CORINNENOTES

Critical Commentary: “Brussels in Winter”.

The title of this poem is straightforward and unambiguous – the reader expects the poem to match this and be a representation of, as the title implies, Brussels in winter. However this is not reflected in the poem which is clouded with ambiguity and uncertainty. Indeed the title of the poem is the last point at which the reader can really, unambiguously, state that they comprehend the poet’s meaning.

The poet, in the later edition of the poem, makes several important changes to the first section of “Brussels in Winter” which serve to increase the ambiguity of the poem. In the first line the assertive “the” becomes “through”. The use of “though” increases the sense of movement in the opening line but this is quickly contradicted by the changes which the poet makes to the second line. In the first version the fountains are “silent”, denoting an absence of sound in the city. In the second version however “silent” is replaced by “rigid” which denotes a lack of movement. “Rigid” also suggests death; that the fountains are like rigid corpses devoid of life. The exchange of the word “city” for “formula” dehumanises the city further – it has been reduced to being merely a scientific term, a concept without emotion. The word “formula” also reflects on the poem – a formula is a strict definition devoid of ambiguity, something which cannot be said for this poem. The final line of this part of the poem increases the elusiveness of the poem. Ironically the revised version contains the word “certainty”, which is something which is definitely “lost” in this poem. Rather than the “qualities” which can proclaim “’I am a Thing”, it is now “certainty” which “constitutes a thing”. This second version is much less emphatic about the proclamation of identity – the absence of quotation marks, the loss of the personal pronoun and the removal of the capital letter all create a reduced idea of individuality.

There is a major revision in the first line of the second section of the poem. Both start with the word “Only” but the people included in the “Only” of the second poem have increased; now there is “the old, the hungry and the humbled”.  The displaced “homeless” are no longer included and it is no longer only the “very humbled” that are included in this group of outsiders with identity in the numb city. In the revision the poet’s sense of the negative has expanded along with the grouping, to be “hungry” is after all to be in a worse situation, relatively, than to be “homeless”. The first version of the poem is also less definite about whether the “Only” do know “where they are” due to the use of the word “seem”, which qualifies the line. This “seem” has been removed from the second version, so the line is now a statement rather than an opinion. The inclusion of the word “temperature” also emphasises the numbness of the opening section. The “sense of place” is also an important addition as it is one of the things which is notably absent from the poem after the mention of Brussels in the title. It is also ironic that the only people who have this “sense of place” are the ones who are disadvantaged, emotionally damaged or old. The final change in this section is that of the replacement of the word “Opera” with “Opera-house”. The “Opera-house” is, like the addition of the word “formula”, a method of dehumanising the city – it is merely an unfeeling building rather than the more emotional, not to say poetic, music of the opera.

The final two sections of the poem, which are joined via the rhyme scheme, contain only four changes, but these changes are all highly important. The first is that the word “rise” is replaced by the word “loom”. “Loom” is a much more sinister word, compared to the positive “rise”, which can be interpreted as providing hope of rising beyond the situation. “Loom” cannot provide such hope. The second change in this section is that “the stranger” becomes “a stranger” which again removes identity, and implies that this stranger is simply one of many, all nameless and faceless. The poet also changes the positive “warm” with “take”. The word “warm” contrasted with the “cold” of the opening line, but the revision of the poem serves only to emphasise the coldness of the city. The word “take” also implies unemotional possession. The final change in the poem is that the “heartless city” becomes “the shuddering city”. “Shuddering” implies both the temperature of the poem and a vulnerability which is absent from the use of “heartless” in the original poem. It is also in the final two lines that the fact that the poet is not only writing of Brussels but of prostitution. This is the ultimate contrast in the poem for the reader. As the poem is written in sonnet form the reader expects to read a love poem, and instead is presented with a poem on prostitution.