Homecoming

This poem is a puzzle for the reader - there are some things the poet has not told us, and without them, our reading of the poem relies on guesswork. This seems deliberate, as the first thing the poem invites us to do is to look at two things separately, then put them together. The poem is written mostly in the second person, addressed to “you”. This may at first seem to be the general reader, but later in the poem, Armitage writes “I” and “we” - and it seems that here he speaks to a particular individual. The context and other clues suggest this is a lover or friend (someone he meets “sixteen years” after the incident he describes in the second section of the poem). Perhaps he wants the reader not so see this as something that happened once to another person, but as something all of us can, and maybe should, do.

The first stanza - after the opening line - is quite easy to follow. The poet invites us think of a trust game. (Teachers and students of drama may know this game. Readers of the poem will perhaps have played it, or something like it.) “Those in front” spread their arms wide, and “free fall” backwards, while those behind catch them and “take their weight”. The point of the game is for those in front, to overcome the instinct to bend their legs and fall safely. The “right” way to fall is only safe because there is someone to catch us.

The second stanza is far more puzzling, but will be familiar to anyone who knows school cloakrooms. A yellow cotton jacket has come off its hook. On the “cloakroom floor” it is trampled on - “scuffed and blackened underfoot.” The sequel to this is that “back home”, a mother (presumably the mother of the child whose jacket this is) “puts two and two together” and gets the wrong answer (“makes a...fist of it” in the dialect phrase). We do not know what the right answer would be. One possible reading is that the mother blames the child for being careless and not checking that the jacket was hung on its hook. What follows is accusation, tempers flaring and the child's being sent to bed:

There is a further sequel - the child sneaks out of the house at midnight. She does not go far (“no further than the call-box at the corner of the street”). We do not know whom she rings, or what becomes of it. We may suppose that she goes back home - but in some way her relationship with her parents is damaged.

At this point the poem becomes confusing - the poet introduces a first-person speaker, who is “waiting by the phone” for this call. But his phone does not ring - “because it's sixteen years or so before we'll meet”. (So we may suppose that the two people here are very close - lovers or friends - and that she has told him about this family row, many years later. In fact the poet does not even indicate the sex of either character, so the incident here could have happened to a boy or girl, and the “I” of the poem could be male or female. The “cotton jacket” may be a clue to its owner, however.
What follows may be what happened, but seems more like what should have happened (but didn't) or what should happen now. The poet uses an imperative verb (giving an instruction or command) and tells the “you” character to go back home - “Retrace that walk towards the garden gate.”

What happens next seems to be an idealized act of reconciliation - the embrace of welcome is likened to putting on a garment, which becomes the “same canary-yellow cotton jacket”. And, magically, it still fits - though years have passed. The point of the title becomes clear now. The “you” character can only come home (emotionally and psychologically) when the source of her quarrel has been removed. Putting the jacket back on her is a way of saying that everything is all right. We can be fairly sure that this is not literally the same jacket, because the poet does not know what it is like in detail - the “you” character is to say whether the fingers of the hands holding her are to make a “clasp”, a “zip” or a “buckle”.

We do not know whether the real father ever did make this reconciliation, or whether it is a scene that Armitage imagines. But at the least, he suggests, the father wanted (or should have wanted) to do this. What remains unclear to the reader is whether the imagined reconciliation here ever took place for the characters in the poem. If we see the poem as an account of something more universal - how children and parents fall out over relatively unimportant things, that become serious obstacles, then the biographical details are less important. The poet is telling us, to make our peace while we can.

The final stanza contains a beautiful image of someone - the “father figure” - embracing his child, while clothing her in an imagined garment. (It is not clear whether the “ribs” and “arms” are those of the person doing the holding or the person being held - but the former seems to make better sense. What do you think? It is also not quite clear whether the person “making” the jacket is facing the “you” character or behind her - which would be more like what happens in the trust game.) The “father figure” may not be the real father, but the “I” of the poem, restoring trust that another has lost - in which case, the “homecoming” may be to a new home, rather than the old one where the trust was lost. Stepping “backwards” suggests not only the spatial direction of the movement, but also a going back in time, to put right an old wrong. And “it still fits” suggests that the love of the father (or the “father figure”) is something out of which the child never grows.

This is a very tender poem - it seems that the poet writes from the heart and his own experience, and that the “you” is someone he knows and loves. (But it is quite possible that he writes of an imagined experience - poetry does not need to be literally true to tell the truth about human nature.) It is also a fair poem - the “I” character does not take sides, but sees how parents, even the “model of a model”, let down their children, yet this does not mean that they love them the less.

The poet treads delicately here - his task is to set right a wrong. But he cannot be too direct about it, as the “you” figure may resist any attempt at reconciliation. On the other hand, he does in some ways lead the reader through the poem.

The poem has a regular metre (the iambic pentameter), while the sections vary in length. There are occasional rhymes but they are not very intrusive. The effect of this is to give the poem a serious tone. There is some drama in the second section, where the mother's anger and the child's defiance flare up - shown in the short sentences, and the infantile language of “Temper, temper” and parents' command: “Bed.” The contrast of “seeing red” and “blue murder” seems almost violent (we have already had the “yellow” of the jacket, and its being “blackened”).

The poem, on the page, is broken into four sections. But its structure comes more from its argument and from indications of time. The introduction of the “I” character, waiting by a phone that doesn't ring, is a dividing point between then and now, between the damage done and the remedy, or between what did happen (once) and what should happen (now and for the future).

As so often, we find Armitage writing in lists - here he lists features of a garment and corresponding body parts. There are adjectives of colour, but mostly the vocabulary is simple and understated. Until the end of the poem most of the images to be taken literally - like the “silhouette” of the father figure. In the final stanza this changes, though we do not find conventional poetic metaphor here, either. Instead we can envisage someone acting out a demonstration - pointing to ribs and saying they are “pleats or seams”. In fact, we cannot properly understand this stanza unless we visualize the physical actions and gestures.

* In reading this poem, do you identify mostly with the “you”, the “I” or the parents? Or do you find that the poem allows you to see all viewpoints equally?
* How far is this poem about a particular quarrel and how far does it show the way parents and children commonly (or always) fall out?
* Do you think that the people in the poem are the poet and someone he really knows or characters he has invented? Why do you think this?
* It is possible (since the poet is a man) that we read the poem and assume the “I” to be a man and the “you” to be a girl (when the argument happened) and now a young woman, to whom the “I” is very close (lover or partner). Does this make sense, or can we alter these roles without affecting the essential meaning of the poem?
* There are eight of Simon Armitage's poems in the Anthology - but this is different from all the others. It's far more serious and we see the poet's real feelings for once. Do you agree with this judgement?
* Do you like or dislike this poem? Give reasons why.