grammar of light commentary

..grammar	Grammar here refers to both the rules which bind words together into meaningful sentences, and the teaching of those rules. Duffy quite often uses the understanding of language as an analogy to ways of perceiving the world - so that here light, and what it shows, are 'read' as if it was a language - the language the world is 'written' in.
barely enough light	The poem begins at night, and will trace out a whole day. The progress of the verses follows the order of time in a whole day - giving the poem a simple but progressive structure. Night here is associated with making love - there's just enough light to find her partner's mouth to kiss.
bless	Duffy frequently uses the language of religion to apply to love.
a meaningless O	The 'O' is both the shape of the lips, and the sound of pleasure, I would guess. Why 'meaningless'? Perhaps because love is simple - it requires no interpretation.
teaches, spells out	This develops the analogy of the poem's title. The light, even though barely present, teaches the value of love; to 'spell out' is to explain something using the simplest, most obvious terms - that is what this physical love here is. Note the verbs in this verse: 'teaches, spells out...pierces.' -the 'teaching' of light is not in terms of ideas, abstracted concepts, but emotional. (it seems to me that Duffy is quite keen on the word pierces -it also is used importantly in the last line of First Love. Piercing in this sense is to feel a sharp emotion -immediate, deep - although the emotion felt is not necessarily simply pleasurable; it could equally be a sense of fragility as of happiness, of eventual loss as well as of possession.)
The way	This will appear in each verse. It is worth thinking about what this way of phrasing a sentence means. It simply indicates - doesn't explain or describe. It depends upon the person addressed knowing what is being, as it were, pointed out. Although the images listed in the poem are meant to be sharp and particular, the poem is not meant to be a report on one person's experience (as some of Duffy's other poems are meant to be) - rather, this poem is meant to stand in for anyone's (actual or potential) experience. The poem's relation to the reader is that it stands in for the reader's (anyone's) experience/perceptions.
paints for a moment	The brief shaft of light picks out the form of the loved partner. A poem about light will inevitably be visual - but this is also characteristic of Duffy's poems in general, the way she uses sharp, concrete images. Her poetry at times is a close cousin to painting, depending upon a visual depiction of her subject. But there is something more in the combination here of 'painting' and 'moment' - they pull against one another. A painting, by design, is permanent - it fixes a visual perception. But the painting here is only for a moment'. It is this combination of love and transitoriness which, I think, explains the force of the verb in the sentence: pierces. It also prepares for the final sentence in the poem: The way everything dies.
so many mornings to learn	But this ambiguity of feeling in pierces (and it is only, as yet, a shade of meaning) is put aside for the beginning of the second verse. Note that so many mornings to learn has its own type of ambiguity: so many mornings in which to learn (about the world), and so many mornings, with their different play of light, to experience. The mornings are both the time in which to learn, and what is learned.
the day is wrung	The second verse forms a pair with the third verse: ..some...some.. The mornings of the second verse are a bit dismal - damp and grey. Wrung suggests wringing out wet clothes - but also contrasts with fluent in verse three (you have to wring a statement out of someone reluctant to speak). The picture drawn in this verse is of someone leaving a town early, having stayed in a B&B - not at home, faintly miserable perhaps. This verse is close in tone to Prayer, I think.
a wasteground weeps glass tears	The glass tears are either the drops of dew, or the smashed glass on the wasteground: either way, the line is dominated in terms of feeling by weeps. A disconsolate urban landscape.
..think in birds	The third verse contrasts in feeling- fluent with birds moving from tree to tree, a waiter (a synecdoche for eating out, relaxing and entertaining), and the bell (why is it young?) ringing out. The trees think in birds because the movement of the birds from tree to tree is like the communication of ideas from person to person. (The comparison of birds to ideas is as old as Plato)
tell	A nice little verbal felicity: bells normally toll - although tolling is perhaps most associated with a funeral, and so out of keeping with this particular verse. Tell, with the alteration of a single letter, avoids these associations while fitting in with the running theme of the poem, in which the objects of the world communicate with us: spelling out, weeping, thinking, speaking, stuttering, flattering.
evening	The day has moved on in the fourth verse: it is now evening. There is some falling off from the brightness of the third verse: if the saucer of rain speaks to the eye - what exactly does it say?; the fires, undressing, perplex; the lamps are muted; the stars are stuttering (this stuttering both continues the idea of communication while also picking up the blinking of starlight.
midnight	The last verse returns back to night - although the scene now appears to be in a restaurant. The candle slurs its soft wax - since the wax is melting and sliding ( but slurring seems apt enough for this late meal, with wine already having been mentioned)
shadows circle	The poem is coming to an end - and gradually the tone again alters into the feel of a final valediction. The shadows circling the table are the encroaching darkness of night, but circling also perhaps suggest something of a ghostly feel.
dreams of themselves	The poem began with a moment of contact between lovers - it finishes with the human presences withdrawing into themselves (and the sharp pictures of the poem begin to disappear into a blur.)
the flare of a match	The last image of light in the poem is light in its briefest form - a match is appropriate to a restaurant, but the brief flare of a match is also a stock image of the brevity of life - an association confirmed by the final sentence: The way everything dies.
	What then does light teach? All that there is in the world to notice, the world's variety (which the small, particular images of the poem stand in for, represent - but also, in its diurnal cycle, how things must come to an end, how such experience is ended in darkness and death.

	The Grammar of Light Commentary
Home	return to text of 'The Grammar of Light'	Carol Ann Duffy index
		Do you agree/disagree with this commentary? Anything you want to add? stevebrown@clara.co.uk