Some of you are still struggling to get to grips with the ten marker in the Scotish Set Text section so I have copied up another example below for you to take a look at:
Waking with Russell is a poem by Don Paterson which clearly deals with the nature of life. In this poem Paterson looks at his four day old son and the happiness this has brought him. Here the nature of life is that having a child has brought meaning into Paterson’s meandering life. In The Thread we are again faced with a poem about Paterson’s children, however this time it deals with the difficulties surrounding Jamie’s birth and then his vitality at the age of two. Here the nature of life is both its fragility (as the child almost dies) but also its robustness (he survives).
This idea of meaning being brought to Paterson’s life is brought in during the second half of the poem. He says that the “true path was as lost to him as ever” reflecting that his life had little meaning and that he felt like he was merely filling space and time for the sake of it. The fact that Russell gives his life meaning is given in the next line “when you cut in front and lit it as you ran”. Russell appears with speed and Paterson seems surprised at his arrival suggesting that perhaps he was not prepared for fatherhood. Russell now lights the path ‘of life’ for his father, meaning he has given him a reason to live. The father must follow his son in order to protect him.
In The Thread we get a hint that Jamie’s birth didn’t go so well as early as line 2. We are told he arrived so fast that he almost “ploughed straight back into the earth”. Here there is a sense of life and death with the use of the word ‘ploughed’ as this suggests harvest cycles. There is also a nod towards Christian funeral rights with the idea of Jamie being put in the earth for burial.
The idea that Jamie has come incredibly close to death and that life is fragile but also robust is also suggested in the following lines where we are told Jamie was sustained by the “thread of his one breath”. The singleness of “one” in this line shows that this was a game-changing breath for Jamie, this one breath and the life it supplied him with would mean he survived. The tenuousness of that breath is suggested in the thinness of thread. But there is a sense it is also strong here as thread can hold things together if it is of a tough enough tensile.
Later the thread is used to suggest the strength of life. The thread has expanded to “hold all of us” together: the entire family. Here it is described as the thing that glues the father, his wife and the two sons together and makes sure they are happy. The sense and scale of life is suggested in the ‘all’.
