Cotton Flannelette - Analysis

A lullaby made out of emergency

Les Murray’s Cotton Flannelette turns the ordinary act of rocking a baby into a lifelong ritual of care after catastrophe. The poem’s central claim is brutal and tender at once: when pain can’t be cured, a family invents a kind of medicine out of motion—Shake the bed—and that invented medicine becomes the rhythm of an entire household, even an entire life. What might look like a simple instruction is, here, an incantation against screaming, against memory, and against the medical verdict that says, in effect, stop trying. The poem insists that devotion continues anyway, and that continuing has a cost.

The tone is urgent and exhausted from the start. The repeated cry, O shake the bed! feels like a prayer that has been reduced to one workable sentence. Even the bed is not a comforting object but an improvised machine: an iron-framed mattress that jinks, topped with nodding crockery bulbs—details that make the room feel poor, precarious, and constantly in motion.

The burned child and the family’s sleepless economy

The first section plunges into aftermath: a blackened child whimpers through beak lips that will never straighten. These aren’t decorative images; they force the reader to face disfigurement as ongoing fact, not momentary horror. Murray surrounds the child with a household running on shifts and depleted bodies: siblings taking turns with the terrible glued-together baby, and an unsleeping absolute mother who can only snatch an hour before returning to the work of cleaning and soothing. The mother wrings pale blue soap-water over nude bladders and blood-webbed chars—a grotesque, intimate labor that makes care inseparable from bodily damage.

One of the poem’s key tensions appears here: rocking the bed is both love and triage. The family’s tenderness is real, but it takes the form of a near-mechanical task that must be repeated without end. The poem refuses any sentimental glow; the love is measured in watches, shifts, wringing, gripping. Even the objects (iron frame, soap-water, bulbs) seem enlisted into this emergency economy.

The father’s awe and the household’s new religion

Murray sharpens the scene by showing how the crisis reorganizes family roles. Even their cranky evasive father is pulled into the work, awed to stand watch rocking the bed. That word awed is crucial: it suggests the child’s suffering has become something like a sacred terror, a force strong enough to convert avoidance into participation. Care becomes a kind of religion, but not a comforting one—more like a duty performed before an altar of pain.

The child’s body is mapped in tactile, almost unreadable marks: contour whorls and braille tattoos. The phrase makes the scars into a text the family must learn to read by touch, and it hints at a cruel irony: this is a language written by fire, and the family becomes fluent because they have no choice. The poem’s compassion is not pitying; it is specific about what it means to live beside a wound that never stops being present.

The flashback: fire as the origin story that won’t stay past

The poem’s emotional hinge comes with the abrupt return to the accident itself: the child, in her nightdress, flaring out of hearth-drowse into a marrow shriek, pedalling full tilt with firesleeves in midair. The imagery is kinetic and nightmarish—sleep turning into sprinting flame in an instant. This flashback explains why rocking matters: the household is trying to counter a memory of frantic motion with a controlled, repetitive motion that might overwrite it.

Then comes a different violence: medical realism. The doctor says, No one can save that child, and even cries Dear God, woman! The poem doesn’t paint the doctor as a villain; instead, it shows a limit—what treatment can do, what endurance can do. The line Let her go! collides with the mother’s refusal to let go, and the poem holds both truths in painful suspension. The doctor spared her the treatments of the day, suggesting that sometimes intervention is only another form of suffering. Here the contradiction tightens: relief can look like giving up, while continuing can look like cruelty. The poem will not let us choose easily.

Rocking as thought: the mind’s search for a molecule of relief

After the doctor’s verdict, the poem returns to its chant—Shake the bed—but expands it into a theory of coping. Rocking becomes comparable to mental rituals: count phone poles, rhyme, classify realities, even bang the head. These are ways people try to make the unbearable bearable by breaking it into manageable units, by turning chaos into pattern. Murray’s phrase any iteration makes the point that the content almost doesn’t matter; repetition itself is the tool.

The poem’s language gets briefly scientific—brain’s forks, melting molecules of relief—as if the family is trying to coax chemistry into mercy. Relief is imagined as something tiny and physical that can be brought again through repetition. The rocking is not comfort in the soft sense; it is the relentless manufacturing of a few seconds in which pain loosens its grip.

Care that heals by hurting: dressings that will be the fire again

The final section deepens the poem’s hardest truth: recovery itself re-enacts trauma. The child must Nibble water with bared teeth, make lymph like arrowroot gruel; survival is reduced to primitive, strained functions. The mother holds her for weeks in an untrained perfect language—a phrase that honors instinctive caregiving while admitting it has no formal expertise to rely on. Eventually the doctor relents, but what follows is not simple improvement. The child is salved and wrapped in dressings that will be the fire again, ripping anguish off agony. Even healing is a tearing.

Those treatments confirm the landscape of scars: ploughland ridges in her skin. The metaphor is startling because it turns the body into worked earth—furrowed, productive-looking, and permanently altered by force. Then the poem leaps forward: sixty more years in which the family weaves you on devotion’s loom. Devotion becomes textile work, and the title Cotton Flannelette begins to feel like more than fabric: it’s the domestic material that both comforts and binds, the soft surface against a harsh reality.

The most unsettling reversal: the child becomes the one who commands

The ending lands on a quiet, devastating reversal: the bed is still being rocked, but now as you yourself, six years old, instruct them. The child, once wholly dependent, learns to manage her own survival by directing the ritual. It’s a kind of agency, but it’s an agency born from necessity—learning how to ask for the one thing that works. The poem’s final image of rick-racking the bed suggests a zigzag stitch: decorative in sewing, but here a record of endless back-and-forth.

Challenging thought: if rocking is the family’s remedy, it is also their captivity. The poem dares us to see that the same repetition that brings molecules of relief also locks everyone into a life organized around pain. The miracle is not that the child survives; it is that the family keeps choosing the labor of love even when love looks like an unending night watch.