Love — Kate Clanchy
Love — Kate Clanchy
Kate Clanchy writes ‘Love’ from the point of view of a mother meeting her newborn son for the first time. The poem does not describe love arriving instantly and easily. Instead, it shows a mother who finds her baby genuinely strange — almost frightening — and traces how love begins inside that confusion rather than replacing it straight away.
Who Speaks, and What Happens
The speaker is the mother herself, using the first person throughout. She opens with a blunt admission: “I hadn’t met his kind before.” The baby is treated almost like a different species. His face is compared to a misericord — a “misericord face” — blurred and worn smooth as if by centuries of polishing, and his hands are “like curled dry leaves.” None of this is tender baby-talk. It is the vocabulary of someone encountering something ancient, foreign, and slightly unsettling.
Clanchy repeatedly makes her own baby seem unfamiliar: a “misericord face,” hands “like curled dry leaves,” and a body giving off “profligate heat.” The mother is not instantly at ease with him — she is startled by how alien he seems, and the poem’s honesty about that is what makes its arrival at love feel earned rather than assumed.
The strangeness escalates into grand, almost comic hyperbole. The baby’s body heat is called “profligate heat” that he “gave out, gave out” — wastefully abundant, as if he is burning through some private fuel supply. Then the speaker imagines him as royalty: “I thought he was an emperor,” “dying on silk cushions.” The metaphor is deliberately excessive. It elevates a fragile, ordinary infant to something exotic and doomed, showing how far outside normal experience this new life feels to her.
Themes within Youth and Age
The poem’s central idea is that love between parent and child is not automatic knowledge — it has to be learned. The speaker admits her ignorance three times in quick succession: “I didn’t know” how to keep him wrapped, “how to give him suck,” and finally “no idea about him.” This is not a poem about maternal instinct kicking in perfectly. It is about the gap between the baby she expected to recognise and the baby she actually has to learn from scratch.
The poem ends: “I started there.” The word “there” points back to all the confusion and ignorance just described. Love, for Clanchy, does not begin with instant recognition — it begins in not-knowing, in the strange and the unfamiliar. The ending frames love as a process that starts from uncertainty, not a feeling that simply switches on.
‘Love’ is written in free verse with no stanza breaks at all — it runs as one unbroken block from first line to last. This mirrors the mother’s overwhelmed, tumbling state of mind: her thoughts run into each other without the tidy pauses a stanza break would give her. Clanchy relies heavily on enjambment, so ideas spill across line endings, almost as if the poem itself runs out of breath describing him. Semicolons and colons create brief catches of breath rather than full stops, keeping the whole poem feeling like one continuous, urgent train of thought.
Key Language and Imagery
Later in the poem, the speaker tries to recall the physical feel of her son at night. She reaches for similes drawn from very different worlds: his skull is “small as a cat’s,” his soft spot “hot as a smelted coin.” One image is domestic and animal, the other industrial and metallic — both unexpected ways to describe a baby’s head. She then builds an extended simile around his hair, describing it as “fine” as the “vellum layer” of “some rare snowcreature’s” fur — language that turns her son into something almost mythical, glimpsed rather than fully known. The imagery never settles into ordinary tenderness; it keeps reaching for the exotic and the strange, which is exactly the point.
Comparing Love with Other Poems in the Cluster
The exam never asks you to compare two anthology poems directly — the comparison task always pairs your printed poem with an unseen one. But knowing how ‘Love’ relates to other poems in the cluster helps you choose and prepare a poem for the second part of the question, and builds the skill of holding two poems in balance that the first part needs.
‘Baby Song’ (Thom Gunn): Gunn gives voice to the baby itself, resentful at being born — “Why don’t they simply put me back” — in tight rhyming couplets. Comparing methods with ‘Love’ draws out a striking contrast in viewpoint: Gunn’s controlled, rhymed form against Clanchy’s formless, enjambed free verse, and a resentful infant voice against a bewildered adult one.
‘You’re’ (Sylvia Plath): Plath also builds her poem about a baby entirely from chains of similes — “Clownlike”, “moon-skulled”, “Gilled like a fish” — without a single main narrative sentence. Comparing this with Clanchy’s own catalogue of strange similes shows two poets reaching for the same technique — piling up comparisons because ordinary language cannot capture how alien a new baby feels.
‘My First Weeks’ (Sharon Olds): Olds remembers her own infancy with unguarded joy — “Glorious life!”, “I have known heaven” — a euphoric tone that sits in direct contrast with the uncertainty in ‘Love’. Comparing tone and attitude here draws out how differently the two poems treat the earliest days of a life: one as untroubled paradise, the other as bewildering strangeness that only slowly becomes love.
‘Happy Birthday Moon’ and ‘Prayer’ both explore bonds between parents and children that are hard to put into words, making them useful further partners when you are thinking about how love and understanding develop slowly between generations rather than arriving all at once.
Using Love in the Exam
If ‘Love’ is the printed poem in the first part of the question, look for an unseen poem that also explores an unfamiliar or overwhelming new experience, and compare ideas and attitudes, tone and atmosphere, and the effects of language and structure across both. If you choose ‘Love’ for the second part, from memory, the highest-value short quotations to learn are “I hadn’t met his kind before,” “I thought he was an emperor,” and the closing “I started there” — three phrases that carry the whole arc of the poem, from strangeness to the first step into love.