Dan Burt on Lucy Tunstall's 'Remembering the Children of First Marriages'

Remembering the Children of First Marriages by Lucy Tunstall

Oh remember the children of first marriages
For they are silent and awkward in their comings and their goings;
For the seal of the misbegotten is upon them;
For they walk in apology and dis-ease;
For their star is sunk;
For their fathers’ brows are knitted against them;
For they bristle and snarl.
All you light-limbed amblers in the sun,
Remember the grovellers in the dark,
The scene-shifters, the biders, the loners.

from New Poetries V © Lucy Tunstall

I read and reread many poems in New Poetries V, and would happily have written about any one of them. But I chose Lucy Tunstall's 'Remembering the Children of First Marriages' ('Remembering...'), a ten line lyric sermon, because its unusual subject, insight, logic and craft memorably embody an experience I had not thought about, and because she and her work were new to me.

'Remembering...' memorializes the damaged progeny of first marriages who grow up in the family of a second. The first line’s exhortation – Oh remember the children of first marriages – strikes an elegiac note, calling 'Adonais' to mind – Oh, weep for Adonais – he is dead! – in a tone sustained throughout the poem, and reinforced by its mostly tetrameter lines.

The next seven lines clinically evoke the miseries these children endure by showing how they behave, behaviour rooted in how others treat them, using Old Testament sonorities and repetition to suggest the inevitability of their suffering:

For they are silent and awkward in their comings and goings;
For the seal of the misbegotten is upon them;
For they walk in apology and dis-ease;
For their star is sunk;
For their fathers' brows are knitted against them;
For they bristle and snarl...

The last three lines of 'Remembering...', beginning – [A]ll you light limbed amblers in the sun – command us, the lucky reading congregation, to recall our good fortune in not having come from such families by parading the pariahs they produce, the grovellers in the dark /The scene-shifters, the biders, the loners. These lines starkly and unemotionally describe the lasting psychological damage done in second families, the lilting alliterative phrase used for the fortunate – light limbed amblers – juxtaposed with the guttural, harsh consonants of the damaged – grovellers in the dark. The last line's 'hook', which epitomises the damage the poem's subjects suffer by naming what they become – [T]he scene-shifters, the biders, the loners – suggests and is worthy of Larkin’s [A]nd don’t have any kids yourself.

'Remembering...' sympathetically and convincingly presents a class of children who suffer through divorce and remarriage, while simultaneously and dramatically analyzing how they are hurt. The reader is not told but shown the cause and the consequence of their affliction, almost scientifically, in plain language rendered resonant and memorable by its literary and biblical echoes.

I don't know if there is an identifiable class of children from first marriages damaged in the course of a second, though literature and anecdote make me rather suspect there is, but I do know 'Remembering...' is what a lyric poem should be, a world in a grain of sand.

Dan Burt