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Three

smell of shit when i lift him he knocks the book from my hand
i hold him up she pulls at my leg the other comes in with a book
he give me his book picks up my book she pulls at his arm
            the other
is pulling my hair i put him down he pulls at my leg she
has taken my book from him and gives it to me i give him
            his book
give her an apple touch the other’s hair and open the door

they go down the hall all carrying something

   I’ve often wondered why this poem touches me so deeply. Years
after first reading it, I still read it over and over. Yet the voice and
inflections are the same, the video of it replays identically and the
meanings I glean from it remain the same so, if it’s not giving me
something new or more, what is it that keeps drawing me back?

   It certainly has an immediate impact. Barely off the first line, we’re already in the realm of timeless truths: the bonds between parent and child, between siblings, nurture, the way we infiltrate each other’s lives inextricably.

   I think that’s pretty impressive. And, for want of a more academic
description, this poem feels good in the head, the pitch and roll of it.

   Ostensibly, the poem describes an interlude. A distraction. Seemingly, at first, a disturbing one; there’s a ‘smell of shit’ and the child ‘knocks the book from my hand’.

   Even in this first line, multilayering is evident. We’re drawn, quite dramatically, into the physical space, by the smell. Then, forced,
through the absence of punctuation, to figure out how the phrasing
reads by the physical contact and movement taking place:

smell of shit                    when I lift him
he knocks the book       from my hand

we’re captured by the music of it and a dance begins – one that we’re already taking part in. It’s just that temper-wise we’re not sure yet whether it’s an apache or a hoedown. Here are just two of the possibilities arising from line 1 which might be resolved if
punctuation were used:

1 There’s a smell of shit that interferes 
   with my ability to think

2 So I lift him

3 and he knocks the book (damn it)
   from my hand

indicating one intrusion exacerbated by another. Or:

1 I notice the smell of shit

2 after (having taken time out for it)
   I’ve lifted him.

3 He knocks the book (good, I’m bored
   to death with it anyway) from my
   hand

presenting an engineered and welcome interval.

   This is a point that should not be resolved. It doesn’t matter what dance we’re doing. What’s important is that, as the others arrive, seemingly captured into it, there’s a tangle of body-parts and subliminal responses. So absence of punctuation here is very effective in preventing us from taking a wrong step towards literal meaning.

   Raworth is using simple language – there are only seven words with more than one syllable, and one of those is used three times – a lot of repetition:

                                        book
   she pulls at my leg the other    book
  book                   book she pulls at
   the other
pulling                 he pulls at my leg she

and fairly standard syntax to play out the scene, so it’s all the more
impressive that he has achieved an almost unravellable complexity in
the imagery. He does this by keeping the physical movement going and by switching, literally, from one to ‘the other’. There’s no pause for thought about what kind of giving or pulling or taking we’re engaging with – only the certainty of it taking place. There are two
short indented lines, though,

     the other

and

    his book

which serve to make us ‘cock our heads’ so to speak, and vary the
tone without disturbing the pace.

   Just when the tangle is almost impenetrable, he neatly brings it back into focus by having the girl take ‘my’ book:

                                           she

has taken my book from him

   Yes. Now we know where everyone is, just in time for departing gifts (an apple, a tender ruffle of hair), and that one stanza break tensing the release of the three captured dance-partners and the poem’s true meaning, weighted with two of the seven multi-syllable words –

            all carrying something

   utter fulfilment.

   Even without Raworth’s propensity for political and social comment, I could read the whole mess of religion and social and political suppression into this poem, by way of the apple and the book: God the father, Eve gets the apple – we all know where that leads – and Man gets the book – learning, control, the law. I could even work the international economy in, if I wanted to focus on the darker side of inter-dependency.

   But why would I? I’m still enjoying the sheer beauty of it; of the way it captures the very best of what humanity has to offer. Shared pleasure. Emotional investment. Love.

                        ‘Three’ reproduced by kind permission of
                        Tom Raworth as found in fifty fifty: Fifty
                         Poems from Fifty Years of The Poetry
                         Library; also in Tom Raworth: Collected
                          Poems, Carcanet, 2003