Analysis of poem

1. HARMONIUM
SIMON ARMITAGE
GCSE Poetry Revision
‘Relationships’ Cluster

2. READING
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhpPHTx4DmI

3. CONTENT
• Simon Armitage is famous for his use of colloquial
(every day, informal) language and the inclusion of
autobiographical material in his poems. Family is an
important topic for Armitage, as is music. This poem
combines the two subjects.
• The harmonium is a musical organ (usually found in a
church) that is played using keys and foot pedals. The
poem tells the story of someone rescuing a harmonium
from being “"bundled off to the skip"”. The narrator needs
the help of his father to carry the instrument away from
the church.

4. LANGUAGE
• Armitage uses brand names and place names frequently in his
poetry, rooting it in the modern world and bringing an element
of reality and honesty to his work. In this poem the brand of
the organ is mentioned - a Farrand Chapelette - as well as the
place it's from, Marsden Church (Marsden is a large village in
West Yorkshire).
• Colloquial language is used to create an informal, friendly and
conversational tone. In the first stanza the harmonium is
“"gathering dust"”, about to be “"bundled off to the skip"” or sold
“"for a song"” (cheaply). This technique creates a sense of
honesty and deceptive simplicity.
• The colloquial language is also combined with puns associated
with music. As well as the example above, the sound of the
harmonium “"still struck a chord"” - both literally as the
instrument still plays, but also because it triggers thoughts of
the past, specifically of fathers and sons singing in the church
choir.

5. IMAGERY
• The third stanza uses an interesting metaphor to describe the choir.
The singers “opened their throats/and gilded finches - like high notes -
had streamed out”. The metaphor of the voices sounding like golden
birds is combined with a simile of the “high notes” to create a very
positive and joyful image of the past.
• The harmonium is given human qualities throughout the poem: the
keys are “fingernails”; “one of its notes has lost its tongue”; and it is
carried out “laid on its back”. The position of the instrument in the
church, like an important member of the congregation or community,
was once significant.
• There is careful observation of the instrument, the organist and the
speaker's father to create atmosphere and associations with the past.
The holes in the “treadles” (foot pedals) prompt an image of the
organist's feet, socks and shoes. These have “pedalled and pedalled”,
a repetition bringing to mind both the playing of the instrument and
time passing. Line 19 has a similarly close observation of the father's
“smoker's fingers and dottled thumbs”.

6. IMAGERY
• Although the poem is literally about a musical instrument, it is also about
ageing and how a son takes the place of his father as time passes.
The speaker uses parallelism, a form of repetition in which syntax
(structure of words in a sentence) is repeated: “And he, being him, ... And
I, being me,”. This use of a repetition intensifies the relationship
between father and son.
• The personality of the speaker is reflected in the final three lines. The
narrator's father suggests that the next thing carried from the church will
be his own coffin; the speaker responds:
And I, being me, then mouth in reply
Some shallow or sorry phrase or word
Too starved of breath to make itself heard.
• The two pairs of indefinite descriptions “"shallow or sorry"” and “"phrase
or word"” are vague and imprecise, and the narrator's lack of breath
means whatever he has said is not heard. This suggests a sense of the
speaker's feelings of inadequacy. Is he up to the job of “"replacing"” his
father? Or perhaps the speaker is upset and tongue-tied at the thought of
his father's death. He could also, of course, be breathless from the
exertion of lifting the heavy organ!

9. STRUCTURE
• ‘Harmonium’ is a simple, autobiographical poem. Its structure is
made up of memories within a memory. The memory of shifting
the harmonium begins in past tense but shifts to present in the
final stanza, so it feels more vivid and immediate. The
harmonium itself reignites older memories, of singing in church
with his father.
• The poem has four stanzas of varying lengths. The first stanza
describes the harmonium as it stands, ready to be discarded.
The next is a closer investigation of the instrument, with
detailed descriptions of its parts. The third stanza considers the
history of the instrument. The final stanza, which describes
carrying the harmonium from the church, is concerned with the
relationship between the speaker and his father.

10. MESSAGE/MEANING
• The poem is a celebration of a musical instrument and its role for
generations in the local church and wider community. The poem is
mostly about the relationship between father and son, however, and the
way in which life is cyclical - a son becomes a father and he in turn
becomes a father, “"each in their time"”.
• The poem is possibly about regret too. The harmonium is “"gathering
dust/in the shadowy porch"”, and by saving the instrument there is an
attempt to preserve the memories it provokes in the speaker. The final
lines have a sense of failure about them, as if the speaker feels
something has been lost which he is unable to recapture.
• The writing of the poem might redress (set right) this sense of failure,
however, by aiming to recreate the beautiful music and community spirit
associated with the harmonium.
• The main themes are old age, death and uselessness. The speaker says
the harmonium was his ‘for a song’ if he wanted it, but he doesn’t make it
clear if he took the offer. In the final stanza he simply says that they were
carting it away – to the skip or to his house? By leaving out this
information, the poet has made this poem very ambiguous. If the old and
decaying harmonium represents his father in some ways, it’s important to
know if the poet keeps it or disposes of it.

11. MESSAGE/MEANING
• Another theme is communication breakdown. Men are notoriously bad at
communicating emotionally with each other. The speaker’s father makes
a joke out of death, reminding his son that the next box he carries
through the church will be ‘the freight of his own dead weight.’ The
internal rhyme seems inappropriate, it creates a flippant tone and
emphasises the image of his dead body simply as ‘freight’, an
emotionless word. The comment seems to upset the speaker. His
reaction uses alliteration of the ‘s’ sound, and some consonance with the
‘d’ sound being repeated internally in ‘phrase’ and ‘itself’. These sounds
are called fricatives, we make them by restricting the airflow in our
mouths. I think that this adds a kind of breathless quality to the sentence.
The words are not harsh plosive sounds, they literally make the speaker
sound softly spoken and choked up. We don’t know what the speaker
says, and he doesn’t want to be too specific about it either the word
‘some’ suggests vagueness. Maybe he can’t really remember, because
whatever he said wasn’t quite right, it didn’t suit the serious subject
matter of death, it was ‘shallow’ and ‘sorry’. Maybe he felt uncomfortable,
maybe he felt upset, or maybe he even felt annoyed with his father for
talking about death so flippantly. Whatever the interpretation, the poem
ends there, and so does the conversation we assume.