Chapters
- 01. The Nettles Poem: What is it about?
- 02. Nettles by Vernon Scannell
- 03. Overview
- 04. Context
- 05. Form and Structure
- 06. Language
- 07. Themes Within "Nettles"
- 08. Conclusion
Vernon Scannell is a British poet who was born in Lincolnshire. Having fought in World War Two, Scannell was most famous as a war poet. His poetry often reflects his experiences at war, as in this poem, Nettles.
There are many poems you may have to analyse as part of your GCSE English, including Ozymandias, another poem that tells of fallen empires and has wartime themes. In this post, though, we delve into an analysis of the GCSE poem Nettles by Vernon Scannell.
The Nettles Poem: What is it about?
The poem is a reflection on the speaker's relationship with his young son, and how they handle the sting of nettles while working in the garden together. The poem describes the physical pain of the nettle stings and the emotional pain of their relationship.
The poem uses imagery to create a vivid picture of the nettles and the pain they inflict. The speaker reflects on how he used to be able to handle the nettles, but now he is older and more fragile. He also reflects on how he is teaching his son to handle the nettles with care and how the nettles are a metaphor for the emotional pain in their relationship.
The poem also uses symbols to create meaning. The nettles symbolize the difficulties and challenges of life, and the father and son's relationship symbolizes the cycle of life and the passing of knowledge and experience from one generation to the next.
The poem evokes emotions of pain, love, the passage of time, and the relationship between the father and son. The poem also touches on themes of fatherhood, parenting and the pain of growing up.
Nettles by Vernon Scannell
My son aged three fell in the nettle bed.
'Bed' seemed a curious name for those green spears,
That regiment of spite behind the shed:
It was no place for rest. With sobs and tears
The boy came seeking comfort and I saw
White blisters beaded on his tender skin.
We soothed him till his pain was not so raw.
At last he offered us a watery grin,
And then I took my hook and honed the blade
And went outside and slashed in fury with it
Till not a nettle in that fierce parade
Stood upright any more. Next task: I lit
A funeral pyre to burn the fallen dead.
But in two weeks the busy sun and rain
Had called up tall recruits behind the shed:
My son would often feel sharp wounds again.
Overview
The poem is written from the overview of a protective, but perhaps ultimately futile father figure, who cannot protect his son, try as he might. The themes and language of war are woven through the poem, as it tells the story of the son falling in nettles and seeking comfort from his father.
The nettles of the title are introduced in a simple, rhythmically regular end-stopped line consisting of a single clause: noun phrase followed by verb phrase.
Context
It won't surprise those who have read the poem to learn about Vernon Scannell. He was a war poet, and also a former boxer, a topic he covered in much of his poetry.
Scannell's father had served in the First World War, and he served in the Second, adding even more pertinence to the father-son relationship in this poem.
In World War Two, Scannell deserted his division, and "sentenced to three years imprisonment, he spent six months in one of the harshest military penal institutions in Alexandria before being released on a suspended sentence to take part in the Normandy landings."
Scannell's experiences of war influenced his career as a writer and poet greatly.
Form and Structure
The poem is a single stanza of four, cross rhymed quatrains. Each line is written in very regular iambic pentameter: lines of ten syllables with five stressed beats alternating with unstressed beats.
Only a single line (‘And went outside and slashed with fury with it) breaks the pattern of ending on a stressed syllable – sometimes called a ‘feminine’ ending. When iambic pentameter is used so regularly it achieves a very steady, relentless rhythm, helped here by the simple rhyme scheme abab. This is a stark contrast to another of the GCSE poems, Praise Song For My Mother, which takes a very free approach to its rhyming and rhythm.
This is another decision to relate the story in simplicity and most of the rhyme words are monosyllables with simple, everyday meanings – shed, bed, tears, skin.
It is fair to say that in many different ways the poem itself is simplistic, and this could even be a way for the poet to reflect the naivety and simplicity he desires to get across as his message to the reader.
Language
In fact it’s worth noting that Scannell achieves quite a nuanced, subtle perspective with only the simplest vocabulary. In the 137 words, there is only a single word of three syllables – ‘regiment’. Almost all of the others are ‘core vocabulary’ – everyday words.
This contrasts with another of the GCSE syllabus poems, Kamikaze, which paints a picture with more complex language and description.
Next in Nettles comes the undeniable military theme.
By mixing in a few pieces of military language – ‘spears, regiment, parade, recruits’ and ‘wounds’ – he dresses the mundane event in a light metaphor that encourages us to rethink the meaning of other words. The image of the father ‘honing the blade’ becomes more vengeful, and more intentionally violent, in the context of this language.
The use of military, war-themed language is not subtle, nor is it supposed to be.
The rhyme is large of the simplest kind: short, common monosyllables rhyming with ‘friendly’ words. In one place an unstressed pronoun (‘slashed in fury with it’) rhymes with a stressed verb ‘lit’, perhaps giving a sense of release from effort that chimes with the frantic slashing. There is also an internal line between ‘took’ an ‘hook’, which simply brings those words to our attention. Note that the father is probably using a billhook to hack the weeds, rather than a scythe, as some notes comment.
Themes Within "Nettles"
Scannell’s metaphor of nettles as soldiers is simple enough – the fresh shoots called ‘recruits’, the ‘fierce parade’ conjuring an image of army ranks – but its power is in the application. This enemy stands just ‘behind the shed’ and the son can’t possibly escape them in his play, so the first theme is definitely vulnerability.
Then there’s the matter of the father’s emotional reaction. His anger seems disproportionate and though he ‘slashed with fury’ it is also ultimately in vain because the nettles grow back! Perhaps the second real theme is the vanity of a violent or vengeful reaction. As an ex-soldier, Scannell would certainly have empathised with men who lashed out in anger, still holding back their pent-up reactions to the atrocities of war. Perhaps the reader is also glimpsing a battle-scarred man lashing out?
Additionally, there’s a powerful sense of the father’s love for his son here. If this poem is an accurate account of a real event, then Scannell positions his narrative voice quite carefully: ‘my son’ becomes ‘the boy’. By making the language less specific, and less personal, the poet asks his reader to imagine ‘a’ boy – not a specific named child – a boy suffering. The detail of the blisters ‘beaded on his white skin’ acts like a zoom lens, drawing the reader’s eye up close, before we back away and observe the consequence. There is an intimacy here that adds depth to our picture of the family in the garden.
The theme of futility is what we are left with. A message that many parents can relate to, and also, that no matter how hard we try, there is only so much we can do to protect our children. In fact, the poem may be written from the perspective of hardship, strife, and even pain, being necessary evils. "It was no place for rest" is an example of the hard-nosed attitude towards the pain his son was experiencing.
The "recruits" of the new nettles, caused by the busy sun and rain, are also a message about man's futility when compared to immense resources and things out of one's control. In this case, the natural world.
That final line, punctuated by the colon on the penultimate line, is impactful and leaves us with a bleak message. "My son would often feel sharp wounds again."
Conclusion
Using only the simplest language and poetic tools, Vernon Scannell creates a sequence of focused visual images with subtle overtones of much deeper themes.
You might describe such poetry as ‘deft’ or ‘workmanlike’ and be able to back up your opinion with any of the points above. The poem is not supposed to be overly challenging to understand, and it is contemporary in its use of language.
Cross rhyme - A rhyme pattern alternating line endings, so that the first line rhymes with the third, and the second with the fourth, often notated abab and actually much simpler in practice than explanation! Also one of the most common regular rhyme patterns.
Quatrain - Four lines rhyming together and acting as one unit of a verse. Not necessarily grammatically complete or set apart as their own stanza.
Stanza - A number of lines of verse laid out together on the page and separated by empty lines from the remainder of the poem. This is chiefly a matter of a poet’s personal taste as well as visual appeal.
Need an extra hand with your English? Why not book a private GCSE English tutor to come to your home from the Superprof website? We can help with analyses of further poems on the GCSE syllabus including The Yellow Palm, Praise Song for My Mother, My Last Duchess, and Medusa
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