The Earthenware Head
Who modelled the head of terracotta? An American friend. Life-size, the lips half-pursed, Raw-edged with crusty tooling – a naturalistic attempt At a likeness that just failed. You did not like it. I did not like it. Comments magnetised it For a perverse ritual. What possessed us To take it with us, in your red bucket-bag? November fendamp haze, the river unfurling Dark whorls, ferrying slender willow yellows. The pollard willows wore comfortless antlers, Leafless switch-horns. Just past where the field Broadens and the path strays up to the right To lose the river, and puzzle for Grantchester, A chosen willow leaned towards the water. Above head-height, a twiggy crotch, the socket Of a healed bole-wound, nearly an owl’s porch, Made a mythic shrine for your double. I fitted it firm. And a willow tree Was a Herm, with your head, watching East Through those tool-stabbed pupils. We left it To live the world’s life and weather forever. You ransacked Thesaurus in your poem about it, Veiling its mirror, rhyming yourself into safety From its orphaned fate. But it Would not leave you. Weeks later We could not seem to hit on the tree. We did not Look too hard – just in passing. Already We did not want to fear, if it had gone, What witchcraft might nurse it. You never Said much about it. What happened? Maybe nothing happened. Perhaps it’s still Representing you to the sunrise, happy In its cold pastoral, lips pursed slightly As if my touch had only just left it. Or did boys find it? (And shatter it?) Or Did the tree too kneel finally? Surely the river got it. Surely The river is its chapel. And keeps it. Surely Your head, made in a furnace, kisses God – Mudded at the bottom of the Cam, Beyond recognition or rescue, All our fears washed from it, and perfect, Under the stained mournful flow, saluted Only in summer briefly by the slender Punt-loads of shadows flitting towards their honey And the stopped clock. Evil. That was what you called the head. Evil.
The Earthenware Head - meaning Summary
An Abandoned Double
The poem recounts leaving an imperfect terracotta portrait in a willow beside the River Cam, then imagining its unsettling fate. What begins as a private joke acquires the force of a ritual: the abandoned head seems to represent its subject, attract danger, and resist explanation. The speaker finally imagines the river absorbing it, where destruction becomes a kind of release from fear, guilt, and human judgment.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.