Lament — Gillian Clarke
Lament — Situation and Speaker
“Lament” is Gillian Clarke’s response to the 1991 Gulf War. The speaker takes on the voice of a mourner, offering a lengthening series of prayers — each one beginning “For” — for the war’s victims. Unlike a poem that mourns soldiers alone, Clarke widens her circle of grief to include birds, turtles, whales and unnamed civilians, treating the ecological damage of war as seriously as its human cost.
Gillian Clarke and the Gulf War
Gillian Clarke wrote “Lament” in response to the 1991 Gulf War. When Iraqi forces retreated from Kuwait, they set hundreds of oil wells alight and released huge quantities of crude oil into the Persian Gulf. The resulting fires and oil slick killed enormous numbers of seabirds, turtles, dolphins and other marine life. Clarke’s poem responds directly to this ecological catastrophe, placing the animal casualties of the spill alongside the human casualties of the fighting.
The oil fires burned for months, blackening skies across the region, while the spilled crude formed slicks that coated beaches and killed wildlife across long stretches of coastline. Clarke wrote in direct response to reports of this damage, giving the dead and dying creatures of the spill the same dignity as human casualties of the war.
Clarke’s list of victims includes the “green turtle”, the “cormorant”, the “dugong and the dolphin”, and a “whale struck dumb by the missile’s thunder”. By naming specific animals harmed by the 1991 Gulf oil spill, Clarke insists that war’s destruction reaches far beyond the battlefield and beyond human life alone.
Form and Structure: The Litany
Clarke builds the poem as a litany, echoing church prayers in which a list of petitions is read aloud, each one introduced by the same word. Almost every unit of the poem opens with “For”, an anaphora that turns the poem into an act of communal mourning rather than a single personal complaint. The poem is written in free verse, with no rhyme and no fixed line length, which lets the list feel open-ended — as though the losses of war could keep being added to indefinitely.
The poem’s structure widens steadily. It opens with a single creature, the “green turtle with her pulsing burden”, then moves through named and unnamed people — “Ahmed at the closed border”, the soldier, the gunsmith, the “boy fusilier who joined for the company” — before returning to wider groups of animals and finally to the whole landscape: the “burnt earth”, the “scalded ocean and the blazing well”. This widening lens, from one turtle to an entire scorched world, shows how a single conflict’s damage spreads outward until it touches everything.
Themes in Lament
Clarke refuses to separate human suffering from environmental damage. Animals and people appear side by side in the same list, given equal weight: the “green turtle” is mourned in the same breath as “Ahmed at the closed border”. The poem also complicates blame. Alongside victims, it names people caught up in the machinery of war for ordinary reasons rather than conviction — the “boy fusilier who joined for the company” and “the farmer’s sons, in it for the music” — suggesting that war draws in the naive and the unwilling as much as the guilty.
The named human figure, “Ahmed at the closed border”, stands out against the poem’s otherwise anonymous roles — the soldier, the gunsmith, the armourer. Giving one civilian a name, while leaving combatants unnamed, quietly shifts sympathy toward those displaced by war rather than those fighting it.
The poem ends “For vengeance, and the ashes of language”. By placing vengeance inside the same litany as its other victims, Clarke suggests war feeds on itself, provoking further violence. The closing image of language reduced to “ashes” hints that war also damages our ability to speak truthfully about suffering.
Key Language and Imagery
Key quotations: The “cormorant in his funeral silk” imagines the oil coating a bird’s feathers as formal mourning dress, as if nature is already dressed for its own funeral. The “veil of iridescence on the sand” describes the oil slick with beautiful, almost bridal language, making the pollutant’s visual appeal disturbing against its toxic reality. The ocean’s “mortal stain” gives the spill a moral weight, as though the sea itself has been sinned against.
Other images work through contrast and sound. The “whale struck dumb by the missile’s thunder” sets natural sound against man-made noise, silencing a creature famous for its own song. The paired phrasing of the “scalded ocean and the blazing well” hammers together the destruction of water and land through the oil fires, the balanced grammar of the two halves making sea and earth share a single fate. Even the soldier is reduced to his function: his “uniform of fire” defines him entirely by the danger and destruction he causes and faces.
The poem’s opening image, the “green turtle with her pulsing burden”, ties new life to danger from the very first line: the turtle carries eggs laid in their “nest of sickness”, so the next generation is already poisoned before it can hatch.
Comparing Lament with Other Anthology Poems
“The Destruction of Sennacherib” (Byron): Both poems catalogue the animal cost of war — Byron’s dying “steed with his nostril all wide” against Clarke’s “hook-beaked turtles”. Byron frames destruction as swift divine punishment; Clarke frames it as slow, ongoing ecological damage caused by people, not God.
“What Were They Like?” (Levertov): Both use list-like, repeated structures to mourn what conflict has destroyed. Levertov’s questions ask what has been permanently lost of a culture; Clarke’s litany asks readers to hold in mind an ever-widening list of casualties, human and non-human.
“We Lived Happily during the War” (Kaminsky): Both use insistent repetition to build accumulating moral pressure — Clarke’s repeated “For” against Kaminsky’s repeated “of money”. Compare how each poet uses repetition to implicate the reader in a wider guilt.
“Songs for the People” (Harper): Where Harper imagines a future “more abundant life” that could replace the discord of conflict, Clarke’s litany mourns a present already devastated by war. Compare the two poets’ contrasting responses to conflict: hope for future harmony versus grief for existing loss.
Using Lament in the Exam
“Lament” could be the printed anthology poem paired with an unseen poem about environmental or ecological damage caused by conflict, or it could be the poem chosen for the second part when a question asks about the cost of war on the natural world, on civilians, or on ordinary participants swept into fighting. Its short, exact quotations — the litany’s opening “For”, the “cormorant in his funeral silk”, and the closing “ashes of language” — are worth learning by heart, since the poem will not be printed for the second part of the question.