Once It Was the Colour of Saying
Once It Was the Colour of Saying - meaning Summary
Memory Shaped by Language
The poem links memory and speech, presenting recollections of childhood places and transgressive acts filtered through language. Images of a school, playing girls, reservoir nights, and lovers become coloured by the speaker’s “saying,” which both preserves and threatens to undo those scenes. Speech functions as a force that revives and exposes, unspooling past gestures and guilt so that remembered events are transformed into moral consequence and self-reckoning.
Read Complete AnalysesOnce it was the colour of saying Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill With a capsized field where a school sat still And a black and white patch of girls grew playing; The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo That all the charmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill. When I whistled with mitching boys through a reservoir park Where at night we stoned the cold and cuckoo Lovers in the dirt of their leafy beds, The shade of their trees was a word of many shades And a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark; Now my saying shall be my undoing, And every stone I wind off like a reel.
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