CORINNENOTES

“A Kumquat for John Keats” – Critical Commentary.

“A Kumquat for John Keats” opens with “today” regresses through “history” to the writer’s birth and back to Keats and then returns to the writer’s present. It explores contrasts and oppositions, how sweet helps define sour, night defines day and how death is intrinsically linked with life.

The kumquat of the title appears at first to be in stark contrast to the tone of the poem. The exotic kumquat co-exists with the colloquial “spuds” and the mundanity of “Newcastle” and “Leeds”. Even the line endings of the poem are largely oxytonic: “my prime”, “I mean”, “second bite”, creating an impression of simplicity. Yet the kumquat is not as out of place as it may originally seem. The writer alludes to Lempriere and Prosperine. Equally the poem, with all its references to Keats, is unashamedly a literary text. It mixes the language of the educated with the language of the uneducated and a glorious past with a mundane, even dreary, present. This style, however, simply underlines, and reflects the mutual existence of opposites in the poem. To define the exotic you also have to define the ordinary.

Until the final stanza the majority of the poem (with only a couple of variations) is written in rhyming couplets and this also helps emphasise the connections between seemingly unconnected words. “Defeat” rhymes with “sweet” and “rain” with “pain”. The negative words attach themselves to the seemingly positive ones – rain after all is water and water is, from Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot, a symbol of redemption. Yet all it brings is “pain”. Equally the poet’s fear of time, the loss of youth and the onset of old age is shown in the rhyme of “years” and “fears”. This is even more potent since it precedes a section which is full of words such as “grim”, “gory” and even “bloody”. This passage is also the most consciously devoid of the colloquialisms of the opening stanza. The flora is “asphyxiated” and it is “a shirt of Nessus fire” which kills children “half the age of Keats”. The reader already knows that “dying young” is “sweetness unsung” and the use of the repeated references to age underlines this. Positively the poet also rhymes “write” with “Delight”, a reflection on the power of the written word. However the “write” also rhymes with “bite”, linking it with the fall of Adam and Eve. However the eating of the kumquat by the poet at the end of the poem shows that eating fruit does not mean that you will be expelled from paradise, rather that fruit can express a “metaphor, to fit the soul”. To write and connect opposites may indeed be positive.

There are three points in the poem when the rhyme scheme breaks away from the standard rhyming couplets. After the reader has become accustomed to the rhyme scheme the last four lines of the first stanza deviate from it:

“…………………..his futures far behind.

  Then it’s the kumquat fruit expresses best

              how days have darkness round them like a rind,

     life has a skin of death that keeps its zest”.

This change in rhyme scheme emphasises the importance of this section. In it the poet expresses how death defines life. “Night” has already appeared in the same line as “day” and now this is even more explicit – “days” have “darkness” and “life” and “death” co-exist. The second deviation from the rhyme scheme occurs in the fourth stanza, and again is connected to “days”. This stanza is noticeable for the number of times the word “days” is used – it is the first word in four lines, the last word in two and appears twice in the final line. What is noticeable here is that the final “Days!” not only does not rhyme with the surrounding lines but it is separated from the rest of the line by a full stop and emphasised by the use of an exclamation mark. Of course the word “nights” is also used extensively in this section. The corresponding “sunlight” and “black” contrast is also used, though “sunlight” causes the poet to “weep” and we are ultimately left with “grey days” rather than bright “rays” (later in the poem the dawn is a “grey haze”). The final stanza dispenses with the previous rhyme scheme altogether, with the first and third, second and fifth and fourth and sixth lines rhyming. Again we have “sunrise” and “night”, though now, in contrast to the earlier “foul air”, the “air grows clear”. However the fifth line ends with the word “bed” and this reminds the reader of the earlier use of “bed” in the fourth stanza when it was rhymed with “dead”. This negative feeling is promptly backed up by the “farmers’ saws” which link to the “slagscapes with no trees” of the second stanza. Again the connections between opposites create ambiguity.

The poet also uses a number of other techniques for emphasis. The most obvious of these is the italicised: “You’ll find that one part’s sweet and one part’s tart:/ say where the sweetness or the sourness start”. This is the central dilemma of both the kumquat and the poem – if opposites are mutually defining how are we supposed to assert which is which? The use of the capitals in the midst of sentences also adds emphasis as they act to abruptly stop the flow of the poem. “Melancholy” exists with “Delight” and “Man’s Being” is ultimately “Nothingness”.  As I have previously noted repetition is also highly important. A striking example of this is the poet’s repetition of “42” – the only age which is written in numbers rather than in words. However much the poet states he is “in need” and the constant references to youth the reader is aware that the first line of the poem ends with the word “prime”  - for all the melancholy and nostalgia the poet is still alive and can taste and experience the kumquat. The poet also uses a “-“ for emphasis first to highlight the word “or” and the ambiguity of opposites and then to connect “birth” with “years”. The poet also uses exclamation marks with increasing frequency towards the end of the poem. Whether this is to express relief or a neurotic desire for everything to be “Fine” is unclear, but again this simply links to ambiguity and the fact that emotions cannot be separated. Noticeably though the poem ends not on an emphatic exclamation mark but with a final, understated, full stop. The poet still has not managed to answer the question which he previously asked “Keats…”.

Overall the effect of the poem is to show the impossibility of separating opposites and the inevitable passage of time which may, or my not, lead to “death” or to the “prime” – though noticeably not to being “wiser” but simply “older”. Sweet and sour, night and day, delight and melancholy, age and youth and, most importantly, life and death cannot be split – they exist only as one indistinguishable whole.