. The classical English sonnet has 14 lines, a fixed syllable count per line and a rhyme scheme: ABABCDCDEFEFGG. Armitage deliberately introduces slang words like 'quid' and 'blubbed' into this most conventional of forms, because he wants to make contemporary poetry out of the living language. Similarly he refuses the full rhymes of the original sonnet form, going instead for half-rhymes like 'back'/'that' and 'nurse'/'church', undermining expectations and keeping the form alive.

What Simon Armitage said

Simon Armitage - Passwords 1998