Analysis

The poem is set in summer and there is a sense of sound at the beginning of the poem: ‘the long grass is a snare drum’ and ‘the air hums with jets’.

It is far from a peaceful summer country scene.

The sense of something bad is focused on with ‘the radio’s terrible news’ which is not specified, so the other sound, the radio, gives off unpleasant sounds in the form of terrible news occurring around the country on another typical day.

They are away from this ‘terrible news’ as they cut hay down at the other end of the meadow.

The hay seems like a sea, metaphorically ‘its wave breaks before the tractor blade’ emphasising the vastness of it and the fact that it does blow in the wind looking like a sea or ocean. The neighbouring farmer in his field creates a cloud of lime, which sends the sweet smell across to their field in the form of ‘a chance gift’ (a metaphor), which they happily receive.

The second stanza brings the child into the poem and there is a sense of death with ‘the killed flowers’ personifying the flowers as if dead.

The child carries a ‘quivering mouse’, which is nestled into his hands. There is still life in the mouse as its eyes are described as ‘two sparks burning’ but there is a loss of hope ‘we know it will die and ought to finish it off’.

The description emphasises the pain the mouse is in ‘it curls in agony big as itself’ so the pain is so vast that it is as much as the size of the mouse, so it is immense. Life seems to be going as ‘the star goes out in its eye’ showing the end is close. ‘the fields hurt’ is a personifying of the feelings created by the death of the mouse, as when the harvest is brought in animals who have lived in the protective world of the crop are now exposed to the elements and are often killed by the farm machinery.

The pain affects the children most as they ‘kneel in long grass staring at what we have crushed’ there is almost a morbid fascination at the death of the animals or a sense of religious reverence as they kneel, almost in prayer at the death of these creatures.

In the final stanza there seems to be a scene of carnage with death of destruction all around. ‘the field lies bleeding’ with their garden full of the ‘saved, voles, frogs, a nest of mice’ but the rest lie dead, almost like the aftermath of a battle.

There is a link with the outside world, with the mention of ‘we can’t face the newspapers’ which links to the radio’s messages of terror at the start of the poem. Just as the field represents a microcosm (world in miniature) of the outside world, with death all around, as told in the news.

There is a sense that this is wrong ‘the wrong that woke’ for Clarke. This creates dreams in Clarke’s mind of children dancing in the grass, with the reminder of our fragility with ‘their bones as brittle as mouse-ribs’ a reminder of human fragility.

The direct link to war is then made with ‘the air stammering with gunfire, my neighbour turned stranger, wounding my land with stones’ a reference to how wars can cause neighbouring countries to kill and destroy each other when once everything was calm and everyone at peace with each other.

The poem is a metaphor for the harshness of life and the cruel way we can treat each other.