Cold Knap Lake

Cold Knap Lake

This poem is about an incident from the poet's childhood. Cold Knap

Lake is a real place near Barry in Glamorgan, South Wales. It is a

Bronze Age burial site, and something of a local beauty spot. A little

girl is drowned in the lake, or so it seems, but the poet's mother

gives her the kiss of life, and her (the poet's) father takes the

child home. The girl's parents are poor and beat her as a punishment.

At this point, the poet wonders whether she, too, "was...there" and

saw this (the beating, rather than the rescue) or not. The poem is

inconclusive - the writer sees the incident as one of many things that

are lost "under closing water".

What begins as a reflection on a vivid memory ends by recognizing the

limits and vagueness of the way we recall the past. In the opening

lines, the poet seizes the reader's attention with the seeming

seriousness of death. This makes the mother's action seem yet more

miraculous. If we assume that the "wartime frock" is being worn during

(not after) the Second World War, then the poet (born in 1937) would

have been at most eight years old. The mother is a "heroine" but her

action has nothing to do with the war. The rest of the crowd either do

not know about artificial respiration, or fear to take the initiative.

And they are "silent" perhaps because they do not expect the child to

recover. The poet notes how her mother's concern is selfless - she

gives "her breath" to "a stranger's child". (We can contrast this with

the poet's admission of her own coldness to someone else's child in

Baby-sitting.) The image also suggests the miracle of creation as

related in Genesis (the first book of the Bible), where God gives Adam

life, by breathing into his nostrils.

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The poet does not condemn, but seems shocked by, the child's being

"thrashed for almost drowning". But for all we know, the parents who

beat her thought this was the right way to teach their daughter to be

more careful. (The incident may also explain the poet's reluctance,

years later, as she writes in Catrin, to let her own daughter skate in

the dark.)

In the penultimate stanza, the lake of the title supplies an apt image

of memory. Under the shadow of willow trees, cloudy with "satiny mud",

stirred as the swans fly from the lake - the "troubled surface" hides

any exact information. What really happened lies with many other "lost

things" under the water that closes over them - in the lake, where