Analysis

The poem focuses on birth, which can be linked to Mali and Clarke’s other poems about nature. The birth is difficult possibly because it is an ‘old ewe’ who had, it seems ‘given the ram the slip’ and so avoided getting pregnant until this year, they had thought she was infertile ‘barren’.

The day is ‘Good Friday’ and the significant event of the ‘Irish Peace deal’ being close to being settled gives the poem a political background, another difficult birth.

The ewe is described as ‘serious, restless’ which causes them to ‘put off the quiet supper and bottle of wine’ they had got ready to celebrate if the Good Friday Agreement is a success.

The second stanza tells us that ‘her waters broke an hour ago’ and so the salty waters have hit the ground. The contrast with the political situation is emphasised by the idea ‘while they slog it out in Belfast’ the ewe gently ‘licks my fingers’ but the idea of her ‘burning tongue’ shows that this is difficult and an effort for her, just as it is an effort to get the Good Friday agreement signed.

The fact that the problems have been going on so long is emphasised by ‘eight decades ago’ and ‘exhausted, tamed by pain’, just as the pain of childbirth exhausts the ewe.

The lamb won’t come, at the start of stanza three. There is anxiousness about those watching the event. The vets arrive, depersonalised as ‘the whitecoats’ as if they are not emotional beings and don’t really care.

Clarke then helps with the birth ‘I ease my fingers in, take the slippery head in my right hand…’ The effort of the birth is emphasised with words like ‘strained’ and the fact that the act of the birth is not just the ewe’s, but everybody about her.

When the lamb comes it is in a ‘syrupy flood’, as if it is surrounded by goodness in the form of a syrup. ‘She drinks him’ is not literal, but refers to the cleaning of the new lamb, the licking off of all the juices from birth. It seems like a drinking as she does it so eagerly, as if absolutely desperate for a drink ‘famished’.

The simile ‘you find us peaceful, at a cradling that might have been a death’ makes it seem like a photograph of people gathered with the ewe and her lamb, like at a funeral, but her it is the contrast of birth.

There is a huge contrast with the understated birth of the second ewe who ‘slips through her opened door, the stone rolled away’ almost a biblical image of Christ coming out of the tomb, the stone rolled away.

This birth is much easier and goes almost unnoticed. This refers to Easter and the link to Good Friday. The links between the birth of the lamb and the Good Friday agreement show that this was a difficult thing to achieve ‘a difficult birth’ but it was achieved in the end and everyone was very pleased with the outcome.