Bread Brendan Kennelly This poem reflects on how

Bread Brendan Kennelly

• This poem reflects on how to nurture a person. • It features one of the great opening lines in modern Irish poetry: “Someone else cut off my head / in a golden field. ” • This is an ironic kind of violence, however, as death in the field leads to life in the kitchen. • The wheat then narrates its journey from field to kitchen to oven to stomach.

• As it does so, it takes on many symbolic meanings. • Kennelly uses wheat as a metaphor to describe human life. • “Now I am recreated / by her fingers, ” he continues, as the first stanza leads into the second in a short, punchy rhythm, which is maintained throughout the poem.

• Students must consider the identity of the female character identified in the second stanza. • It is widely thought to be Kennelly’s mother or grandmother, but there are strong sexual undertones to much of the imagery. • This view gains credence when we notice the sensuousness of the language – time and again Kennelly returns to the image of hands at work: “This / Moulding is more delicate / Than a first kiss, ” • This draws an affectionate comparison from the humdrum kneading of bread dough while also underlining the sense of a person being formed by the woman’s actions.

• He expands on this with another simile, describing her breathing in a way which compliments the sensuous language used to describe the earlier kiss: “More deliberate than her own / Rising up / And lying down. ” • Students come to see the process of bread- making as a caring and loving act, and we are aware now that a person is being nurtured too.

• Indeed, Kennelly shows a love which borders on reverence for the woman. • He uses a seductive sibilance to write admiringly of her effect on him: “I am nothing till / She runs her fingers through me / And shapes me with her skill. ” • Regardless of her identity , the woman is at once delicate and forthright (honest), and Kennelly certainly considers her a fundamental influence in his life.

• The sense of nurturing is enhanced when the wheat “Grows round and white” – an image which may speak of pregnancy. • We are then jolted away from this world of love and care when the woman is described in violent terms: “It seems I comfort her / Even as she slits my face / And stabs my chest”. • Kennelly uses alliteration to portray her as clinical and deliberate. • The reader must consider how the woman could take comfort from causing the poet so much pain.

• And yet for all the pain implied, the poet is satisfied that it is worth it: “so I am glad to go through fire / And come out / Shaped like her dream. ” • His willing tone implies that he finds this sacrifice of love a worthy one. • Its pain is compensated with satisfying rewards.

• Even with this love I noticed an absence of the speaker’s / poet’s free will – he is living according to someone else’s idea of him; he is being shaped by someone else and finds nothing objectionable in that. • “In my way / I am all that can happen to men” reinforces the idea that he is subject to forces beyond his control. • The final two lines offer a lot for me to ponder – the poet seems to have been created and destroyed by the same person.