Hold out your arms
by Helen Dunmore
Death, hold out your arms for me
Embrace me
Give me your motherly caress,
Through all this suffering
You have not forgotten me.
You are the bearded iris that bakes its rhizomes
Beside the wall,
Your scent flushes with loveliness,
Sherbet, pure iris
Lovely and intricate.
I am the child who stands by the wall
Not much taller than the iris.
The sun covers me
The day waits for me
In my funny dress.
Death, you heap into my arms
A basket of unripe damsons
Red crisscross straps that button behind me.
I don’t know about school,
My knowledge is for papery bud covers
Tall stems and brown
Bees touching here and there, delicately
Before a swerve to the sun.
Death stoops over me
Her long skirts slide,
She knows I am shy.
Even the puffed sleeves on my white blouse
Embarrass me,
She will pick me up and hold me
So no one can see me,
I will scrub my hair into hers.
There, the iris increases
Note by note
As the wall gives back heat.
Death, there’s no need to ask:
A mother will always lift a child
As a rhizome
Must lift up a flower
So you settle me
My arms twining,
Thighs gripping your hips
Where the swell of you is.
As you push back my hair
– Which could do with a comb
But never mind –
You murmur
‘We’re nearly there.’
***
Idowu Omoyele says:
“Hold Out Your Arms” by the Beverley, Yorkshire-born British poet, novelist, short-story writer and children’s writer Helen Dunmore (12 December 1952 – 5 June 2017) is an elegy – a self-elegy. It is a beautiful piece of work which mediates its author’s stoicism, her quiet dignity, in the face of impending death (The poem is dated “25 May 2017”). The lyric’s seven stanzas eschew emotionalism, sentimentality and platitudes; instead, in their consummate command of meter and prosody, their astute alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, they reflect Dunmore’s sense of equanimity in the face of despair, her sense of tonal and temperamental control in engaging with death which amounts to a defiance every bit as palpable as the sonnet “Death, Be Not Proud” by the English Metaphysical poet John Donne. And yet and yet … her defiance is nowhere as brash or abrasive, and all the more affecting for being so subtle, so reflective:
Death, hold out your arms for me
Embrace me
Give me your motherly caress,
Through all this suffering
You have not forgotten me.
In this first stanza, Dunmore offers a warm welcome to death, asking it to embrace and caress her, acknowledging that it has not forgotten her in her period of pain and anguish. Death is often perceived as a harbinger of doom, but the suffering poet has other ideas:
You are the bearded iris that bakes its rhizomes
Beside the wall,
Your scent flushes with loveliness,
Sherbet, pure iris
Lovely and intricate.
I am the child who stands by the wall
Not much taller than the iris.
The sun covers me
The day waits for me
In my funny dress.
The poet invokes death as sweet-smelling, attractive and beautiful. Through metaphor, she likens death to Sherbet, a fruit-flavoured food or drink, and to an old plant sporting attractive (purple or yellow) flowers and sword-shaped foliage (“bearded iris”; “Sherbet, pure iris”) which, by the wall, “bakes” its stem with dry heat (“rhizomes”). That the leaves of the iris are sword-shaped complicates and intensifies an otherwise exquisite portrait of death. Just as the rhizomes are baked by their iris, so is the funnily-dressed poet, in a memory from childhood of standing by the wall, baked or heated by the sun. Death is the common and certain denominator in the journey of life from cradle to grave.
Death, you heap into my arms
A basket of unripe damsons
Red crisscross straps that button behind me.
I don’t know about school,
My knowledge is for papery bud covers
Tall stems and brown
Bees touching here and there, delicately
Before a swerve to the sun.
Death stoops over me
Her long skirts slide,
She knows I am shy.
Even the puffed sleeves on my white blouse
Embarrass me,
She will pick me up and hold me
So no one can see me,
I will scrub my hair into hers.
The poet continues her engagement with death by direct address: in the opening line of the fourth stanza, she modulates the rhetorical device of apostrophe (“Death, you heap into my arms”) in relation to the opening line of the first (“Death, hold out your arms for me”). The poet reckons that that thing about to claim her is itself aware that she is shy of death, that death that would stoop over, and embarrass, her with its scent-filled essence. The fact of her impending and, now, untimely, death of cancer at 64 is evoked in another line which refers to fruit and the colour purple: “A basket of unripe damsons/ Red crisscross straps that button behind me.”
There, the iris increases
Note by note
As the wall gives back heat.
Death, there’s no need to ask:
A mother will always lift a child
As a rhizome
Must lift up a flower
So you settle me
My arms twining,
Thighs gripping your hips
Where the swell of you is.
The poet returns to the images of iris and rhizomes and, significantly, to an earlier image from stanza 1 of death’s “motherly caress”; just as the wall gives back the heat generated by the bearded iris’s baking of its rhizomes, and just as a child would always be lifted by her or his mother as a rhizome would a flower, so would death embrace, caress, lift up the suffering poet: “So you settle me/ My arms twining,/ Thighs gripping your hips/ Where the swell of you is.” By the end of this moving poem, the poet has reached an accommodation with death that suggests more than mere familiarity: an intuitive, introspective but enlightened and philosophically reflective perspective about life and living, death and dying:
As you push back my hair
– Which could do with a comb
But never mind –
You murmur
‘We’re nearly there.’
extrafilespace 