When Six O’Clock Comes and Another Day Has Passed by Kathryn Simmonds

When Six O’Clock Comes and Another Day Has Passed

the baby who can not speak, speaks to me.
When the sun has risen and set over the same dishes
and the predicted weather is white cloud,
the baby steadies her head which is the head of a drunk’s
and holds me with her blue eyes,
eyes which have so recently surfed through womb swell,
and all at once we stop half-heartedly row, rowing
our boat and see each other clear
in the television’s orange glow. She regards me,
the baby who does not know a television from a table lamp,
the baby who is so heavy with other people’s hopes
she has no body to call her own,
the baby who is forever being shifted, rearranged,
whose hands must be unfurled, and wiped with cotton wool,
whose scalp must be combed of cradle cap,
the baby who has exactly no memories
softens her face in the early evening light and says I understand.

KATHRYN SIMMONDS

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A once-marginalised subject, now enthusiastically rediscovered by poets of all genders, parenthood might be at risk of becoming the modern poetic equivalent of the ready-mix sunsets and nightingales of a previous age. Kathryn Simmonds, one of the most original and formally fluent younger poets currently writing, as her second collection, The Visitations, confirms, steers a clear and thoughtful path through the pitfalls in this week’s poem, elegantly avoiding both the rainbows-in-both-eyes syndrome and the sleepless-in-soggy-nappies alternative.

When Six O’Clock Comes and Another Day Has Passed might seem the sort of title intended to conjure hours of domestic lethargy, but, in its additional role of opening line, it moves us quickly into the lively business of the poem. In fact, the next line already tells us, obliquely, what the poem is going to be about – which is that paradoxical moment when “the baby who can not speak, speaks to me.” (Note the carefully separating emphases of “can not” rather than the usual compound, “cannot”).

And then it seems to begin again – an appropriate rhetorical flourish, perhaps, for a poem where two births are implied – the second, psychological birth being the one that dominates its attention. We readers may have been alerted to what’s coming, but the suspense holds: we know the journey to that point will be artistically difficult, as well as humanly interesting.

A young baby’s first response to a parent or carer with what seems to be a fully intelligent, fully human consciousness is thrilling, and the poem’s speaker doesn’t deny the emotional impact. She even allows herself a little exaggeration. At the same time, there’s a sense of balance: the reader never doubts the poet’s control of her emotional effects. She avoids the temptation of the big deictic build-up of a list of “whens,” for example. Her rhetorical devices are subtly spaced. Limitations are acknowledged, as part of the strategy. So the miracle accrues in a frankly ordinary scene in an ordinary kitchen, centring on a small, sticky-fingered, unexceptional baby who has cradle cap.

That the day has passed slowly is conveyed in the observation that “the sun has risen and set over the same dishes” – a precise evocation of that curious sense of being overwhelmed by the underwhelming. The baby is too young to support her head properly. She has also, perhaps, recently been fed, so the description of the head as “the head of a drunk’s” [sic] is appropriate. The “row, rowing” no doubt refers to that well-loved but monotonous nursery-song, “Row, row, row your boat,” and it neatly connects back to the whimsical notion of womb-surfing in the previous line. Both mother and child are lost in a rhythmical somnolence of routine: as the song says, “Life is but a dream.” Then comes the look which alters the focus of the day.

The child has been seen as a palimpsest, “so heavy with other people’s hopes/she has no body to call her own.” That’s to say the child is unknowable. She has a body, of course and a consciousness that doubtless includes memory, but her powers of communication are not equal to her complexity. The speaker’s exaggeration is permissible. What she and the poem are telling us is that babies mystify us. Their passivity allows us uncomprehending power over their bodies, a possession that’s physical but not imaginative. They (mostly) keep us guessing. So the moment when the child looks, sees, “softens her face” and seems to say “I understand” is also the moment when the parent may say, identically, of the child, “I understand.”

At which apex of intense connection, the two human beings inevitably know each other to be separate. That condition will entail eventual loss, but not now, not in this poem. This poem stays with the moment of enchantment.

Its fusion of detached observation and finely calibrated rhetoric continues to heighten the tension in a last sentence elongated over more than eight lines by the repetition of its subject, “the baby” – a device which gradually sharpens our own focus on this unnamed, generic being. Against the backdrop of inanimate and slightly depressing objects (the washingup, the television) the paired faces (though the mother’s is left to our imagination) exchange electrically charged glances like the Madonna and Child in a Russian icon. It’s not simply that they suddenly “see each other clear”, but there’s an affective response that makes the moment significant. The child’s look is perceived as something more than recognition, more even than comprehension, although both are included: it is – or seems to be – empathetic.

• Kathryn Simmonds’s first collection, Sunday at the Skin Launderette, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.