Analysis – The Field Mouse By Gillian Clarke 5et2z

Analysis – The Field Mouse by Gillian Clarke The poem was inspired by the early 1990’s Bosnian crisis, the genocide of the Bosniaks by the Serbs and Croats of Yugoslavia; emphasizing the fragility and mankind’s destructive and lethal nature. The title of the poem refers to a mouse, one of the victims in the hay-cutting progression. The poet compared this tragedy to the war at the Eastern Europe, where many became victims and being in the state of sympathy and mercy; using the field mouse as a metaphor to compared with. This poem consisted of 3 stanzas, possessing uncorresponding and varying length, urging plausibility of to reflect freedom of the natural world or the lack of order and ordination in peace. Each stanza tells different parts of the story – the first describes the background about the hay making and the war, the second about the death of the field mouse, the third about the poet’s incubus and terrifying vision. The first stanza starts with the settings at countryside in summer, accompanied by a sense of sound at the beginning of the poem present in the metaphor of the first line, “and the grass is a snare drum”. The “snare drum” sound here represents the busying insects in the grassy pastures. With profound depth, the “snare drum” sounds like machine guns, linking too the Bosnian War, contrasting the never ending massacre in the bloodblanketed battlefields. From the second to the fifth line, the poet used ironic personification, “the air hums with jets”. This second line is sarcastic as danger was lurking at the Eastern Europe and brought further threat into the war. At the other hand, the “jets” humming could represent bees or any other insects lurking around the pastures. The long phrase from the third line to the fifth line, “Down at the end of the meadow, far from the radio’s terrible news, we cut the hay”, tells us how the poet was far from the war showing concerns and sympathy to the soldiers as she received news of war in this evidence, “far from the radio’s terrible news”. Continuing with new phrase from the fifth line to the end of the stanza, the hay seems like a sea, metaphorically “its wave breaks before the tractor blade” emphasizing the vastness and size of it and showing that it does blow in the wind. The phrase also create imagery of the grasses on the pastures causing whooshing sound it makes as if fall. In the seventh line, the poet tells how her neighbour had use lime to

neutralise the acidic soil for the crops to flourish, as shown at the ninth line, “with a chance gift of sweetness”. In addition, this metaphorical phrase shows how the Yugoslavians enjoy their life like a field mouse. Literally, this can alludes with deep elaboration and explanation, linking to the United Nations having the leaders of Yugoslavia to sign a treaty to end this war caused by religious discrimination rather than being subjected to racism. Besides that, the second stanza defines the death of the field mouse, interconnecting to the victims of the war. Line 10 of the poem tells the tales of a boy running through the “killed flowers”. The personification here linked to the war as battlefields were full of bodies discarded by poor souls of the victims. In the eleventh line, the boy “hands a nest” defining that the boy carried the mouse in cupped hands of his, reding how the boy was concerned and urged to protect it as its habitat was destroyed by the tractor, damaging and inflicting damage to the mouse and caused it to “quiver” and tremble in fear just like how the poet would felt. In the next line, “its black eyes two sparkling”, still insisting hope to live but there is a loss of hope, proven in the phrase “We know it will die and ought to finish off”, ending the life of the mouse to prevent further excruciation in the following line. These 4 lines own the same status like victims in Bosnian War, where survivors cross through the land dumped of bodies like “running through the killed flowers”. The victims were “quivering” conditioned in intense and utter dreads. However not all survivors were lucky, some were found by the opposing enemies and were to be found shot dead as they were escaping the battleground with ill-omen. “It curls in agony big as itself” in the fourteenth line exhibits the immense pain as the mouse die, showing cataclysmic scale of woe in the war at Eastern Europe. The mouse no longer lives as “the star goes out in its eye”. The author use this phrase to prevent the use of word, die as she felt guilt in destroying the nest and murdering the house. Line sixteen marks the ending of the Bosnian War and personifies the feelings created by the death of the mouse, as when the harvest is brought in animals who have live in the protective world of the crop, are not exposed to this elements and are often killed by the machinery, again showing the desolating nature of man. The seconds last line of the stanza indicate the “children kneel in long grass” proposing thought that this poem also linked to the idea of children, resembling life and growth, in

contrast to the demises and destruction of war. Technically, this line also shows the clemency and mercifulness of the children towards the Bosnian War as they were unharmed back in Wales, as shown from the seventeenth line and the eighteenth line. As the poem approaches its end, the final stanza demonstrates the vision and the aftermath of the war. At the end of the day, line 19 personifies the field “bleeding”. This personification indicates that the battleground was totally surrounded by corpses of the dead. The second and third line of this stanza reveal surviving “voles, frogs, a nest of mice” as metaphor once more that they were like survivors of the aftermath settling in new settlements, in tremendous and extreme fright. There is a sense that this is wrong, “the wrong that woke” for Clarke. This creates dreams and visions in her minds of children dancing in the grass, with reminder of our fragility with “their bones as brittle as mouse-ribs”, a reminder of fragility of human. There is a link to the outside world. The evidence is at the twentythird line, “we can’t face the newspapers”, which links to the terror at the start of the poem. The field symbolizes a microcosm of the outside world, with corpses and demises ubiquitously, as told in the news. Last but not least, a direct link to the war is made. These phrases, “the air stammering with gunfire, my neighbour turned stranger, wounding my land with stones”, subjects to how wars can provoke neighbouring countries to kill and destroy each other and vice-versa; where there is peace, there is tranquillity. In conclusion, this poem is the metaphor for the severity and harshness of life and the colossal and overwhelming lethal way we can treat each other.