Nostalgia
Commentary
Home return to text of 'Nostalgia' Carol Ann Duffy index
Do you agree/disagree with this commentary?  Anything you want to add?
 stevebrown@clara.co.uk
Nostalgia So far in the volume there have been two poems (The Captain.. and Litany) about a character's linkage to the past - one using a persona, the other more autobiographical. Both poems have questioned the 'romantic' view of the past and childhood: for one a hopeful past, by being too prized, produces a sterile present; in the other, the repressions of childhood, the limitations of adults and a past state of the culture become the focus.  Both poems act as warnings or barriers against too simple an attraction to what has gone.  'Nostalgia' also sets up a kind of barrier, but this poem takes a different tack in writing about the relation of past and present: writing in the form of a parable or fable.  Rather than concentrate on some particular individual, it presents a kind of generalised, impersonal story about the origins of the feeling which draws one back to the past.  It's a sort of cultural history, but wrapped up in a story: a fable.

(The poetic influence here, to my mind, is the Auden of the end of the Thirties - in poems like the sonnet sequence 'In Time of War' - where Auden writes a series of fables, a sort of history of feelings which have determined History. The point in these poems - as in this one by Duffy - is not historical accuracy, but rather, through the fictional form of a fable, the individual, the writer in the first instance, is able to get some leverage on the particular idea or feeling, by writing about it at arm's length, the distance given by the 'impersonality' of a generalised account.)
Those early mercenaries The poem imagines the first feelings of nostalgia felt - the origins of the feeling, preceding the word.  (Is there something odd about imagining the first time a particular emotion is felt?  Emotions are perhaps the most immediate things we have - and therefore the least questioned.  Burt if emotions have origins - that is, they did not always exist - then they seem to that extent, more arbitrary, more questionable: they have not always been so.  The idea opens up the possibility of consideration, judgement, of the particular emotion.
'Early' establishes the myth of origins.  'Mercenaries' is a bit more complex: why would anyone leave home?  Here, it is only for money - the word suggests a kind of moral judgement: mercenaries fight for no other reason than money; values, etc, are not an issue for them.
ill Nostalgia is first described as a sickness.  This seems both a kind of punishment for the 'mercenaries', leaving home - but also a kind of reduction of the general 'romantic' aura of nostalgia, its description as a sensitive, delicate feeling.
(Relate to Goethe's remark that 'Romanticism is a sickness'.  This isn't simply a negative judgement: for sure, sickness is something to be avoided, but it is also produced by certain conditions: lack of something, bad luck, etc - to be ill is not to do something morally wrong - as no one would choose it, it does not arise by choice.)
mountains Still, the drift of the first verse is that leaving home is a mistake: it's a descent from a higher condition to a lower one.  The 'air' of home is described as high, fine..; the idea of descent, a falling off is emphasized by the repetition: down, down
wrong What they found in the lowlands, the place not home, was wrong: what they were not used to, what they didn't expect, what was not suited to them, or morally or aesthetically wrong, bad, in itself. The word 'wrong' blurs across all these different shades of meaning - although on how you weight the word depends what you take to be the 'moral' of the poem.
Every detail is wrong: emphasized by the repetition of the word and the list of different qualities.
What they got was money Weighed against the emphasized wrongness of the new place is this one return: money.  It must sound cold and inadequate placed against the list of all that is wrong: an abstract word placed against a list of things appealing to the senses - especially as it is described by the adjectives 'dull' crude', and the image of the 'coins clenched in the teeth' is followed by the judgement: 'strange food, the wrong taste' - money is not sustaining.
The gist of this first verse sounds critical - especially when it seems to be summed up by the final word of the long second sentence: 'wrong' - a summarising judgement given emphasis by the placing of the word: a run on line, completed by this single word alone.  It sounds, at least temporarily, conclusive, a moral judgement.
They had an ache here But isn't   there something odd about this sentence: it pulls out of the fable to address a doctor, and where is being pointed to by the indicative 'here'?  It is as if - suddenly but briefly - the impersonality of the fable has disappeared, leaving a consultation between the speaker and a doctor, and the 'here' pointed to is the speaker's own heart: that is, the feeling suffered by the 'mercenaries' is also suffered by the speaker now.  Suddenly the distanced judgement is, partially, compromised: the speaker too has this 'illness'.
killing If the involvement of the speaker compromises the distanced judgement, so does this sudden up rating of the feeling's severity; we suddenly go from merely 'making them ill' to 'it was killing them', placed in a position of great emphasis: the end of the first verse.  The force, strength, of the feeling has just been emphasized: 'grown men' were made to weep and pine.  Making nostalgia an 'illness' has not just stripped away a kind of 'romantic' aura; at the end of the first verse, making it an illness has increased its strength: the poem, instead of distancing and minimizing nostalgia, has made it more pressing.
It was given a name Naming is a second stage operation; this is the second verse.  There's a gap between the feeling and the word.  The consequences of this is radical: the feeling can be talked about, imagined - without being actually felt.  This will form the content of the second and third verse: that the feeling, 'nostalgia', will have an effect without being felt really - as it is in the first verse.
Hearing tell of it Those whose feelings are described in the second verse have only hearsay knowledge of the feeling - contrasting to those 'early mercenaries' in the first. The 'feelings' described in the second verse are of 'those who stayed put, fearful..'.  This is worth bearing in mind when considering the language of the second verse.
a sweet pain in the heart The language and imagery of the second verse is notably more 'romantic' than the reductive or concrete language of the verse: this is the feeling as imagined by those who stayed put, who were fearful - i.e., those who merely imagine the feeling because they do not feel it really.  The conventional language/phrasing/imagery of 'romantic' verse - '..the sad pipes..', '..the dwindling light of the plain..' - is thus introduced already compromised.  Such conventionally 'poetic' phrasing is not the poet's own - but the imagination of these stay-at-homes, fearing nostalgia.
..you met a girl.. But such a simple division - between those who really felt 'nostalgia' as an illness, and those who elaborated upon their fears of what it might be - is too simple a division. 'You' now makes the reader complicit (as '..here, Doctor..' implicated the writer.  And imperceptibly introduced by the word 'dwindling' is a different perspective on nostalgia: the first verse has emphasized 'geographic' distance; now, in 'dwindling' and in the last two lines of this verse is introduced the perspective of Time.  The last two lines each introduce a kind of snapshot memory from childhood.  This shift is probably imperceptible - but it will determine how the poem ends.
the word was out If the second verse concerned itself with those who imaginatively developed the idea of nostalgia (through fear of actually feeling that feeling), the beginning of the third verse will concern those who more abstractly, systematically develop the concept.
The phrase itself perhaps suggests two different but related ideas: the word has escaped - and so cannot now be contained or restricted in how it will be used or interpreted: and, secondly, the rumour of the existence of this feeling is now general, public property, and so what it might mean, how it might be used, can now no longer be controlled.
Some would never fall in love.. The idea here is based upon the gap between feeling and word examined or asserted by the second verse: a feeling can be imagined because a word exists to name it, although such imagined feeling is not the same as the feeling really is: some would never feel nostalgia if the word 'nostalgia' did not exist.  
the priest Duffy introduces as imaginary systematizers of nostalgia the priest and schoolteacher - where their interpretation of what the feeling is is supported by the priest and the teacher: two professions which Duffy seems sceptical about in other poems.
What's happened between the first verse and this is that the feeling has become purely mental, imagined, but also mournful, and, as such, impossible to eradicate because it concerns itself not with individual fate and actions, but with the fixed conditions of Nature and Life, not dependant on individual actions.  The priest is 'crying at the workings of memory through the colour of leaves'   Why is the priest crying? - because memory can not call back the past.  Why 'at the colour of leaves'? - because leaves turn red and fall in autumn, that is, they die: Time moves on and cannot be held still. The teacher turns 'too late' to try to recreate her past through reading.
It was spring when one returned The last movement of the poem.  It returns to one of the 'early mercenaries' returning home - which should be the antidote to the 'illness' of the first verse.  Also, it was 'spring' - a season standing for revival, and the repetition of the word 'same' mimics but reverses the repetition of the word 'wrong' in the first verse.  But these 'returns' are now ironic, because...
everything changed Although the 'illness' of the first verse concerned just geographic distance, displacement in space, that illness has , as it were, mutated during the last two verses: it now concerns Time - and against that, there is no antidote.  With Time there is no possibility of return: change happens, even without any action on the individual's part.  The feeling first felt by the adventurous and active has been broadened by the reflective - who have made it unavoidable.